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For millennia, the Ganges River, holy to Hindus, has provided livelihoods, food, and water for Nepal, India, and Bangladesh. Last month, one of India’s leading environmental activists died after a 111-day hunger strike, failing to evoke changes to save India’s most revered river (known as Ganga). Image: By Babasteve – https://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=3267702&context=set-781175&size=o, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1859422
Helping Reassess China’s National Forest Policy
In 1998, OED initiated a review of the World Bank’s 1991 Forest Strategy, in order to assess its impact on World Bank lending and whether the strategy remained relevant. The 1991 Strategy had pursued a green agenda, by restricting the Bank from supporting production activities which entailed the logging of tropical moist forests. It had […]
The World Bank Forest Strategy: Striking the right balance
The changing dynamics of the forest sector and the global economy prompted World Bank President James Wolfensohn to launch the CEO forum and the World Bank/World Wide Fund for Nature Alliance. In parallel, Bank management launched a Forest Policy Implementation Review and Strategy process in which the Operations Evaluation Department (OED) was asked to contribute […]
The interaction between population growth, the environment, and agricultural intensification raises the most compelling and most controversial issues currently facing developing countries. Given the low initial population densities, the benefits of increasing population on agricultural development have been widely documented by Boserup in 1961 and Ruthenberg in 1982. These authors argued that slowly increasing population […]
Brazil – Forests in the balance: challenges of conservation with development Vol. 1
The World Bank has clearly diminished its lending presence in the Amazon in the past decade. It has moved from the ” big projects ” era of the 1960s through the 1980s and strong economic and sector work to a more careful approach at the end of the century with attempts once again to focus […]
The Green Revolution in developing countries in the mid 1970s was a revolution fueled by science. It substantially increased agricultural productivity and saved millions of lives. U.S public sector and private foundations dominated in supplying the science and technology which generated the Green Revolution.
The Design of Rural Development: Lessons from Africa
The African Rural Development Study (ARDS) was conducted to investigate the reasons for the limited impact of past rural development programs on low-income populations in Africa and to generate a theoretical framework and operational guidelines for the design of future rural development programs. Specific topicsanalyzed include labor flow, migration, mechanization in smallholder agriculture, regional equity, […]
