List of Participants
Chair
Andrew Norton
Director of Research, ODI
Speakers
Iris Krebber (VC)
Food Security and Land, DFID
Anna Locke
Head of Agricultural Development and Policy Programme, ODI
Megan McInnes
Senior Land Campaigner, Global Witness
Thea Hilhorst (VC)
Global Coordinator LGAF, World Bank
D. Hien Tran (VC)
Director of Global Advocacy, Landesa Rural Development
Institute
Participants
Bronwen Manby
Africa Regional Office, Open Society Foundations
Giles Henley
Research Officer - Agricultural Development and Policy
Programme, ODI
Felicity Buckle
Senior Project Manager, HTSPE Limited
Gail Warden
Embassy of Ethiopia
Harry Davies
Private Sector Development at Adam Smith International
Helen Dancer
Lecturer in Land Law at the University of Brighton and Visiting
Fellow at IDS
Jana Schlegel (VC)
Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development
(Germany)
Jennifer Duncan (VC)
Africa Program Director, Landesa Rural Development Institute
Shaping policy for development
odi.org
Leila Shamsaifar (VC)
Associate Professional Officer - Climate, Energy and Tenure
Division, FAO
Lorenzo Cotula
Senior Researcher, Law and Sustainable Development, IIED
Lukasz Czerwinski (VC)
Sr. Program Partner Specialist Landesa Rural Development
Institute
Margreet van Doodewaar
Senior Strategist, Hivos International
Kaitlin Cordes (VC)
Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment
Paul Im
Senior Programme Officer, Japan International Cooperation
Agency (JICA)
Robert Nash
Policy Advisor, Oxfam
Robin Palmer
Global Land Rights Policy Specialist, Mokoro
Rosemary Albinson
Technology and Transport Strategy Advisor, BP
Terence Powell
Policy adviser at DCLG
Vanessa Herringshaw
Director, Transparency and Accountability Initiative
Biographies
Anna Locke is Head of Programme, Agricultural Development and Policy, at ODI.
Anna is an agricultural economist with 20 years of experience in development. She has indepth experience of working with market-led agriculture, analysing and advising on how to
develop agriculture in such a way as to promote sustainable growth and reduce poverty,
based on principles of competitiveness, market access and inclusiveness. Her focus in
recent years has been on land governance and biofuels, looking at the linkages between
agriculture, energy and climate change.
Andrew Norton is ODI’s Director of Research and has worked extensively on issues of
poverty, vulnerability, social protection, citizen participation, political economy analysis, aid
effectiveness, natural resource management and social policy. Andrew’s role at ODI is to
support the Programme Teams to develop relevant and challenging research agendas. He
works with the rest of the management team to develop systems and strategies that will
enable ODI to engage effectively in global development debates and fulfil its mission.
Bronwen Manby is senior adviser within the Africa Regional Office of the Open Society
Foundations. She is currently coordinating a multi-program initiative on food security in
Africa, within which issues of land governance will form a central focus.
D. Hien Tran is an attorney and leads Landesa’s efforts to elevate, within the international
development community, the issue of secure land rights for the poor as a key tool to help
alleviate poverty and hunger. Tran was previously counsel at a law firm in Washington, D.C.,
where she focused on appellate and government/regulatory cases raising novel issues of
constitutional law, criminal procedure, and statutory interpretation. She previously clerked
for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge David S. Tatel on
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Before her legal career, Tran worked with the
USAID Asia and the Near East Bureau, Office of Strategic and Economic Analysis where
she participated in and led assessment teams that evaluated opportunities and challenges
for U.S. development assistance and created strategic frameworks with a focus on
establishing cross-sector linkages.
Giles Henley is a Research Officer for the Agricultural Development and Policy programme
in ODI. Giles has a background in agricultural development and environment. Giles works in
the Agriculture Development and Policy Programme on land governance issues in the
context of land acquisitions and links between emerging economies and Africa. Prior to
joining ODI, Giles spent the last seven years in China on agriculture and forestry issues in
Asia and Africa.
Helen Dancer is a lecturer in land law at the University of Brighton and visiting fellow at the
Institute of Development Studies in Brighton. She has a multidisciplinary background in law
and social sciences, with research interests in the fields of human rights, gender and land
rights in Africa. Her doctoral research at the University of Sussex was an interdisciplinary
study exploring women's experiences of making legal claims to land in Tanzania, and was
based on over twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork. She is currently working on several
research projects with the Future Agricultures Consortium based at IDS exploring the gender
implications of commercial land deals in Africa. Helen also has extensive previous
experience as a barrister practising in family and immigration law.
Iris Krebber has been working for the UK Department for International Development for
three years. Her work in DFID’s Policy Division currently focuses on land. Following the
successful launch at this year’s G8 Summit of seven pilot country partnerships to implement
the Voluntary Guidelines on Land Tenure, Iris is now taking forward work to make these
partnerships happen and to upscale DFID’s policy and programme ambitions to support
better land governance in developing countries. Iris also advises DFID on global food
security issues. Iris works on global policy but she also engages with DFID country offices
on their programmes and policy influencing.
Prior to joining DFID in 2010, Iris was the Regional Director in East Africa for Welthungerhilfe
(German Agro Action), the largest German NGO working on hunger. Iris has 13 years of
experience in senior development and humanitarian policy and programme positions around
the world. She also spent seven years working in the private sector, mainly for multinational
companies.
Jennifer Duncan has worked in international development for more than 15 years, with an
emphasis on land and housing rights. Her experience includes project management; drafting
and analysis of law, policy and regulations; development of strategies for rule of law and
advocacy around land and housing rights; situational assessment and design and
sequencing of responsive interventions; and research, writing and publishing on land and
housing-related issues. She has focused on gender issues and women’s rights to land and
housing throughout her career. Ms. Duncan has worked intensively over the past eighteen
months on a number of projects in support of Kenyan land sector reforms.
Duncan has previously conducted policy work and field research on land issues in China,
Georgia, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Romania, Russia, Tajikistan, and Thailand. She has
also lived and worked in Costa Rica. In addition to her international experience, she has
worked with socio-economic development and legal issues among minority groups within the
US, including migrant farm worker communities in California and the Makah Nation in
Washington State.
Kaitlin Cordes is an Associate Research Scholar at the Vale Columbia Center on
Sustainable International Investment, where she leads work on investments in land and
agriculture. In addition, she focuses on the intersection of human rights and international
investments, including the social impacts of FDI.Prior to joining the VCC, she worked with
the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch (focusing on farmworkers in South Africa) and
served as an advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food (concentrating
primarily on large-scale land acquisitions, contract farming, and the rights of agricultural
workers). She is the co-editor of Accounting for Hunger: The Right to Food in the Era of
Globalisation (Hart, 2011).
Lorenzo Cotula is a Principal Researcher in Law and Sustainable Development at the
International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). He leads research, capacity
support, policy and advisory work on topics at the interface between law and international
development, with a focus on land rights and natural resource investments in low and
middle-income countries. He also steers ‘Legal Tools for Citizen Empowerment’, an initiative
to strengthen local rights and voices within natural resource investments in low and middleincome countries. Before joining IIED in 2002, Lorenzo worked on assignments with the
Legal Office of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Megan MacInnes, Campaign Leader – Land, Global Witness. Megan currently manages
Global Witness’ land campaign and has been working for the organisation since 2009. She
has more than ten years’ experience working on governance of land and natural resources
in Southeast Asia, and lived in Cambodia for seven years working with grassroots, local and
international organisations on land and natural resource governance policy and dispute
resolution. She has published extensively and has been a Board member of two local
Cambodian organisations.
Robert Nash is a Policy Advisor in the Private Sector Team at Oxfam GB, leading on
financial sector policy. Oxfam works with responsible investors and civil society
organisations to build awareness of the impact of investment on poverty; and also
campaigns to raise awareness of business and investment activities that have harmful
impacts on the lives of the poorest people. Oxfam recognises the crucial role of the financial
sector in mobilising resources that can contribute to poverty reduction, and works to
understand both the barriers and opportunities for investors to safeguard the rights of the
poorest people and deliver equitable growth and decent jobs. Robert has recently worked on
issues including land grabs and responsible investment in agriculture, Financial Intermediary
lending, and the role of commodity markets and commodity trading businesses in food price
volatility.
Robin Palmer is a Global Land Rights Policy Specialist, with a particular focus on Southern
and Eastern Africa and South-East Asia. He had 20 years’ experience with Oxfam GB in a
range of advisory, management and communications posts, with a focus on land rights,
gender, HIV and AIDS, livelihoods and food security, and 15 years’ experience as an
academic, predominantly in Southern Africa, with a focus on agrarian history. Robin has
published extensively on land rights and agrarian issues as a development worker, as an
academic and as a Mokoro consultant. He has worked on governance issues, giving advice
and programme and advocacy support to civil society organisations, governments and
donors on global land rights issues, including women's land rights and legal issues,
principally in Africa and South-East Asia. He has undertaken consultancy work on land rights
issues for DFID, Danida, the EU, the Legal Resources Centre of South Africa and Oxfam.
He is currently working on the impacts of global land grabbing and continues to manage the
prestigious Land Rights in Africa website (housed by Oxfam from 2000-12) which was
moved to Mokoro in May 2012.
Vanessa Herringshaw is Director of the Transparency and Accountability Initiative. Her
work has centred on strengthening accountability and governance, in areas including
economic policy and poverty reduction, the extractive sector, health services and children’s
rights. Vanessa spent four years living in South Asia, working with communities, donors and
governments. She joined Save the Children UK, developing organisational strategy,
coordinating advocacy and finally heading the Economic Policy Unit. At the Revenue Watch
Institute, she was Director of Capacity Building, then Director of Advocacy. She has been
running the Transparency and Accountability Initiative since 2012.
Thea Hilhorst is the global coordinator for the Land Governance Assessment Framework at
the World Bank. She is also the chair of the World Bank Technical working group on land
policy and land administration.