Lorenzo Cotula
Principal researcher (law and sustainable development), Natural Resources; team leader, legal tools
Lorenzo Cotula’s work sits at the interface between traditionally segmented arenas: international law including human rights and investment law; land and natural resource law and governance; political economy of development, natural resources and foreign investment; and legal empowerment, inclusive business and public accountability. Lorenzo leads IIED's work on Legal Tools for Citizen Empowerment – a collaborative initiative to strengthen local rights and amplify local voices in the context of natural resource investments. He has extensive experience in low- and middle-income countries in Africa and Asia.
Law and development, human rights law, international investment law, land governance and "land grabbing", law and political economy in natural resource investments, agriculture, extractive industries.
Extensive country experience in Africa and Asia, particularly low-income countries in these regions.
Lead on Legal Tools for Citizen Empowerment – a collaborative initiative to strengthen local rights and amplify local voices in natural resource investments; rethinking investment treaties, laws and contracts; accountability in investment chains, legal and social accountability tools in agricultural investments; legal empowerment work, and international lesson sharing among legal empowerment practitioners.
Research consultant to the Legal Office of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO); collaboration with two Italian NGOs.
Education:
Postgraduate certificate in Sustainable Business, University of Cambridge; PhD in Law, University of Edinburgh; MSc in Development Studies (Distinction), London School of Economics; Degree in Law (cum laude), University "La Sapienza" of Rome.
Italian, English and French
Lorenzo Cotula's blog posts
African governments have played a key role in allocating land to investors. Recent developments hold out promise for more carefully thought out approaches by them in the future.
A recent US judgment is a setback in efforts to improve corporate accountability, but promising developments elsewhere are creating new opportunities.
Greater transparency was a key theme at the World Bank land conference last week. Transparency is critical, but without greater accountability to local communities it is not enough.
In January, the president of Benin and the prime minister of Canada announced they had signed a new bilateral investment treaty (BIT). The treaty, which is now publicly available, is just the latest in a large number of BITs signed by African countries over the past 20 years.
Corporate interest in agricultural investment is up, but a new report shows that policies are skewed against inclusive investments. We need to reshape them so investments meet local people's needs and aspirations.
Researchers studying land acquisitions in the global south face many challenges, including trying to measure the exact scale of the problem. Developing rigorous methods to assess how the rush for land is exacerbating land scarcity and affecting people locally is perhaps the most promising way to measure what the scale of the land rush means for recipient countries and the people who live in them, says Lorenzo Cotula.
With land central to the livelihoods of millions of people in Africa, Lorenzo Cotula examines the impact of large-scale land acquisitions on the continent's farmers and says that promoting agricultural development in Africa and addressing the world's food security challenges requires investing in farmers - not in farmland.
Imagine you live in a small village in Africa. You and your family cultivate a small plot of land, graze livestock on village land and collect fire wood from a nearby forest – just as your grandparents and great grandparents did. Then, one day, everything changes. A big car arrives in the village with company officials and the chief district officer. You are told that the company and the government have signed a lease that gives the company a large area of land – including your plot, rangeland and forest. The visiting officials are upbeat – there will be jobs, a village school and a clinic as result. But you have heard promises before, and you were let down. You stand to lose all that you have – the land that feeds your family and that you belong to. All for an uncertain future. You rightly ask: “Will the jobs materialise? Will I get one? Why should I give up my farm to work on somebody else’s plantation?”