The Development Marketplace 2009 focused on adaptation to climate change. This paper identifies lessons from the Marketplace and assesses their implications for adaptation support. The findings are based on: statistical tabulation of all proposals; in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of the 346 semi-finalists; and interviews with finalists and assessors. Proposals were fuelled by deep concerns that ongoing climate change and its impacts undermine development and exacerbate poverty, migration and food insecurity.

The organization, which is now called the International Land Coalition (ILC), was established on January 1, 1996, on the recommendation of the conference on hunger and poverty convened by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in 1995. At first, the organization was called the popular coalition to eradicate hunger and poverty. The ILC itself was formally constituted and launched along with its new name in February 2003.

This report seizes the opportunity to learn from existing evidence by analyzing lessons derived from impact evaluations produced between 2000 and January 2009 to begin to discern what has been effective in agriculture. It is part of a broader effort being undertaken by the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) of the World Bank to understand how impact evaluations can help improve performance and broadly disseminate those lessons.

A well-functioning land administration and management system is crucial for Madagascar's economic and social future. Land is implicated in Madagascar's ongoing economic development and social transformation in many important ways, as key a factor in its quest for economic growth, urbanization, transparent decision-making on land-related foreign investments, environment protection, vibrant and sustainable rural communities, political stability, and social cohesion.

South Africa has rapidly reduced trade barriers since the end of Apartheid, yet agricultural production and exports have remained sluggish. Also, poverty and unemployment have risen and become increasingly concentrated in rural areas. This paper examines the extent to which remaining price distortions, both domestic and foreign, are contributing to the underperformance of the agricultural sector vis-a-vis the rest of the economy. The author draws on a computable general equilibrium (CGE) and micro-simulation model of South Africa that is linked to the results of a global trade model.

Local and Community Driven Development (LCDD) is an approach that gives control of development decisions and resources to community groups and representative local governments. Poor communities receive funds, decide on their use, plan and execute the chosen local projects, and monitor the provision of services that result from it. It improves not just incomes but people's empowerment and governance capacity, the lack of which is a form of poverty as well. LCDD operations have demonstrated effectiveness at delivering results and have received substantial support from the World Bank.

This paper analyzes the political and institutional factors which are behind the dramatic changes in distortions to agricultural incentives in the transition countries in East Asia, Central Asia, and the rest of the former Soviet Union, and in Central and Eastern Europe. The paper explains why these changes have occurred and why there are large differences among transition countries in the extent and the nature of the remaining distortions.

Although economic reform has brought remarkable progress in poverty reduction in Vietnam, the scale and depth of ethnic minority poverty in Vietnam presents one of the major challenges to achieving the targets for poverty reduction set out in the Socio-Economic Development Plan, as well as the millennium development goals. The authors first review a series of monetary and non-monetary indicators which show the living standards of the ethnic minorities are improving but still lag seriously behind those of the majority Kinh-Hoa.

Using recent estimates of industry assistance rates, the effects of trade liberalization in the rest of the world and in Pakistan alone are analyzed using a global and a Pakistan computable general equilibrium (CGE) model under two tax replacement schemes: a direct income tax and an indirect tax replacement. The results indicate that the distributional and poverty effects in Pakistan of a unilateral liberalization of all traded goods are significantly greater than the effects of trade liberalization in the rest of the world.

This review of public expenditures on Social Protection (SP) in Nicaragua is based on the analytical framework of Social Risk Management (SRM) developed by the World Bank. The concept of managing social risk comes from the notion that certain groups in society are vulnerable to unexpected shocks which threaten their livelihood and/or survival. Social protection focuses on the poor since they are more vulnerable to the risks and normally do not have the instruments to handle these risks.

The report seeks to analyze what has been learned about how agricultural interventions influence nutrition outcomes in low-and middle-income countries, focusing on the target populations of the millennium development goals-people living on less than a dollar a day. It also sets out to synthesize lessons from past efforts to improve the synergies between agriculture and nutrition outcomes. The report identifies a number of developments in agriculture and nutrition that have transformed the context in which nutrition is affected by agriculture.

This social assessment (SA) was conducted under the Fergana Valley Water Resources Management Project (FVWRMP), which is providing assistance to the Government of Tajikistan to address irrigation and drainage deficiencies in Eastern Sughd. The main SA objectives were to understand how prevailing structures of water provision, land reforms, and gender relations impact rural livelihoods; to analyze experiences in establishing inclusive Water Users Associations (WUAs); and to provide recommendations to FVWRMP with the aim of enhancing its programs.