Most national governments can legally acquire land for public needs such as roads, schools and other infrastructure, in a process known as expropriation. But in many countries, weak laws allow governments and companies to take land for private interests without adequately compensating and resettling displaced people. Here are six ways to bring those laws up to global standards.
Encroaching on Land and Livelihoods examines whether national expropriation laws in 30 countries across Asia and Africa follow the international standards established in Section 16 of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGTs).
Demand for electricity is increasing rapidly in India due to economic growth and urbanization. The growing residential sector offers the opportunity to achieve significant energy efficiency gains, which will be critical given India’s widening demand-supply gap.
Ensuring that indigenous and community land rights are respected and protected is important, not only from a human rights perspective, but also as a sound climate mitigation strategy.
Negotiators made major and encouraging promises when they adopted the new Paris Agreement at COP21 last week. Yet the future success of this Agreement relies on tough questions about accountability, participation, transparency and effectiveness—all of which have governance challenges at their core.
"The shift to a clean energy economy is inevitable -- it's no longer a matter of if, but when," WRI President and CEO Andrew Steer writes. "Elected officials can make America a leader in this new clean energy future and ensure that Americans enjoy better health and a more vigorous economy."
Satellite data reveals that concessions cover more than half the Malaysian state of Sarawak, often overlapping with sensitive intact forests that are being degraded at one of the highest rates in the world.
The world’s legally recognized community forests hold about 37 billion tonnes of carbon, about 29 times the annual carbon footprint of all the passenger vehicles in the world.
How can open government accelerate implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and the post-2015 development agenda? One overlooked answer is “forests.”
While members of the Open Government Partnership have made notable progress toward government accountability over the past four years, there has been little attention given to making land holdings and land transactions more transparent.
A key objective of the Open Government Partnership's Global Summit this week is supporting implementation of the new Sustainable Development Goals.
10 Questions to Ask about Distributed Generation, a collaboration between WRI, WWF and Prayas (Energy Group), is part of the 10 Questions to Ask Series and provides a framework for stakeholder engagement around the common questions and challenges that arise in the context of planning for and implementing DG option to address electricity access gaps.
Solving the challenges of air and water pollution will require more than the adoption of top-down solutions or greener technology. It will require countries to address key governance challenges, like inaccessible information and a lack of public participation.
WRI's new Environmental Democracy Index tracks and scores 70 countries' progress in enacting national laws that promote transparency, accountability and citizen engagement in environmental decision-making.
WASHINGTON— On Wednesday, May 20, World Resources Institute and The Access Initiative will launch the Environmental Democracy Index, the first publicly available, online platform that measures countr
Differences in the ways men and women understand and use forests mean natural resource policies can result in significant gender-differentiated impacts that oftentimes put women at a disadvantage.
Cécile Ndjebet, a partner of WRI’s Governance of Forests Initiative, explains the challenges rural, forest-dependent women face in Cameroon, as well as solutions for overcoming these problems.
WRI's new global director of governance, Mark Robinson, explains why governance is important for sustainable development, and highlights its challenges and opportunities.
WASHINGTON (January 22, 2015) – The World Resources Institute announced that Mark Robinson will be the global director for Governance.
Improving environmental democracy initiatives is critical, as decision-makers negotiate the post-2015 sustainable development goals(SDGs) and countries make commitments to the Open Government Partnership (OGP), an international initiative to improve government transparency.