High prices and concerns about energy security in the oil and gas industry are driving expansion into ever more sensitive environments with greater technoological, political and social risks.

The concept of local food is appealing to many consumers. But it is difficult to define what actually constitutes local food. Given the globalised nature of agricultural markets, bread baked in a small village bakery in England may be made from grain grown in Canada. Similarly, many of the inputs to a West Country dairy farm selling local ice cream may come from outside the UK.

The Program on Forests (PROFOR) supported a research project in the miombo ecoregion to address these and other issues that a REDD program in the region would be confronted with.

This report explores how international oil and gas companies can contribute to tackling energy poverty in the regions where they operate. Successful initiatives need to be developed in partnership with other actors (government, donors, international NGO’s, researchers and civil society). Energy poverty cannot be addressed in isolation from other development challenges, including general poverty alleviation; provision of clean water; agricultural development; and the provision of education and health services. A case study on Nigeria highlights the dilemmas facing some countries

Private standards are set by the food producing industry and retailers, mainly to assure food safety and good agricultural practice. However their proliferation is a major concern in developing countries where these standards are regarded as too expensive for smallholders to comply with. So what really are the benefits and costs of private standards for small-scale producers?

In response to the disappointing results of many regulatory or public investment approaches to watershed management, payments for environmental services has emerged as a new mechanism to maintain socially optimal environmental services by compensating people for the services they provide.

The UK is widely considered to be a leader in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR); home to some of the word’s leading thinkers, practitioners and campaigners in the field. Despite this, there are few opportunities for collective strategic thinking about CSR across stakeholder groups. Corporate Social Responsibility at a Crossroads was designed to help to fill that gap. It was a process of analysis and stakeholder engagement to build scenarios for the future of CSR in the UK to 2015. The aim was to facilitate a dialogue across informed stakeholders in the UK; to provide an accessible map of the territory; and to set out some plausible scenarios for the future shape of the CSR agenda in the UK. This report records that analysis and the ideas that emerged from the process.

This paper explores the potential for financing small-scale high-benefit sustainable development projects through the voluntary and retail sector of the carbon market.

As regulative institutions, Andean barter markets help sustain local food systems and the ecosystems in which they are embedded. Action research with indigenous communities in the Lares Valley (Department of Cusco, Peru) generated new evidence on the importance of barter markets for: - giving some of the poorest social groups in the Andes better food security and nutrition; - conserving agricultural biodiversity (genetic, species, ecosystem) through the growing and exchange of native food crops in barter markets

There are 5 other country discussion papers in this series.

There are 5 other country discussion papers in this series. . For the set, quote order code, 9546IIED.