Land Triadic Nexus: A conceptual framework for land governance through the strategic adaptive alignment of land use, rights, and values
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Land governance persistently fails to achieve its stated objectives, producing unintended outcomes, coordination failures, and inequality. This paper argues that a major reason is the treatment of land use, land rights, and land value as parallel administrative domains rather than as mutually constitutive components of one recursive governance structure. The Land Triadic Nexus, developed here, explains governance outcomes as a function of the degree of alignment among these three domains. The framework is constructed through a targeted review of existing land governance frameworks, from which four theoretical foundations are developed and four propositions derived. Three foundations are analytical, drawing on institutional economics and property rights theory, game theory, and adaptive governance theory. The fourth is normative, grounded in political philosophy and critical land studies, and establishes land as a shared trust defining what alignment is for. Together these traditions yield three claims. Configurations of land use, rights, and value are strategically produced and defended by actors. Alignment among the three domains is the condition under which planning interventions achieve their intended outcomes. And land governance is an ongoing institutional search for better alignment, constrained by path dependence, capture, and culturally institutionalised models of governance. The propositions are conjectures rather than validated findings, and define the empirical agenda of the research programme the paper opens. Two illustrations, Sayung in Indonesia and Haven-Stad in Amsterdam, show how the framework identifies mechanisms of misalignment that existing frameworks struggle to explain. The paper closes with a research agenda and positions the framework as extending, not replacing, existing scholarship.
Source: Land Use Policy
Author: D. Ary A. Samsura
Institution: Radboud University Nijmegen
Language: English
Topic: Land Rights and Reforms
Subfield: Soil Science
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,830
OpenAlex ID: W7213976470