 Hi, I'm Sam Zockeberg, Senior Legal Researcher at the Columbia Centre on Sustainable Investment. I'd like to thank the organisers and my colleagues on this panel for the opportunity to make this presentation by video ahead of time. Today's topic focuses on innovations in open and transparent land governance and to borrow from a recent CCSI report on this topic, we must ask, for whom? CCSI initiatives can have a range of beneficiaries, including regulators, community members, citizens, journalists, each of whom may have different needs. So designing systems that meet such needs will be crucial if we want to avoid less dominant actors, such as communities, indigenous peoples and women being left behind. I'd like to focus on transparency in the context of land-based investments specifically, given the immense land pressures that agribusiness, forestry and renewable energy projects are currently causing. As you can see, land investment transparency has four elements. The first is disclosure of all relevant and accurate information in a timely manner. This includes information about actual or proposed investments, including likely impacts and the actors involved. But it also includes information about relevant rights and laws, including the processes through which decisions will be made. CCSI's own effort in this regard is open land contracts, which currently houses 1,500 land investment contracts and other documents from over 50 countries. The next element is access. Communities, citizens and government actors have to be able to safely access the information. Third is comprehension. Information should be made in understandable formats, which includes translations into local languages and plain language summaries. In the case of open land contracts, for instance, we summarise key contract clauses to aid comprehension for non-legal users. Communities often also need sufficient time to digest information and to access technical support if needed. The final element is information use in open systems. Communities and other actors must be able to access decision-making processes if they want to knowledgeably influence them. More generally, governance systems must be open and democratically responsive. So what are these open systems and decision-making processes that we need and how can local actors influence them in practice? The systems and processes I have in mind are wide-ranging and often country-specific. They include processes enabling decisions on land use planning, the design of legal and policy frameworks, through-to-consideration of proposed investments and the terms of those investments that are granted permits. So this also includes consultations, contract negotiations, impact assessments, as well as monitoring and enforcement, grievance mechanisms and decisions concerning project closure and what happens to land afterwards. For communities to access these systems, disclosure is crucial, but it's also insufficient. To influence decisions, communities need information, yes, but also power is going to play a prominent role, meaning that communities will often struggle to have their voice heard. They may need skill-building and accompaniment from civil society and other support providers to really grasp what is at stake, prepare and confidently decide on and implement a course of action before it's too late. Because communities, including women and Indigenous peoples, are so often excluded from these processes, they increasingly are turning to processes to set the agenda themselves before it's too late. Community-led processes include autonomous protocols and bylaws, which explain how customary decisions are made within the community, as well as community-driven visions for how the community plans to pursue its own self-determined development. Community-led data collection is another important tool. This can democratise the information sources feeding into government decisions concerning land, which can otherwise often tilt heavily towards unaccountable company consultants or reporting that may not tell the full story. On the government side, we know that information sharing between agencies remain the challenge. This is not only a technical or a financial challenge, it's also a political one. Public actors might be hoarding information or demanding money for it, precisely because being a gatekeeper to such information brings with it power and influence. So while we can and should innovate on intra-governmental information sharing and coordination, we also have to empower those good faith actors within government, sometimes referred to as reformers, who earnestly seek to uphold their mandates but are too often stymied by pressure from above to not make things difficult for certain investors. On this topic, CCSI is currently working to empower specific governmental actors and is preparing a brief on how such actors can build political support to translate good ideas into practice as part of our Align project with IIED and Nomati. Thank you very much for your time.