A Legal Framework for Mitigating Soil Pollution Risk in Rwanda: Transitioning from Reactive Regulation to Proactive Governance

Agricultural soil contamination increasingly threatens food security, environmental health, and rural livelihoods in Rwanda. However, the country’s laws and regulations remain largely ineffective and reactive to issues. Existing environmental legislation broadly addresses pollution but lacks a clear, risk-based framework for the protection, monitoring, and remediation of soil. This study assesses the adequacy of Rwanda’s current legal and institutional frameworks for managing soil pollution and develops a governance structure to enhance agricultural sustainability. It employs a qualitative desk-based methodology that combines doctrinal legal analysis, comparative environmental governance review, and interdisciplinary literature synthesis to evaluate Rwanda’s regulatory frameworks alongside established models from China, Brazil, and Kenya. The analysis highlights critical gaps, including the absence of soil-specific standards, poor institutional coordination, and inadequate systems for early risk detection and liability enforcement. The research proposes a legally mandated, multi-phase soil risk management process that includes inquiry, monitoring, assessment, mitigation, and adaptive oversight, drawing on insights from previous studies. The findings suggest that incorporating preventive, risk-based measures into national legislation can improve environmental governance, lower long-term remediation costs, and promote sustainable agricultural practices. Conducted from mid-2024 to late 2025, this study advances environmental law and sustainability by providing a context-specific framework for regulating soil pollution applicable to Rwanda and other developing economies. It also contributes to the global dialogue on risk-based environmental governance and provides a model for improving soil protection laws in emerging regulatory settings.