Land tenure security is a concept that informs land governance interventions. In short, the thinking is that tenure security will lead to positive economic, environmental and social impacts and hence to improved livelihoods for the land right holders. The evidence on the causality between strengthened tenure security and livelihoods is not conclusive. Findings are ambiguous regarding the effects on productivity, access to credit, land market functioning and climate resilience. Contextual changes, such as urbanisation, climate change and commercial pressure on land, but also violent conflicts and war, affect the access to, and use of land, and thus how this resource can contribute to, or threaten, livelihood strategies. Tenure security interventions are implemented in these contexts of societal change. These interventions themselves in turn affect the frameworks and structures within which rural populations build their livelihoods as visualised in the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework. Using this framework, the paper addresses five questions for tenure security to contribute to sustainable livelihoods, looking at sources of tenure insecurity, what rights are to be protected and by whom, how to use the land once secured and the role of local communities in these processes. It concludes that interdependencies between land and livelihoods remain complex in an ever-changing context. Sustaining tenure security and its contribution to people’s livelihoods is therefore a continuous journey.