Putting responsibility in the hands of farmers to determine agricultural extension programs can make services more responsive to local conditions, more accountable, more effective, and more sustainable. To realize these benefits, the role of the public sector has to be redefined to permit...

The full participation of both men and women in policymaking, in economic and sectoral analysis, and in project design and management, may be impeded by cultural and legal constraints which limit women ' s participation and by women ' s relative lack of time and mobility due to their workload...

It is well recognized that mountain ecosystems and their inhabitants are among the most vulnerable to climate change. Measuring the nature and scope of these vulnerabilities remains, however, a work-in-progress. This note develops an analytical framework that builds upon two existing approaches:...

Political decentralization is the primary mechanism through which citizen preferences are represented in the decision making, and is therefore essential to an effective system of decentralization. The purpose of this note is to elucidate components of a well-designed political decentralization...

Community foundations are locally based grant making foundations that mobilize local philanthropic contributions to support variety of development projects. They are becoming increasingly important in mobilizing local resources and development expertise. These foundations play a particularly...

On August 15th the Government of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) signed a Memorandum of Understanding aimed at ending almost 30 years of armed conflict in Aceh. This note summarizes the results of a rapid conflict assessment prepared by the Bank to understand conflict dynamics, to...

This note provides a short summary of the concept and key phases involved in implementing a citizen report card (CRC) survey. CRCs are client feedback surveys that provide a quantitative measure of user perceptions on the quality, efficiency and adequacy of different public services. They have...

This note looks at the challenge of capacity building in post conflict countries, including options for creating capacity and the trade-offs between speed and longer-term impact, the need to ensure that aid management agencies include sunset provisions, and six proposed general lessons for more...

This note looks at the challenge of capacity building in post conflict countries, including at options for creating capacity, and the trade-offs between speed, and longer-term impact, the need to ensure that aid management agencies include sunset provisions, and six proposed general lessons for...

Addressing mental health is gradually being recognized as an important development issue, especially in the case of conflict-affected countries. Although mental health issues have received increased attention in post-conflict settings, there has been a tendency to implicitly assume that the...