What do local communities perceive as the key problems and challenges for adaptation to climate change? Lessons are identified from a major global grant competition, the Development Marketplace, focused on adaptation to climate change. Proposals developed by non-governmental actors at the local...

Natural resources, unless of commercial interest, are hardly a prominent concern of most policy-makers. A certain complacency seems to prevail in which too little is done to increase the productivity and sustainability of the natural resource base on which the rural poor continue to rely for...

This discussion paper, an input to the South Asia region's Social Protection and Hazard Risk Management Strategies, describes the cash transfer instruments supported by the Bank in South Asia, evaluates their design and implementation, and suggests improvements to increase their effectiveness....

Mongolia was hit hard by the global economic recession, notably the fall in commodity prices. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contracted by 1.6 percent in 2009 after growth of 8.9 percent in 2008. The country is narrowly specialized in production of a few primary goods with minerals comprising 70...

This paper discusses domestic energy supply and demand in rural India. Links between forest scarcity and household fuel collection are analyzed in a non-separable household model, focusing on substitution of non-commercial fuels from the commons and the private domain. Based on data from...

This article analyzes the relationships between farm size and productivity and between farm size and profitability. A framework is set out to explain the inverse farm size--productivity relationship based on imperfections in the markets for labor, land, credit and risk. Hypotheses are derived...