"In 1993, India introduced quota-based political reservations for women in rural areas with the objective to promote gender equality in human development by making rural service provision and local governance inclusive and responsive to the needs of women. Recent evidence shows that reservation...

"This paper seeks to identify the factors which are responsible for successful management of natural resources when communities are given opportunities to manage those resources. Applying the social capital framework, it analyzes empirical data from the well known case of Kalahan Educational...

"The forest management strategy of Nepal is based on people's participation, which is known as community forestry. This approach was formally introduced in 1978 to encourage active participation of local people in forest management activities as a means to improve their livelihoods. Under the...

Large-scale social safety net programs such as Indias National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) are difficult to implement due to governance challenges related to elite capture, leakages, and corruption. The ability to identify how the governance challenges of program implementation can be...

"We examine access to, use of, and participation in decisions on improved water supply in the Volta basin of Ghana, one of the first countries to introduce a community-based approach to rural water supply on a large scale. While 71 percent of the households interviewed have access to improved...

"Land is still among the most important assets of the rural population in the developing world. Land resources are governed by a variety of tenure systems based on statutory, customary, or religious law. At the same time, many national, subnational, and local institutions administer the...

"The world made significant progress on reducing poverty between 1981 and 2001 — the number of people in developing countries living on less than US$1 a day fell from 1.5 billion to 1.1 billion, or from 40 to 21 percent of the world's population. In fact, however, nearly all this progress...

"The world made significant progress on reducing poverty between 1981 and 2001 — the number of people in developing countries living on less than US$1 a day fell from 1.5 billion to 1.1 billion, or from 40 to 21 percent of the world's population. In fact, however, nearly all this progress...