Despite the economic and social costs of national and international efforts to restore millions of hectares of deforested and degraded landscapes, results have not met expectations due to land tenure conflicts, land-use transformation, and top-down decision-making policies.

The project ‘Grounded Legitimacy’ explored how interventions in land governance by development organizations feed into the legitimacy of state and non‐state public authorities, and how these development organizations may better take ‘legitimacy’ into account.