Many information technology initiatives have emerged in recent years with the aim of improving natural resource management. These take a variety of technological forms designed either to directly curb corruption in resource extraction and production, or to enhance information flows, facilitate citizen participation, and hold specific actors accountable. Donors can play a role in connecting the divide between development practitioners, technologists, and researchers by supporting the use of tools in programs and evaluations.

The Enterprise Surveys (ES) focus on many aspects of the business environment. These factors can be accommodating or constraining for firms and play an important role in whether an economy’s private sector will thrive or not. An accommodating business environment is one that encourages firms to operate efficiently. Such conditions strengthen incentives for firms to innovate and to increase productivity, key factors for sustainable development.

Section I provides an overview of large-scale land deals. It assesses the trend at a global level and examines structural obstacles faced by efforts to regulate such deals. Section II focuses on corruption as a major obstacle to improving the protection of local communities and indigenous peoples whose livelihood, identities, and traditional ways of life depend on the use of local lands and natural resources. This phenomenon is largely understudied because corruption, by its very nature, is hidden and therefore poorly documented.

Large-scale land acquisitions, or land grabs, concentrate in developing countries which are also known for their corruption-friendly setting caused by a weak institutional framework. We argue that corrupt elites exploit this given institutional set-up to strike deals with international investors at the expense of the local population. Using panel data for 157 countries from 2000-2011, we provide evidence that these land deals indeed occur more often in countries with higher levels of corruption.

In Burma, where 70 percent of people earn a living through agriculture, securing land is often equivalent to securing a livelihood. But instead of creating conditions for sustainable development, recent Burmese governments have enacted abusive laws, enforced poorly conceived policies, and encouraged corrupt land administration officials that have promoted the displacement of small-scale farmers and rural villagers.

A surge in land grabbing over the past decade has seen millions of people displaced from their homes and farmland, often violently, and pushed deeper into poverty. As demand for food, fuel and commodities increases pressure on land, companies are all too often striking deals with corrupt state officials without the consent of the people who live on it. Until now, there has been little analysis of the role that corruption plays in the transfer of land and natural resources from local communities to political and business elites.  

Corruption in land governance is commonly defined as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain while carrying out the functions of land administration and land management. When land investors target countries with weak governance, the risk of corruption is high. Likewise, corruption is more likely to occur when local elites are able to manipulate their country’s land governance systems for their own benefit
 

Includes land regulatory framework; foreign direct investment and large-scale land acquisition; mechanized farming agriculture; lack of transparency and corruption in land use and allocation; land and conflict. Argues that land tenure insecurity has resulted from the imposition of formal law that does not recognize individual rights to unregistered land. State authorities have considered unregistered land to be state land and thus available to transfer to private commercial interests, the military, land speculators, and elites without regard for customary rights.

The Government of Jordan, the World Bank
Group (WBG), and the international community are working
towards a paradigm shift in their collective response to the
refugee crisis - a holistic approach which stresses the
continuum between the humanitarian response and the
country’s development agenda. In parallel, Jordan’s implicit
social contract by which the state provided citizens with
jobs and heavily subsidized public services is evolving.

The geo-economy presents Lebanon with
challenges associated with being a nexus for regional fault
lines and risks from its dependence on capital inflows.
Despite markedly improved security conditions since the
start of 2015, anxiety over regional turmoil and potential
spillover effectspersist. All the while, Lebanon continues
to be, by far, the largest host of Syrian refugees (in
proportion to the population). In addition, the economy’s

A major investigation by Global Witness has revealed how Cambodia’s ruling family are pulling the strings on Cambodia’s economy and amassing vast personal fortunes with extreme consequences for the population. The report, Hostile Takeover, sheds light on a huge network of secret deal-making and corruption that has underpinned Hun Sen’s 30-year dictatorial reign of murder, torture and the imprisonment of his political opponents.