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LRAN is the Land Research Action Network (LRAN), or Red de Investigación-Acción sobre la Tierra, which brings together activist researchers working on land and resource access issues, to network them with one another and with grassroots movements struggling for land and other productive resources. It’s members are committed, activist researchers, their organizations, and social movements fighting for access to land, for true agrarian reform, and for access to other productive resources.
LRAN is a response to a gap in research/analysis support for grassroots movements around the world who are engaged in struggles over access to land and other resources, even as various forms of so-called "land reform" are back on the policy agenda. For example, while institutions like the World Bank, which is actively promoting questionable ’market-led reform’ policies have ample support from the researchers and scholars they have on staff or that they fund in order to make their case to governments, the movements who come up against these policies are often without reliable analyses meeting their needs for engaging effectively in policy debates.
The purpose of LRAN, then, is to network researchers and analysts whose research and analysis would be useful to these movements, both with each other and with the movements themselves, and provide a mechanism of feedback so that their analyses address the needs of the movements, and are made available to them in a usable form.
LRAN was founded by, and is coordinated by, Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy, based in the USA, Focus on the Global South, based in Thailand, the Social Network for Justice and Human Rights (Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos), based in Brazil, and the National Land Committee, in South Africa.