The Special Rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, Raquel Rolnik, undertook an official visit to the World Bank Group from 26 October to 1 November 2010. In this 2013 report, she presents her observations and recommendations on the World Bank‟s safeguard policies, particularly on the right to adequate housing, in the context of its current two-year consultative process to review and update its environmental and social safeguard policies.

As shown in this report, harassment of local activists in Cambodia, including defenders of the right to housing, is widespread. Cambodia’s rich and powerful are increasingly abusing the criminal justice system to silence communities standing up against land concessions or business deals affecting the land they live on or cultivate. Many poor and marginalized communities are living in fear of the institutions created to protect them, in particular the police and the courts. As forced evictions increase, public space for discussing them is shrinking.

This 2012 report is an assessment of the human rights impact of economic land concessions (ELCs) and other land concessions and major development projects in Cambodia. It includes not only an analysis of concessions pertaining to agroindustry (for example, rubber, sugar, acacia and cassava plantations), but also to concessions for mining, oil and gas, forestry, and concessions for the purposes of tourism, property development, and large scale infrastructure, such as hydropower dams.

Rural areas in Cambodia have been the target of large-scale land acquisitions since the late 1990s. As of March 2012, economic land concessions in Cambodia covered more than 2 million hectares, equivalent to over half of the country’s arable land. In this paper, we discuss the policy narratives and discursive strategies that are employed by various actors to justify and legitimize large-scale land acquisitions. We then analyze the underlying mechanisms of such acquisitions and investments and examine how they are entangled with donor-assisted land use planning efforts.

This document provides data on families in Phnom Penh that have been displaced either through planned relocation or forced eviction, 1990-2011. Short case studies are provided on the 1990 Wat Sarawan relocation and the 2006 eviction from the Bassac riverfront area. A graph shows trends in displacement over time.

The objective of this paper is to synthesize the findings of six individual case studies (Bucaramanga, Colombia; Coimbatore, India; Kigali, Rwanda; Gaziantep, Turkey; Changsha, China; and Tangier, Morocco) by analyzing the similarities and dissimilarities among them and identifying common, cross-cutting themes. The intent is to highlight what institutions and strategies successful cities have relied on to spur
economic development, under what conditions such success has occurred, and what lessons of this experience might be applicable to decision makers in other cities.

The Palestinian economy has experienced
strong growth in recent years. This report examines the
economic benefits of lifting the restrictions on movement
and access, as well as other administrative obstacles, to
Palestinian investment and economic activity in a region
known as Area C. This region constitutes about 61 percent of
the West Bank territory and was defined under the Oslo Peace
Accords as the area that eventually would be transferred to

Restrictions on economic activity in
area C of the West Bank have been particularly detrimental
to the Palestinian economy. Area C constitutes about 61
percent of the West Bank territory. Area C is richly endowed
with natural resources and it is contiguous, whereas areas A
and B are smaller territorial islands. Mobilizing the area C
potential will help a faltering Palestinian economy. Since
area C is where the majority of the West Bank's natural

The use of the phrase, ‘political
economy’ originates in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and is
also found in the writings of David Ricardo and Karl Marx.
What is presently understood as ‘economics’ was, at that
time, termed ‘political economy’. This was understood to
mean ‘conditions of production organization in
nation-states’ (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012, Beuran,
Raballand and Kapoor, 2011). Venerable scholars such as

Integrated Development Plans (IDPs) have
been introduced in Romania as a prerequisite for accessing
EU funds under the Regional Operational Program (ROP). The
IDPs designed for growth poles represent a specific category
of strategic planning documents as: 1) they need to be
considered within the frame of the national policy to whose
implementation they contribute; and 2) they represent a
first endeavor to think of development across functional

This Investment Climate Assessment (ICA)
seeks to evaluate the conditions under which the Palestinian
private sector currently operates in the West Bank
(including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza strip. This
assessment is both an update and expansion on a similar
assessment undertaken by the World Bank in 2006. As such, it
provides both a snapshot of the investment climate in 2013,
as well as a longitudinal view of what has changed in the

A ministerial intergovernmental
conference in pursuit of these commitments was held in
August 2003 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The conference agreed to
the Almaty Programme of Action (APoA), calling for joint
efforts by transit and landlocked countries-with substantial
technical and financial assistance from other countries-to
revise their regulatory frameworks affecting trade movements
and to improve their trade-related infrastructure. The two