World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law

Why are carefully designed, sensible policies too often not adopted or implemented? When they are, why do they often fail to generate development outcomes such as security, growth, and equity? And why do some bad policies endure? This World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law addresses these fundamental questions, which are at the heart of development. Policy making and policy implementation do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they take place in complex political and social settings, in which individuals and groups with unequal power interact within changing rules as they pursue conflicting interests. The process of these interactions is what this Report calls governance, and the space in which these interactions take place, the policy arena.

Read more: http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2017

PROMOTING PRO-POOR GROWTH POLICY STATEMENT

Guidelines on Poverty Reduction show that poverty has multiple and interlinked causes and dimensions: economic, human, political, sociocultural, protective/security. The 2001 DAC policy statement focuses on one dimension of that bigger picture – reducing economic poverty through pro-poor growth. In doing so, it looks at the relationship between the economic and other dimensions of poverty and how policies for pro-poor growth and other policy areas need to interact so that, collectively, they can make major and sustainable inroads into poverty reduction.

When implementing the policy guidance on how donors can support and facilitate pro-poor growth, they must bear in mind that the poor are not a homogenous group, that country contexts vary considerably, and that policy implementation must be based on a sound understanding of who the poor are and how they earn their livelihoods. Promoting pro-poor growth requires policy choices.

The article is available at: http://www.oecd.org/dac/povertyreduction/44244087.pdf