The objective of the Land Deal Politics Initiative is to provide a platform and network to generate solid evidence through detailed, field-based research that incorporates and complements a range of policy-oriented donor and NGO-led reviews, as well as more activist political work. The aim is to build a public database with different viewpoints, studies and surveys outlining the extent, nature and impact of changes in land use and land property relations around the world. Focus will ultimately be on the politics of land deals and therefore the commercial act of exchanging land titles is embedded into a broader framework concerned with ‘land deal politics’. The initiative hopes to create dialogue with social movements, activists, policy makers and concerned academics to produce data and discuss its implications.
Although the initiative will be global in scope, initial efforts will concentrate on sub-Saharan Africa (facilitated by the Institute of Development Studies and the Future Agricultures Consortium, in alliance with the Institute of Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa ), south east Asia, and Latin America, especially Brazil.