Abstract: This article aims to discuss the approach of the land concept within territorial development. Thus, we sought to understand the land as a spatial analysis unit in the development of emancipatory public policies for Brazilian countryside. Hence, a brief critical review of public actions intentionalities was made, aiming at the territorial development of small farmers’ and peasants’ production of the country, and resulting conflicts. Regarding these conflicts, the emphasis is in the fact that they create exit movements from a given land, which no longer offers neither survival conditions nor development to farmers, who reproduce their lifestyle somewhere else completing the triad of land derivations: deterritorialisation, territorialisation, and repossession. The territory is a result of these and conflicting different ends, caused by social groups and relations of power. So thinking about territorial development, consists in thinking the economic and social growth for each territory, with their interests and contradictions.