This paper describes an initiative to support community-directed development projects in low income neighbourhoods in San Fernando, one of the poorer, peripheral municipalities in Buenos Aires. This was part of a national programme for 'vulnerable groups' in low-income areas and which sought to facilitate access to social services, increase participation and promote transparency in the use of government resources at local level.

This Working Paper describes activities that promote the sustainable development of Windhoek, Namibia, through processes that are consistent with the principles of Local Agenda 21, but that are based on the initiatives of civil society groups rather than local authorities.

Urban development
This working paper describes the Sustainable Penang Initiative (SPI), the first project in Malaysia – and perhaps the region – to address the challenge of sustainable development by organising popular consultations, creating community indicators, and channelling the inputs into the state’s strategic development planning. Central to this effort was a series of roundtables, organised around such themes as Social Justice, Economic Productivity, Cultural Vibrancy, and Popular Participation. This working paper not only documents the SPI, but also explores its successes and its limitations. It describes how the participatory dialogues caught on and spawned numerous follow-up activities, but also how the initial roundtables came to exclude certain segments of the population. Similarly, it describes how the SPI managed to bring previously neglected issues to the attention of the government, but also how certain issues came to be ignored by the SPI itself.

Market-based approaches to environmental management are increasingly common in all sectors of the economy. Forestry is no exception.

This paper draws on the findings from case studies conducted between 1997 and 2001 in Mali, Nigeria, and Tanzania. Each case study is summarised in Briefing Papers 1 to 6 in this series, and full reports are available in the Working Papers Series on Rural-Urban Interactions and Livelihood Strategies.

This paper describes an initiative to support community-directed development projects in low income neighbourhoods in San Fernando, one of the poorer, peripheral municipalities in Buenos Aires.

Finding the Way Forward looks at the role in the mining industry of voluntary initiatives: coordinated activities undertaken by groups of companies to go beyond the environmental and social performance requirements set by legislation. Recent research into the role of voluntary activities in the sector conducted as part of the Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development (MMSD) formed the basis of the this report, and the relevant MMSD papers are included in full on the enclosed CD-ROM.

Can trade controls and the resulting changes in the wildlife trade have a negative impact on the livelihoods of those who earn an income from wildlife harvests, and specifically the rural poor? Some argue that not only do such controls reduce actual or potential economic benefits from wildlife products, but they also have little positive and sometimes even a negative impact on conservation.