This proposal is directed to the Resource Scarcity, Growth and Poverty Reduction theme. Resource scarcity is at the centre of the new geopolitics of growth and development. In global markets, scarcities have been felt in the forms of food price hikes and rising and volatile oil prices. Many investors have responded by acquiring large tracts of land in African countries in order to secure a new base from which to supply growing markets, often changing land uses and displacing existing populations in the process. There is growing evidence that this can threaten existing efforts to alleviate poverty and undermine geopolitical stability, as competition grows over access to and control of natural resources, particularly land and water on which to produce food, fuel, feed and fibre. This trend is most marked in sub-Saharan Africa, where land rights are often inadequately recognised and protected. These same countries are hungry for investment, seeing it as essential for growth, yet substantial evidence now shows that African governments are not concluding the most advantageous deals possible, leading to costs at both the local and national levels. This situation raises an urgent policy question: how can the new land investments driven by perceptions of rising global resource scarcity be used as opportunities to promote growth and reduce poverty and inequality in developing countries? This project presumes that the outcomes of such investments are contingent on their terms and the institutional arrangements that structure them. We therefore propose research that investigates the different institutional arrangements and associated business models for such investments, their respective impacts on livelihoods and resource utilisation and, beyond local level impacts, their implications for land use planning and agrarian transformation in three countries in Africa: Ghana, Kenya and Zambia. The purpose of the research is to determine what forms of investment can best promote growth and reduce poverty and inequality, while also improving the productive utilisation of natural resources for national development. Five sets of questions - elaborated further below - will frame the research: 1. Global drivers and resource scarcity: what narratives of resource scarcity are driving the new land deals and how are these understood by different actors in these deals? 2. Mapping land deals in Africa: Where are land deals happening, what forms do the deals take, who is acquiring the land, and what rights are they acquiring? 3. Historical experiences: Wwhat are the national histories of experiences with large-scale land acquisitions for agriculture, what changes in broad agrarian structures are emerging, and are these new forms of agrarian capitalism or repeats of the past? 4. Institutional arrangements: What are the pre-existing national and local institutional arrangements, what new institutional arrangements are emerging or have been established through new land deals and what forms of accumulation do these promote? 5. Livelihood impacts: What are the livelihood and food security impacts of different kinds of land transactions and institutional arrangements on rural communities, and how are these impacts socially differentiated?