Creating a public tool to assess and promote transparency in global land deals: the experience of the Land Matrix

Abstract

The Beta version of the Land Matrix (Land Matrix 2012) was launched in April 2012 as a tool to promote public participation in building a constantly evolving database on large-scale land deals, and making the data visible and understandable. The aim of the Land Matrix partnership is to promote transparency and open data in decision-making over land and investment, as a step towards greater accountability. Since its launch, the Land Matrix has attracted a high degree of attention, and stirred some controversy. It provides valuable lessons on the challenges and benefits of promoting open data on practices that are often shrouded in secrecy. This paper critically examines the ongoing efforts by the Land Matrix partnership to build a public tool to promote greater transparency in decision-making over land and investment at a global level. It intends to provoke discussion of the extent to which such a tool can ultimately promote greater transparency and be a step towards greater accountability and improved decision-making. It will present the Land Matrix and its value addition, before detailing the challenges it encountered related to the measurement of the large-scale land acquisition phenomenon. It will then specify how it intends to address these issues in order to establish a dynamic and participatory tool for open development.

Keywords:

• Land Matrix
• land observatory
• land deals
• transparency
• open data
• open development

Notes

¹Formed by the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) at the University of Bern, Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD), German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and the International Land Coalition (ILC).

Additional information

Ward Anseeuw, a development economist and policy analyst, is a research fellow at the Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD) seconded to the Post-Graduate School of Agriculture and Rural Development of the University of Pretoria. He has conducted research for the last 15 years in Southern Africa and the African continent, particularly on the issues of agricultural and land policies, agrarian and land reforms, land conflicts and large-scale land acquisitions. He has published extensively on these issues in scientific journals and with renowned publishers, including Land, transition and compromise (with Chris Alden, Palgrave, 2009), The struggle over land in Africa – conflicts, politics and change (with Chris Alden, HSRC Press, 2010) and South Africa's agrarian reform (in French, Editions Universitaires Européennes, 2011).

Jann Lay is an economist and heads the research programme on socio-economic challenges in the context of globalization at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg (Germany). As assistant professor in development studies, he also teaches at the Georg-August-University in Goettingen (Germany). He has published articles in various internationally renowned journals and has worked as consultant for a number of development agencies. His current research interests include informal entrepreneurship in developing countries and the poverty and distributional implications of structural change in developing countries, specifically the impact of large-scale land acquisitions.

Peter Messerli is the director of the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) of the University of Bern. As a human geographer his research interests lie in the sustainable development of socio-ecological systems in Africa and Asia. He thereby focuses on increasingly globalized and distant driving forces of rural transformation processes and their spatial manifestations in the Global South.

Markus Giger is Head of Global Change Cluster at the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE), located at the University of Berne in Switzerland. He studied agricultural economics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich in Switzerland. He further specialized in rural development in a post-graduate course. He is involved in several projects that relate to international land acquisitions. Amongst others, he is coordinating CDE's contributions to the Land Matrix Partnership, an initiative led by ILC, which is collecting data on land acquisitions on global level. Other CDE projects look at impacts of land acquisitions at national and local levels.

Michael Taylor is Programme Manager for Global Policy and Africa at the secretariat of the International Land Coalition, a global alliance of civil society and multilateral organizations working together to promote secure and equitable access to and control over land for poor women and men. Michael is a citizen of Botswana. He has worked for 20 years on community-based natural resource management and land tenure questions in Africa and globally. He has focused in particular on questions of large-scale land acquisitions, common-property tenure and rangeland management systems. He has a PhD in Social Anthropology from University of Edinburgh.