These briefing notes provide regular updates about Justice for the Poor (J4P) program activities, including research findings. They facilitate sharing of lessons learned and good practice in the area of justice and development. J4P is a World Bank program that engages with justice reform as a cross-cutting issue in the practice of development. Grounded in evidence-based approaches focused on the perspective of the poor and marginalized, the program aims to improve the delivery of justice services and to support sustainable and equitable development processes which manage grievance and conflict stresses effectively.
Despite global gender equality gains in education, life expectancy, and labor force participation, two areas of persistent inequality remain: asset gaps and women's agency.
... See More + In many developing countries, including Papua New Guinea (PNG), land and natural resources are citizens' key assets. This briefing note, centered on field research in north fly district explores the process of negotiation and the progress in implementation of the Community Mine Continuation Agreements (CMCAs). The purpose of the research and the resulting brief is to understand how the CMCAs came about, assess whether their promise is being realized in practice, and provide guidance for mining and gender practitioners looking to use mining agreements to improve development outcomes for women, both in PNG and further afield. Revised compensation agreements at the Ok Tedi mine, called CMCAs, concluded in 2007 are an encouraging innovation. In these revised CMCAs, women had a seat at the negotiating table and secured an agreement giving them 10 percent of all compensation, 50 percent of all scholarships, cash payments into family bank accounts (to which many women are cosignatories), and mandated seats on the governing bodies implementing the agreement (including future reviews of the agreement). The 2006-07 Ok Tedi negotiation process and the resulting CMCAs were internationally groundbreaking for having secured enhanced rights for women in legally enforceable mining agreements, even in a context of severe gender inequality. Nevertheless, the gender asset gaps that persist in the midst of the current global extractives boom highlight the need to engage women more proactively in mining agreements and support their ability to exercise greater agency over those resources. More attention to the principles and experiences of community-driven development, together with more local political economy analysis, will likely benefit women's engagement and outcomes.
See Less -
This note summarizes findings from an analysis of Vanuatu national leasing data drawn from the Vanuatu department of lands databases for the period of 1980-2010.
... See More + It provides a preliminary indication of how much of Vanuatu is currently under lease, where land is being leased, how leased land is being used, the length of leases, and the extent that leases have been subdivided. The profile also highlights areas where data collection needs to be improved.
See Less -
This briefing note outlines the reform process that produced these notable results, a process that began with targeted grassroots empowerment through engagement with PEKKA, an Indonesian civil society organization supporting women headed households.
... See More + Formal justice sector institutions and local governments subsequently built on those efforts, with support from international development agencies. The note will outline the range of access-to-justice initiatives involving PEKKA, the Indonesian courts, government partners, and international agencies that have contributed to broader policy reform in the access-to-justice field. It will also describe a series of recent access-to-justice policy developments initiated by Indonesian government institutions and a summary of some key results, highlighting how small-scale pilots and research can provide empirical data on which national agencies can draw to strengthen national policy development and planning processes. The concept of access to justice focuses on two basic objectives of a legal system: 1) that it is accessible to people from all levels of society; and 2) that it is able to provide fair decisions and rules for people from all levels of society, either individually or collectively.
See Less -
In countries where a large proportion of the total land area is held customarily, reform questions around land and development often tend to focus on the customary estate.
... See More + Evidence from Solomon Islands suggests that a focus on public land holdings, even when they are relatively small in land area, can yield outsized benefits. Publicly owned land regularly includes economically valuable land and urban land on which development pressure is high. In Solomon Islands, as much as 10 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) may be affected by how effectively urban public land is governed.
See Less -
In countries where a large proportion of the total land area is held customarily, reform questions around land and development often tend to focus on the customary estate.
... See More + Evidence from Solomon Islands suggests that a focus on public land holdings, even when they are relatively small in land area, can yield outsized benefits. Publicly owned land regularly includes economically valuable land and urban land on which development pressure is high. In Solomon Islands, as much as 10 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) may be affected by how effectively urban public land is governed.
See Less -
This paper provides a brief overview of the intersection of state and customary laws governing land in peri-urban settlements around Honiara, focusing on their impact upon landowners, particularly women landowners.
... See More + It suggests that the intersection of customary and state legal systems allows a small number of individuals, predominantly men, to solidify their control over customary land. This has occurred to the detriment of many landowners, who have often found themselves excluded from both decision-making processes and the distribution of financial benefits from the use of land. This contributes to social conflict and undermines the legitimacy of land dealings, and as the Tensions demonstrate, can ultimately lead to violent conflict.
See Less -
This study strongly indicates the lack of access to land for women in Kenya's agricultural communities cannot be framed as a failing of formal or informal systems, but rather as issues with both.
... See More + Even the creation of fused or hybrid mechanisms, such as the Land Control Boards (LCBs) and Land Disputes Tribunals (LDTs), has not increased access to justice. Underlying power dynamics and the use of such systems by self-serving individuals undercut gender equity efforts. The findings strongly suggest the key to increasing access to justice at both the community formal and informal levels is to address power dynamics and understand further how they operate to the detriment of women. This would be aided if concurrent formal reform addressed barriers such as overly complicated procedures and unrealistic costs which further prevent women from realizing their rights. With land issues currently receiving a significant amount of attention 2007-8 post-election violence, now is an opportune time to bring greater attention to the problems and issues regarding women's access to land in Kenya.
See Less -
As in other societies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, customary social organization features strongly in rural Timor-Leste. As well as providing avenues for conflict resolution, the influence of customary systems extends to land tenure.
... See More + As the state, development partners, private investors, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and others seek to promote rural development in Timor-Leste, they will be forced to engage in some way with customary ownership and use claims which prevail in the districts. A further dimension of the subsistence nature of the Timor-Leste economy is the fact that the use of contracts in connection with agribusiness transactions is rare. This presents a further challenge to the objective of increasing private sector investment in the rural economy. Based on field visits, this Justice for the Poor (J4P) briefing note looks at the rural economy of Timor-Leste and considers approaches that could help promote productive and equitable relationships between communities and other rural development partners and contribute to mutually beneficial rural development outcomes.
See Less -
As in other societies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, customary social organization features strongly in rural Timor-Leste. As well as providing avenues for conflict resolution, the influence of customary systems extends to land tenure.
... See More + As the state, development partners, private investors, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and others seek to promote rural development in Timor-Leste, they will be forced to engage in some way with customary ownership and use claims which prevail in the districts. A further dimension of the subsistence nature of the Timor-Leste economy is the fact that the use of contracts in connection with agribusiness transactions is rare. This presents a further challenge to the objective of increasing private sector investment in the rural economy. Based on field visits, this Justice for the Poor (J4P) briefing note looks at the rural economy of Timor-Leste and considers approaches that could help promote productive and equitable relationships between communities and other rural development partners and contribute to mutually beneficial rural development outcomes.
See Less -
The Cambodian Land Law (2001) provides indigenous ethnic minority groups with a right to register their traditional residential and agricultural lands under communal title.
... See More + To date, however, this right has remained unrealized. While the government has been working on a pilot registration process in three villages and drafting implementing regulations under the land law, Cambodia's once remote highlands have become increasingly exposed to the forces of state and market. The result: indigenous communities are being transformed; livelihoods change; and land is subject to deforestation, sales and grants of government concessions for mining and agribusiness. The Royal Government has included in its policy documents a commitment to the 'interim protection' of indigenous lands prior to registration; however, to progress on this front has been limited. The review of the literature contained in this note is adapted from a study examining the potential of community mapping to serve as an interim protective measure.
See Less -
This paper describes some features of custom landholding. It evaluates elements of the process by which custom land is converted into registerable form, and considers how the judicial system is placed to resolve disputes involving custom landholders in a context where the framework for the recognition of custom is under-developed.
... See More + Certain commentators argue that custom landholding is inherently incompatible with economic development. Others disagree pointing to success stories and arguing that a purely economic analysis dismisses the benefits, also inherent in custom landholding, of community and culture. Wherever one stands on this debate, what is clear is that the process of converting custom land into registered leasehold is fraught with dispute, disillusionment and controversy. The current process is sharply tilted toward the structures of the formal system and the interests of those who have access to that system with the result that: (i) custom landholders are often excluded from equitable participation in the development of their land, and (ii) attempts to use the legal system to respond to these problems are frustrated.
See Less -
Providing legal aid as part of a research program can bring both methodological and community benefits. Legal aid days encourage people to open up more quickly, increase the amount of information people are willing to share, enable less vocal members of the community to speak out and satisfy the desire of researchers to give something back to communities - rather than just extract information.
... See More + Since 2007, the World Bank's justice for the poor program has been partnering with the Legal Resource Foundation (LRF), a Kenyan non-government organization (NGO), working to implement field research in the arid lands region of Northern Kenya. Together, they seek to understand how the poor and marginalized navigate prevailing justice systems. Legal aid days were included as part of the research methodology, capitalizing on LRF's wealth of experience in the legal aid sector.
See Less -
Drama has long been used to promote community dialogue on social and political change. The recent experience of the World Bank's Justice for the Poor (J4P) program in Sierra Leone shows that drama can be a particularly effective medium for engaging poor and illiterate communities.
... See More + J4P, in partnership with the Campaign for Good Governance (CGG), a local Non Governmental Organization (NGO), recently teamed with a community drama group, Future Leaders Action Group for Education (FLAGE), to disseminate the findings of J4P's research on local level governance and justice administration in Sierra Leone. The dissemination program provided an opportunity to thank those communities that hosted researchers during the field research, and to encourage community ownership of the research findings. J4P's experience shows that drama can help to create a space for dialogue between authorities and vulnerable groups. In a context where many community members are illiterate, drama can also raise awareness of ongoing disputes and encourage community members to identify possible solutions.
See Less -
Institutional reforms in contemporary Cambodia are being undertaken in an environment characterized by pervasive legal pluralism the not uncommon situation in which numerous, contradictory and competing sets of rules and norms regulate social, economic and political relationships.
... See More + The international development community has a long and unhappy history of engagement with such environments. This is not simply because the links between substantive policy and institutional arrangements in the 'transition to democracy' are many, uncertain and highly contingent. It is also the case because the formal precepts of liberal democracy as codified in new laws and regulations are often inconsistent with prevailing social norms and administrative practices. In fact, they may be fundamentally at odds with the interests of economic and political elites who have an interest in contesting, neutralizing or capturing institutions created under the new legal framework.
See Less -
Driven mainly by foreign investment in the areas of tourism, financial services and land development, it is expatriates who are primarily reaping the gains of business development.
... See More + This lack of inclusive development is becoming an alarming source of growing economic inequalities, dispossession and potentially disruptive social trends. Yet, ni-Vanuatu are not inherently opposed to community-sensitive' development that can generate employment opportunities and income sources for the population. While economic growth is clearly desirable, an urgent policy imperative exists to ensure that Ni-Vanuatu become equal participants in these developments and the subsequent benefits. This briefing note focuses specifically on some of the challenging effects of foreign investment on the dynamics of land use and ownership in Vanuatu. Conflicts about land are potentially explosive and recent historical events in Fiji, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea have shown the urgency of designing effective long-term policy responses to these sensitive issues.
See Less -
This briefing note describes several of the main findings of a review of Revitalization of Legal Aid (RLA) conducted in May-June 2007. In particular, it provides a brief background on RLA and posko operations and focuses on activities related to socialization, legal education and case handling.
... See More + Finally, several lessons learned are outlined. RLA, a pilot project implemented by Justice for the Poor (J4P) Indonesia, has operated since September 2005 in Lampung, West Java, and West Nusa Tenggara (NTB) provinces. RLA seeks to improve access to justice for poor communities through: (a) increasing legal and advocacy skill of paralegals; (b) strengthening the capacity of the existing posko (legal aid posts) to provide legal education, legal aid and mediation services for the community; (c) establishing effective community mediation services through village mediators; and (d) providing recommendations for legal aid policy reform for government at both the national and local levels.
See Less -
Sierra Leoneans attempting to access justice through the country's complex legal system are presented with a number of barriers. These obstacles can be broadly broken down into those that are the results of the system's costs (including costs of services, fines, time, and transportation) or structure (court infrastructure, skills of officials, and lack of ownership), or, in the case of the formal justice system, its incompatibility with social norms.
... See More + One of the foremost barriers preventing access to Sierra Leone's justice systems, both formal and informal, is cost. With a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per head of $548 in 2005, Sierra Leone is one of the world's poorest nations. This extreme poverty magnifies the effects of conflicts that are small by western standards, and also amplifies the costs of recovery. The costs of accessing justice in Sierra Leone come in a variety of forms, including direct costs of services, fines, time, and transportation. In Sierra Leone's formal courts, where an inadequate legal aid structure makes contesting parties responsible for court fees, legal representation, and other service fees, costs are prohibitively high for all but the wealthiest of citizens. Yet even in local courts, which are designed to be closer to the people, interviews suggest that costs are often too high to encourage use. The World Bank's justice for the poor program will continue to engage with justice reform efforts led by local and international civil society, international organizations, and formal and informal institutions in an effort to improve and enhance access to justice for the poor.
See Less -
The Cambodian labor law of 1997 provides a detailed framework for the regulation of most private sector employment. It provides a framework for industrial relations, including the inclusion of the right for workers to form and be members of unions; the elaboration of the right to bargain collectively; procedures to protect the right to strike; and the establishment of a formal system for the resolution of labor disputes.
... See More + The case study presented looking at labor reforms in Cambodia highlights innovative ways in which the normative potential of law can be harnessed without relying on formal enforcement mechanisms. Further, it argues that providing support for collective contests and whatever institutional spaces allow such contests to be played out most equitably in a given political moment should be at the forefront of our thinking as law and development practitioners.
See Less -
The World Bank's Justice for the Poor (J4P) program seeks to gain a deeper understanding of local level justice processes, in order to identify pragmatic ways to allow access to justice for the poor and marginalized.
... See More + Reform programs in all sectors often ignore the value systems, social structures and realities of the local communities they address, therefore delivering mixed results. Further innovative programs are required to foster meaningful connections between local social structures and value systems and official justice institutions. The key to success will be the ability of different systems to adapt. Interventions may adjust the official system to local realities, but another possible focus is on the transformation of cultural values of individual communities. Processes of transformation allow change to be set in motion from within a society itself. This can mean that positive values are emphasized and re-instated where lost or negative values are transformed into positive ones. The effect is that state institutions can gain legitimacy in the eyes of local communities, and official rights are promoted. Learning from Kenya National Human Rights Commission (KNHRC's) project and similarly innovative interventions, J4P research will focus on socio-cultural values, in order to develop spaces for local debates over values and in order to determine the appropriate agents for change at the local level.
See Less -
Training local researchers to conduct high-quality qualitative research in a country like Sierra Leone is both a time and resource-intensive task.
... See More + However, there are many benefits to partnering with a local organization which cannot be replicated or replaced by simply hiring ready-made international researchers. First, the J4P project in Sierra Leone has received a great deal of appreciation locally for its decision to work closely with a national partner, and its commitment to building local research capacity. Second, and related to the first, it is quite possible that these local partnerships increase the likelihood that the research will have an impact on policy and programs here in Sierra Leone, particularly those instituted locally by government or civil society actors. Finally, there is much that local researchers themselves teach the project. They often provide a reality-check on research instruments and methods before they are field-tested. This briefing note focuses on the experience to date in Sierra Leone, where the project has been working in partnership with a local Non Governmental Organization (NGO), the Campaign for Good Governance (CGG), and with a team of local researchers hired by CGG.
See Less -
