Vision and Mission

Our vision

The Land Matrix promotes transparency and accountability in decisions over land deals in low- and middle-income countries across the world in order to create a positive context for wider and more meaningful participation in decisions over land and investments, especially by those who are most affected. We believe that the availability of reliable, up-to-date data is crucial to support evidence-based decision-making and monitoring of LSLAs so that their negative social and environmental impacts can be mitigated, while their positive effects, such as the infusion of capital, improved infrastructure, and job creation for local communities, can be increased.

Our mission

The Land Matrix strives to stimulate inclusive debate on the trends and impacts of LSLAs, support greater public involvement in critical decisions that affect the lives of land-users, and contribute to the growing movement towards open data. We do this by collecting, capturing, and sharing data about LSLAs at global, regional, and national level on our online open access platform.

As well as building an open development community of citizens, researchers, policy-makers, and technology specialists, now, in our third phase, we will also expand our decentralisation efforts to address the high demand for accurate and relevant information and the need for long-term engagement with stakeholders to achieve impacts on policy and land use decisions. In addition, we are further improving the scope and quality of data collection and strengthening research analysis and interpretation of data.

Increasing our support and contributions to global monitoring frameworks, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT), and Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems (RAI), is another focus area. We will also be concentrating on complementing other initiatives that work on issues of transparency and accountability around land governance, particularly with regard to LSLAs.

Our two overarching objectives for the third phase are:

1. Governments, development agencies, businesses, NGOs, researchers, and land users (including smallholders, pastoralists, women, ethnic minorities, and CSOs) access and use reliable and relevant data, information, and analyses on LSLAs to contribute for evidence-based decision-making as well as monitoring of impacts of LSLAs.
2. Targeted inputs at regional and national level based on data are used in multi-stakeholder processes around land, hereby supporting the participation of relatively weaker stakeholders (smallholders, pastoralists, women, ethnic minorities, CSOs) in such processes.