Institutional Arrangements in Land Deals in Africa: Local Impacts of Global Resource Scarcity

This proposal is directed to the Resource Scarcity, Growth and Poverty Reduction theme.

Resource scarcity is at the centre of the new geopolitics of growth and development. In global markets, scarcities have been felt in the forms of food price hikes and rising and volatile oil prices. Many investors have responded by acquiring large tracts of land in African countries in order to secure a new base from which to supply growing markets, often changing land uses and displacing existing populations in the process. There is growing evidence that this can threaten existing efforts to alleviate poverty and undermine geopolitical stability, as competition grows over access to and control of natural resources, particularly land and water on which to produce food, fuel, feed and fibre.

This trend is most marked in sub-Saharan Africa, where land rights are often inadequately recognised and protected. These same countries are hungry for investment, seeing it as essential for growth, yet substantial evidence now shows that African governments are not concluding the most advantageous deals possible, leading to costs at both the local and national levels. This situation raises an urgent policy question: how can the new land investments driven by perceptions of rising global resource scarcity be used as opportunities to promote growth and reduce poverty and inequality in developing countries?

This project presumes that the outcomes of such investments are contingent on their terms and the institutional arrangements that structure them. We therefore propose research that investigates the different institutional arrangements and associated business models for such investments, their respective impacts on livelihoods and resource utilisation and, beyond local level impacts, their implications for land use planning and agrarian transformation in three countries in Africa: Ghana, Kenya and Zambia.

The purpose of the research is to determine what forms of investment can best promote growth and reduce poverty and inequality, while also improving the productive utilisation of natural resources for national development. Five sets of questions - elaborated further below - will frame the research:

1. Global drivers and resource scarcity: what narratives of resource scarcity are driving the new land deals and how are these understood by different actors in these deals?
2. Mapping land deals in Africa: Where are land deals happening, what forms do the deals take, who is acquiring the land, and what rights are they acquiring?
3. Historical experiences: Wwhat are the national histories of experiences with large-scale land acquisitions for agriculture, what changes in broad agrarian structures are emerging, and are these new forms of agrarian capitalism or repeats of the past?
4. Institutional arrangements: What are the pre-existing national and local institutional arrangements, what new institutional arrangements are emerging or have been established through new land deals and what forms of accumulation do these promote?
5. Livelihood impacts: What are the livelihood and food security impacts of different kinds of land transactions and institutional arrangements on rural communities, and how are these impacts socially differentiated?

The ultimate end-users of the research will be rural people affected by, or potentially affected by, large-scale land deals, and these groups (but others as well) who would benefit from more inclusive types of investments. By addressing the local impacts of perceptions of global resource scarcity, the research aims to promote secure tenure to natural resources on which people's livelihoods depend, and equitable and sustainable development partnerships that avoid generating new dynamics of resource scarcity at the local level.

Intermediary end-users of the research will include policymakers in national governments, regional organisations and continental multilateral organisations; national, regional, continental and global civil society organisations and networks; investors and private sector companies, and industry regulatory bodies; and academics in universities and research institutions within the countries studied and beyond.

Our aim is to move the highly polarised debate on land deals in Africa beyond a simplistic win-win vs. lose-lose opposition. We will offer new evidence and analysis, as well as methodological tools and assessment indicators, based on grounded case studies. We will use this material to generate a debate across scales - from the local to the national to the continental and the global - building on our existing networks and policy connections developed by our respective institutions and the work of the Future Agricultures Consortium.

As founding members and associates of the global Land Deal Politics Initiative and as the convenors of the recent International Conference on Global Land Grabbing (IDS, 6-8 April 2011, www.future-agricultures.org), the project partners have an exceptional network among the policy, academic and activist communities worldwide working on this topic. The project will build on team members' existing partnerships and relationships with global development cooperation institutions, through DFID and the FAO.

This is combined with a strong base in African land governance and agricultural development institutions, and a track record of partnerships and collegial relations, including in African Union, NEPAD, CAADP and the Pan African Parliament. We also have relationships with civil society groups (farmers' organisations, land rights lobbies, and development and human rights NGOs) at the national level and regional levels As likely end users of the research findings, their input on the research will be solicited and they will be invited to key project events.

A user reference group will be established at the outset of the research, and will provide advice on policy engagement and uptake. Membership is yet to be finalised, but will include representatives from the above-mentioned groups. The project will build the capacity of researchers to engage policy makers, and create policy opportunities from start to finish. A detailed policy engagement and communications strategy will be developed at the inception workshop, and its implementation will be supported by communications experts in PLAAS, FAC and IDS. Key moments in the project implementation will be used to engage policy makers, fellow researchers, civil society activists and the media.

All project outputs will be designed to enhance the policy influencing capacity of the project. Short and accessible two-page summaries on the research underway in each country will explain the policy issues to be addressed, the research context, and emerging findings and insights from the field. These will be used as materials with which to engage policy audiences, together with written, visual and verbal presentations and inputs to meetings. These will be complemented by longer working papers, articles, presentations and a final book. A web portal for the project will be established on the PLAAS and FAC websites, as part of the land theme, and outputs will be highlighted in regular newsletters, policy briefings and meetings.