“Pathways to Sustainable and Just Land Systems”. This is the core of the Fifth Open Science Meeting in Oaxaca (Mexico). The Global Land Programme is an interdisciplinary community of science and practice fostering the study of land systems and the co-design of solutions for global sustainability. In their session Maria Backhouse and Katharina Waha will discuss the role of smallholders in future land systems. The session is intended to provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to share insights on the role of smallholder agriculture in future land and agricultural systems.

Smallholders today have a critical role in local and global land and food systems, for local livelihoods and agrobiodiversity, and for climate mitigation and adaptation. Nevertheless, they face multiple challenges such as land and water grabs, vulnerability to environmental and socioeconomic shocks, and low capacity to influence national and international policies. We encourage quantitative, qualitative, or integrated approaches and methods, case studies as well as larger-scale studies. We welcome contributions that:

• Assess food sovereignty and food security in smallholder agriculture systems in different parts of the world, preferably so that we can compare across different locations.
• Present best practices and evidence of inclusive and just transformations towards improved livelihoods, land and water access, and political participation.
• Explore the significance of land rights and property regimes for just transformations. Identify drivers of smallholder’s transformations and progress ideally where conclusions can potentially be upscaled and applied elsewhere.
• Study changes in numbers of smallholders in a local, regional, or global context together with the associated challenges of data collection and analysis and terminology. Investigate the impacts of market-based solutions to climate change (e.g. carbon trading) and biodiversity (e.g. payments for ecosystem services) on smallholders in different parts of the world
• Discuss the relevance of climate-land interactions specific to smallholder agriculture, for example, impacts of climate change and variability for smallholder agriculture and the role of smallholder agriculture in climate mitigation.
• Focus on a political, economic, social, or biophysical element of smallholder agriculture that has changed in the past or is expected to change in the future with relevance to the way we imagine future land systems.