Backed by sound economic policies and until the global crisis, a buoyant global economy, many developing countries made significant movement toward achieving the 2015millennium Development Goals (MDGs), particularly those for poverty reduction, gender parity in education, and reliable access to safe water. But even before the global economic crisis, progress in achieving some MDGs, especially those on child and maternal mortality, primary school completion, hunger, and sanitation, was lagging. The global food, fuel and economic crises have set back progress to the MDGs.

The operations policy on Development Policy Lending (DPL), approved by the Board in August 2004, requires that the Bank systematically analyze whether specific country policies supported by an operation are likely to have "significant effects" on the country's environment, forests, and other natural resources. The implicit objective behind this requirement is to ensure that there is adequate capacity in the country to deal with adverse effects on the environment, forests, and other natural resources that the policies could trigger, even at the program design stage.

This strategic framework serves to guide and support the operational response of the World Bank Group (WBG) to new development challenges posed by global climate change. Unabated, climate change threatens to reverse hard-earned development gains. The poorest countries and communities will suffer the earliest and the most. Yet they depend on actions by other nations, developed and developing. While climate change is an added cost and risk to development, a well-designed and implemented global climate policy can also bring new economic opportunities to developing countries.

Along with economic growth and improved living standards, waste from households, industries, and commercial or service establishments is expected to increase rapidly over the next years. Managing this waste is a hard challenge for the Government of Vietnam because of its substantial cost and lack of awareness and participation of people and businesses. Wastes can be classified according to: their form (wastewater, solid waste); their origin (industrial wastes, agricultural wastes, urban (municipal) wastes); and their hazardous nature (non-hazardous or hazardous).

This report seeks to present micro evidence on how environmental changes affect poor households. It focuses primarily on environmental resources that are outside the private sphere, particularly commonly held and managed resources such as forests, fisheries, and wildlife. The objectives for this volume are three-fold. It is first interested in using an empirical data-driven approach to examine the dependence of the poor on natural resources. The second objective is to examine the role of the environment in determining health outcomes.

It is often assumed that transferring land to rural households will provide people with valuable assets that can be productively used to enhance their livelihoods. Unfortunately, few rural people or land reform beneficiaries are perceived to be using land productively because they do not engage in significant commercial production for the market. Transferring land to subsistence users is therefore seen as a waste of resources.

Paper targeted at land reform practitioners and stakeholders in government and civil society. Argues that land reform can broadly be divided into land tenure reform and land redistribution. First chapter gives short narrative of key land tenure and land policy issues. These remain politically sensitive, but consensus is emerging on how to deal with them once confusion surrounding private /common property and formal / informal rights is cleared up. Secure property rights should not be confused with full private ’ownership’.

La paz, Bolivia
30 de noviembre del 2016
Argumentos para fortalecer la propiedad colectiva de la tierra en Sudamérica
Juan Pablo Chumacero R.
 
Economista, con especialización en estudios latinoamericanos. Ha trabajado durante 14 años en la Fundación TIERRA, siendo su Director Ejecutivo entre 2012 y 2014. Actualmente trabaja como investigador en el IPDRS.
 

Urban wastewater management has become a major challenge in India as infrastructural development and regulations have not kept pace with population growth and urbanisation. This study argues that against the backdrop of water scarcity and climate change, it is important to examine issues related to wastewater reuse more holistically and to investigate the challenges and opportunities for its safe and efficient reuse.

Can the twin developmental goals of administrative decentralisation and improving services for the urban poor be meshed? How can urban authorities and local politicians learn to listen to service users, particularly women? What services should be run by municipalities and what could be managed by neighbourhood or private management?

The Kumasi peri-urban area is characterised by high rates of conversion of agricultural land to private housing. Kumasi, Ghana, is also situated across a major drainage divide, resulting in a range of water quality and supply problems. Collaborative DFID-funded research by Royal Holloway, University of London, with government and NGO partners in Ghana, aims to develop and pilot a sustainable co-management approach to peri- urban watersheds.