The paper investigates determinants of
civic participation in local budget processes in rural areas
in the Kyrgyz Republic by using data from the Life in
Kyrgyzstan survey, conducted in 2012. The analysis of the
data suggests that although civic awareness and interest in
local budget processes is relatively high, the participation
rate in local budgeting processes is low. The paper also
shows that interest, awareness, and participation are

Despite considerable progress in the
area of environmental management over the last decade,
Colombia still faces significant impacts from population
exposure to urban air pollution, inadequate access to water
supply and sanitation, and indoor air pollution from solid
fuel use. This study estimates that the total health cost
attributable to these three factors amounts to about 10.2
trillion Colombian Pesos (COP) annually, or about 2 percent

Across the world, the housing sector
plays a key role in local and national economies, and
expanding access to housing can encourage more equitably
shared economic growth. This report surveys current policy
interventions designed to encourage affordable housing in
East Asia and the Pacific (EAP). The purpose of this report
is to provide a general overview of the recent trends in
urbanization and development in EAP and to consider

Pollution management is at the top of
the development agenda of Bolivia, and this program helps
address it in a cross-sectoral manner. In the context of the
implementation of the program environmental management in
Bolivia: innovations and opportunities which was conducted
from September 2010 until October 2012, the World Bank has
implemented a technical assistance program and supported a
multisectoral analysis in order to help the Bolivian

The World Bank has had a long history of
supporting community driven development and urban upgrading
projects in Indonesia, reaching back to the 1970's. The
primary approach of all program nasional pemberdayaana
masyarakat (PNPM) urban projects is to provide block grants
at the kelurahan level to community trusts (BKM) that work
with their communities to identify, plan, and implement
activities (largely infrastructure) to improve urban

Vulnerability is an important aspect of households' experience of poverty. Many households, while not currently in poverty, recognize that they are vulnerable to events - a bad harvest, a lost job, an illness, and unexpected expense, an economic downturn - that could easily push them into poverty. Most operational measures define poverty as some function of the shortfall of current income, or consumption expenditures from a poverty line, and hence measure poverty only at a single point in time. The authors propose a simple expansion of those measures to quantify vulnerability to poverty.

In this exploration of urban and regional dynamics in Poland after the transition, the authors find that the degree of urbanization, and primacy remains low in Poland. The largest cities are not growing at the rate that would be expected if post-transition adjustments were operating freely. As a result, Poland is not fully realizing external economies from urban agglomeration. Internal migration decreased significantly in the 1990s, with rural-to-urban migration declining dramatically.

Countries receiving debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative will be among the first to benefit from the new World Bank -- International Monetary Fund approach to strengthening the impact on poverty of concessional assistance in low-income countries. The new approach features a more inclusive and participatory process for helping recipient countries develop poverty reduction strategies. From these strategies, joint Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) will bring together the country's own priorities and Bank-Fund assistance to the country.

Traditional food marketing systems in developing countries are often not trusted. In consequence, policy makers frequently try to regulate them and modern market arrangements increasingly are emerging to address some of their presumed deficiencies. However, it is unclear how trustworthy these markets actually are and if and to what extent regulation and modernization affects market governance. In this paper we look at the case of coffee in urban settings in Ethiopia to test trustworthiness along three dimensions of trade transactions - weights, quality, and the presence of illegal trade.

Project paper

This study aims to assess the applicability of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forest in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT) in urban and peri-urban areas. The study also aims to facilitate decision-making on the next steps needed to ensure the application of the VGGT in urban and peri-urban areas, including informing the implementers on how they can anchor the VGGT in their activities, i.e. to apply or use the VGGT in their work in urban and peri-urban areas.

Development and humanitarian actors
currently engaged in Somalia face the challenge of
delivering assistance in such a way that it is supportive of
peace and state building, addresses the acute vulnerability,
and dependence of large shares of the population while
operating in a still insecure and changing environment.
Forced displacement is a key feature of the current
political economy context of Somalia. The necessity of