Landmatrix - Monitoring platform for land acquisition

Challenge

There is a global trend toward large areas of land being bought up by private investors and agricultural companies and used for the production of agricultural commodities. In doing so, international investors, as well as state, semi-state, and private sellers, often operate in legal gray areas and in a no-man's-land between traditional land rights and modern ownership structures. In many cases, so-called land grabbing could be described as land reform from above or the establishment of new, private-sector colonial conditions.

In order to better assess these developments and, if necessary, counteract them, renowned institutions and governments around the world are working together to record land sales (deals) and the investors involved in as much detail as possible in a database covering years and decades.

Implementation

At the heart of the technical implementation of landmatrix.org is the data model of deals and investors, which has been overhauled and optimized several times over the years so that both simple full-text searches and complex graph queries can be performed in a fraction of a second.

To ensure the highest possible data quality, Sinnwerkstatt has worked with stakeholders to develop flexible editing forms for the extensive deal data and a multi-stage editing and publication workflow. Various editing options are approved on the basis of a finely graded rights management system with different roles and access rights. By versioning the deals and investors, adjustments can be tracked transparently over time.

The data can be explored interactively via a sophisticated map display with extensive filter options. Clear, dynamically calculated analysis graphics and charts enable flexible evaluation of the data and developments.

Impact

The website landmatrix.org facilitates cooperation between many actors around the world to record large-scale land sales. The user-friendly input, editing, and management of deal and investor data ensures a high level of quality and timeliness, supporting the credibility and relevance of Landmatrix. Parts of the dataset often serve as the basis for in-depth scientific research. This makes landmatrix.org an important tool for combating injustices in land ownership distribution and enables imbalances and unfavorable developments in land allocation to be documented and understood as transparently and publicly as possible.