Reports and Documents

The food price crisis represents an enormous challenge to the leadership and legitimacy of the world's multilateral institutions, but is also a genuine opportunity to deliver long overdue reforms to the food and agriculture system. Those countries with the resources and power to deliver such reforms should take the lead, as they have done in trying to avert a
global financial crisis. This briefing note sets out a series of steps, both short- and medium-term, to deal with the current food crisis, and to put in place the reforms required to prevent future repetitions.

The Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) Policy for Kerala puts forth the concept of 'knowledge commons' and 'commons licence' for traditional knowledge. The policy says that all traditional knowledge, including traditional medicine, must belong to the domain of "knowledge commons" and not to public domain. The system should be introduced through legal arrangements. While community or family custodians will have rights to knowledge that belonged to them, the rest of the traditional knowledge will belong to Kerala State.

Two studies pointing to the link between heavy pesticide use and several illnesses, including cancer, in Punjab have prompted the state government to set up a cancer registry programme. The Punjab government has decided to begin a cancer registry programme.

Climate change is one of the most serious threats the world faces. It will affect all of us, but will have a disproportionate impact on millions of poor rural people.

The 10-state study on effectiveness of rural water supply schemes, undertaken by the World Bank has looked at various aspects of

Participatory water monitoring can be especially important in helping prevent water-related conflicts that may arise in the extractive industry and large-scale agriculture sectors.

To find the optimal delivery model for urban water supply and sanitation (WSS) services, one must look beyond ownership structures to the practices and designs that support good performance. Consumer cooperatives are often attractive
institutional models. This note focuses on a Bolivian
cooperative that is one of the most successful water cooperatives in Latin America.

This paper contains detailed discussions on climate change strategies. It looks at climate change related issues in several sectors including forestry, energy (biofuels), waste management, and groundwater, as well as key institutional and industry developments in response to climate change challenges. The paper summarises current policy responses from around the Asia-Pacific region and attempts to sort effective climate change policy from non-effective policy.

This study, covering more than 600 rural drinking water supply schemes, is a large-scale empirical analysis of the traditional target-driven (supply-driven) programs of the Government and the more recent model of decentralized community-driven approaches.

This study shows a clear preference for domestic connections and willingness to pay for piped water. Hence the rural communities should be offered a higher level of service, subject to availability of water and willingness to contribute through user charges that recover the O&M (operation and maintenance) and partial capital costs.