Many of the most intense pollution and resource pressures originate in urban centres, and have their major impacts on the surrounding regions. Peri-urban zones are often far more environmentally unstable than either urban or rural settings. Rural–urban burdens can be especially difficult to accommodate within existing administrative systems/boundaries, particularly in countries where public authorities face severe financial difficulties. This paper provides a policy-oriented review of those environmental burdens in low-and middle-income countries that cross rural–urban boundaries but are not national or global in scale.

This paper is about the current and potential role of community-driven initiatives to significantly improve the lives of hundreds of millions of slum dwellers and squatters at local, city and national levels.

Please note that this paper has been superceeded by 'The transition to a predominantly urban world and its underpinnings'- Urban Change:4

Innovative strategies to enhance shelter finance based around the strengthening of savings and savings organizations can transform conventional finance into a catalyst for empowerment and development.

This paper presents the findings of a study of the impact of Guinean pastoral legislation carried out on behalf of IIED as part of its sub-regional “Making Decentralisation Work” programme. Experience in Guinea shows that grassroots ownership of the pastoral legislation is essential if it is to be applied effectively. In order to meet this challenge herders’ organisations need to be more aware of and engage with the issues involved in natural resource management and ongoing processes of decentralisation. The evaluation of the experience in Guinea indicates that formulating legislation or translating it into national languages is not enough to ensure its dissemination and appropriation by local communities.

Produced by The Working Group on Climate Change and Development, this first-time report says global warming threatens to reverse human progress, and make the international targets on halving global poverty by 2015, known as the Millennium Development Goals, unattainable.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) commit the international community to an expanded vision of poverty reduction and pro-poor growth, one that vigorously places human development at the centre of social and economic progress in all countries.

This paper traces the history of Scotland’s once extensive and diverse forms of common land. It provides an insight into why very littleof this common land is still in existence today. It shows how powerful landed interests were able to appropriate the bulk of these lands into their own substantial land holdings by the early nineteenth century. A description of surviving common lands is provided together with a brief insight into current management arrangements and a summary of the key lessons from the Scottish experience. In the concluding part of the paper, a brief overview is given of the new patterns of community ownership which are now emerging and the new legislative and financial instruments that are being developed to assist this process. A set of references and internet websites are provided for those wishing to further explore the topic.