With reference to the “One World – No Hunger” Initiative, Stefan Schmitz shows how food policies can support the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals and highlights the interdependencies between the individual goals and targets.
Meant well doesn’t always mean done well. The Sustainable Development Goals are all set to undermine themselves, Stephan Klasen maintains. The worst aspect is that people, who really ought to be at the focus, threaten to fall by the wayside in this technocratic maze of hundreds of goals, targets, and indicators.
Is it right to attach financial values to nature and to incorporate that valuation into the post-2015 agenda? Will such valuation help to protect species diversity and ecosystems? Or does it not rather harbour the risk that we cheerfully go on destroying nature since other aspects of the national accounts can be seen as compensation? Civil society is split on this issue. Our author points out why.
More than 30 years ago, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) started a post-harvest programme in Central America named “Postcosecha”. The significant impact that was still evident long after the project end also continues to exist after the cessation of external support. The current priority in SDC’s contribution to post-harvest management (PHM) is to use existing knowledge and experience to create conditions for scaling up the most appropriate PHM technologies in sub-Saharan Africa.
A fact sheet on the involvement of the GIZ in Cambodia's social land concessions program. Since 2007, the Royal Government of Cambodia has implemented the “Land Allocation for Social and Economic Development” (LASED) program with technical support from GIZ and financial support from the World Bank. In rural areas, many households are landless and often lose their land as a result of economic and social hardship.
A World Bank progress report for December 2014 on the land allocation for social and economic development (LASED) project. It provides key project dates, objectives, an outline of implementation status and key decisions and results.
This paper documents the opportunities and constraints for the Forest Peoples Land Rights Network (LandNet) in advocating forestland rights, in order to discuss the lessons learned over the previous two decades. Working on the sensitive issue of the struggle over forestland use rights LandNet was able to establish a bottom-up network that includes various stakeholders in this struggle.
As trade and investment flows rapidly increase across Southeast Asia, several countries have experienced a surge in large land deals for plantation agriculture. Against this backdrop, civil society organisations have been using a wider range of legal tools to promote public accountability in investment processes. These include scrutinising the negotiation of international treaties, challenging national legal frameworks, raising local awareness about rights, and testing approaches for local consultation and redress.
This paper presents the case of World Bank support to the mass titling component of the Cambodia Land Management and Administration Project. This was a project for which there was clear national demand, as evidenced by the fact that the Cambodian government had already attempted to implement mass titling a decade previously, but had lacked the human and technical resources to complete it. The case describes a consensus between donors and a host nation government during the planning and approval of the intervention, which dissolves into conflict during implementation.
ABSTRACTED FROM THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Part 4: During the transition, businesses, government and development partners need to take steps to fill the existing gaps in Myanmar’s legislative framework on the protection of the environment, society and human rights. The Government has an immediate and important opportunity in the new production sharing contracts to fill these gaps through contractual requirements to meet the International Finance Corporation Performance Standards and World Bank Group Environmental, Health and Safety Guidelines.
Change is taking place in Myanmar. Since this ethnically and geographically diverse country elected its first civilian government in 2010, a series of rapid and dramatic reforms have taken place to allow freedom of expression, an opening of the economy and the consolidation of peace. The government has also taken the first tentative steps toward decentralization. In October 2013, Mercy Corps conducted a combined economic, governance and conflict assessment that focused on Myanmar’s southern Shan State as a microcosm of the issues present throughout the country.
Over 72% of land leases involve foreign investors, primarily Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai companies. Most products from these operations are exported as raw material to the investor countries, leaving little to no room for added value domestically to benefit the Laotian economy. Rubber is the largest single industry within land investment, making up 34% of all land concessions. The two largest rubber investors are Vietnamese corporations, Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) and Vietnam Rubber Group (VRG).