During the Fifth Replenishment Phase of
the Global Environment Facility (GEF-5), portfolio
monitoring and learning review were introduced as key
components of knowledge management in the GEF Secretariat.
These strategies were intended to address the need to
generate knowledge on innovative practices, experiences, and
lessons from projects financed by the GEF. In that regard,
the Land Degradation focal area strategy for GEF-5

The Land-Based Poverty Alleviation
Project of Brazil is addressing one of the major factors
underlying poverty in the countryside: inadequate access to
land by the rural poor. Preceded by two highly successful
Bank-financed pilots, the project demonstrates the
large-scale viability of a community-based approach to land
reform. In the project beneficiary groups negotiate directly
with willing sellers for the purchase of suitable

The idea of social inclusion has
garnered considerable attention, especially in the context
of two recent developments: the Sustainable Development
Goals and the heightened attention to inequality. This paper
reviews the manner and extent to which social inclusion is
addressed in the first 17 Systematic Country Diagnostics
(SCDs), which are ex ante, country-level assessments
conducted by the World Bank Group, ahead of the preparation

Increased levels and volatility of food
prices has led to a surge of interest in large-scale
agriculture and land acquisition. This creates challenges
for policy makers aiming to establish a policy environment
conducive to an agrarian structure to contribute to
broad-based development in the long term. Based on a
historical review of episodes of growth of large farms and
their impact, this paper identifies factors underlying the

The growing use of Payments for
Environmental Services (PES) for conservation has fostered a
debate on its effectiveness, but the few efforts to date to
assess the impact of PES programs have been hampered by lack
of data, leading to very divergent results. This paper uses
data from a PES mechanism implemented in Quindío, Colombia,
to examine the impact of PES on land use change. Alone among
all early PES initiatives, the Silvopastoral Project

A decade ago in Mozambique, a stakeholder workshop where the need to improve access to industrial and commercial land as a means to encourage investment was a topic of discussion, a government official came up to. In order to create new jobs, generate more income, and modernize the economy, many countries see an urgent need to encourage industrial and commercial investment, both domestic and foreign. However, investment in many sectors cannot take place unless land, along with other basic factors of production, is available.

This study analyzes the difficulties a
poor community experienced in accessing peri-urban land in
South Africa. This community, composed largely of laid-off
farm workers, wanted to buy their own farm in a peri-urban
area west of Johannesburg to establish a mixed-use
settlement. The Ethembalethu 250 families started their own
savings scheme to make their dream a reality. Millions of
black South Africans live in the peri-urban areas. However,

The effectiveness of conservation
interventions such as Payments for Environmental Services
(PES) is often evaluated, if it is evaluated at all, only at
the completion of the intervention. Since gains achieved by
the intervention may be lost after it ends, even apparently
successful interventions may not result in long-term
conservation benefits, a problem known as that of
permanence. This paper uses a unique dataset to examine the

This study aims to assess the extent to
which reforms have actually been implemented, the impact
they have had on the rural population, and the challenges
which, as a consequence, need to be addressed by the new
administration. This report is organized as follows: Section
1 describes Mexico's rural economy. It reviews the
broad context of macro, trade, and sector-level reforms, the
strengths and weaknesses of both the productive and

The overarching theme of the book is
development in a land of contrasts. There have been large
economic, social, and political changes. The mass of society
is far more expressive and politically involved today. In
1945, the country had 7.4 million voters, about 11 percent
of the population. Today it has 120 million voters, or 67
percent of the population. The economy has been modernized,
the capitalist ethos spread across regions, mass

The extractive industries (EI) sector occupies an outsize space in the economies of many developing countries. Economists, public finance professionals, and policy makers working in such countries are frequently confronted with issues that require an in-depth understanding of the sector. The objective of this volume is to provide a concise overview of EI-related topics these professionals are likely to encounter.

This report summarizes the findings of
the Uganda Sustainable Land Management Public Expenditure
Review (SLM PER). The SLM PER was undertaken to achieve six
main objectives: (i) establish a robust data base on
SLM-related public expenditure that can support credible
empirical analysis; (ii) develop a sound methodology for
conducting SLM PERs, which could guide similar work in the
future; (iii) analyze the level and composition of SLM