Although the initiative will be global in scope, initial efforts will concentrate in sub-Saharan Africa (facilitated by Ian Scoones at IDS 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 to be coordinated by Ruth Hall), Southeast Asia (facilitated by Ben White, RELIVE/ISS; and Jun Borras, ICAS/IDS-Saint Mary’s), and Latin America, especially Brazil (facilitated by Wendy Wolford, Cornell University).

In the LDPI we will aim for a broad framework encompassing the political economy, political ecology and political sociology of land deals centred on food, biofuels, minerals and conservation. Working within the broad analytical lenses of these three fields, we will use as a general framework the four key questions in agrarian political economy that Henry Bernstein has explained: (i) who own what? (ii) who does what? (iii) who gets what? and (iv) what do they do with the surplus wealth that have been created? We will add two additional key questions, highlighting political dynamics between groups and social classes: ‘what do they do to each other’?, and ‘how do changes in politics get shaped by dynamic ecologies, and vice versa?’ We will gather data at the global level as well as through detailed in-depth case studies in order to address several big picture questions cited below.

• What changes in broad agrarian structures are emerging? Are these new forms of agrarian capitalism or repeats of the past?
• What is the nature and extent of rural social differentiation – in terms of class, gender, ethnicity – following changes in land use and land property relations as well as organizations of production and exchange?
• Have land deals undermined local level and national food security? How and to what extent? What have been the socially differentiated impacts on livelihoods by class, gender and ethnicity?
• To what extent have agrarian political struggles been provoked by the new land investment dynamics? What are the issues that unite or divide the rural poor, organized movements, and rural communities around the issue of land deals?
• What are the various competing policy and political narratives and discourses around the multiple crises of food, energy, climate and finance, and how have these shaped and been reshaped by the land deal politics? How and to what extent has (trans)national finance speculation played a role in land deals in the context of the convergence of food, fuels, climate and finance crises? What narratives exist around ‘investment, growth and modernization’ versus ‘marginalization, displacement and impoverishment’, and so on?
• How have competing frameworks and views on land property been deployed by various camps around the contested meanings of ‘marginal lands’ (or, idle’, ‘waste’, ‘unoccupied’ lands)?
• What are the emerging trends around dynamics of power, elites and corruption; land as a source of patronage? How can we make sense of the politics of land deals in different contexts?
• Have development-induced displacement and dispossession occurred? How and to what extent and with what immediate and long-term outcomes and implications for rural livelihoods, including new rural refugees or internally displaced peoples (IDPs)?
• Have global land policies of different overseas development agencies (World Bank, FAO, EU, IFAD, and so on)contributed to facilitating/encouraging or blocking/discouraging land deals? What are the limitations of ‘code of conduct’, certification, regulation, information dissemination, and capacity-building strategies?
• What are the dynamics of international politics of land grabs in the broader context of energy, mining, forestry and conservation; and the role of big capital and powerful interests?
• What are some of the relevant emerging alternatives from key actors? Are some of the traditional policies such as land reform, and some of the more recent alternative visions such as ‘food sovereignty’ (and ‘land sovereignty’) relevant and useful in protecting and promoting the interest of the rural poor in the midst of these (trans)national commercial land deals?

1. We hope to generate and incorporate research on these questions through the provision of coordinated seed grants, applied for through an open competitive process involving PhD students and post-doctoral researchers;
2. Ultimately, the global coordinating team members, together with collaborators from different regions, will generate their own in-depth research and will help systematize integrative cross-national and cross-regional comparative studies;

3. We hope to help create a ‘space’ in which we can have a mutually beneficial exchange of data, information, and knowledge with other critical actors who also have their distinct work on this theme, including (trans)national agrarian movements, independent think tanks, research institutions, development agencies, development policy experts and policymakers.

We currently have very limited resources for the LDPI at this early stage, but we will be seeking extra funding to support the network. In the future, the LDPI aims to support exchanges and meetings amongst researchers, a visiting fellowship programme, as well as a publications series and special journal issue and book publications. Workshops will be organized where results of the research can be presented, shared and discussed with development policy practitioners and political activists.

For publications, whenever possible, we will aim for multiple languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish, French and Bahasa. Our commitment to engaged research, means it will be critical to help facilitate exchanges of information between different interested groups (academic, government officials, civil society professionals, researchers, agrarian movement activists) about what is happening in different geographic areas where significant land deals are being carried out. Among other publication initiatives, we will start an LDPI Working Paper Series for this purpose. The LDPI Working Paper Series will be the main initial publication outlet of the research outputs from our initiative, although the Working Paper Series will also accept submissions from authors who carried out studies outside the LDPI initiative. Papers published in this Series will be peer-reviewed.