Governance & Access

Better Governance for More Sustainable Decisions

We collaborate with institutions and civil society organizations worldwide to ensure that decisions about natural resources reflect environmental values as well as people’s rights and interests.

Increasing Access: WRI aims to increase citizen and community access to government decision-making as a way to protect the environment and alleviate poverty. Local coalitions of civil society groups identify gaps in legislation and implementation and work with government officials and policy-makers to secure practical improvements in transparency, public participation and access to justice.

• The Access Initiative–the largest global network dedicated to ensuring that people have the right and ability to influence decisions about the natural resources that sustain their communities.
• Electricity Governance Initiative–a collaboration of civil society, policy-makers, regulators, and sector actors to promote open, transparent, and accountable decision-making processes in the electricity sector.

Promoting Equity: Many of the world’s poor are dependent on land and natural resources for their livelihoods. Poverty is often a direct result of peoples’ limited opportunities to generate wealth from local natural resources and other assets; of the small share of profits they ultimately capture; and of limited access to public goods and services. Access and benefit sharing are determined partly by public policies and government practices that sometimes allow for the concentration and capture of environmental benefits by small groups of political and economic elite.

• Poverty, Environment, and Distributional Equity–promote equitable allocation and distribution policies for revenues from ecosystem goods and services.
• Decentralization and Natural Resources–promote representative local government as a tool to improve environmental justice, reduce poverty, and raise the efficiency and equity of decision-making.
• Mapping Poverty and Natural Resource Revenues–overlay data about geographical distribution of poverty, natural resources and fiscal transfers to improve development approaches and outcomes.

Sustainable Finance: Public and private flows of capital fund major development projects with significant impact on local communities and their environment. Ecosystem variations and carbon emissions associated with such projects have large-scale implications on biodiversity and global climate change. Assessing these impacts and establishing codes of conduct and good practice is essential to guarantee that affected communities are consulted and pressure on their natural environment and the resources they provide is mitigated.

• International Financial Flows and the Environment (IFFE)–working to align public and private investment with environmentally sustainable development and poverty reduction.