This book examines the validity of a social guarantees approach as a framework for evaluating, monitoring, and improving the design of social policy. Social guarantees are defined as sets of policy mechanisms that determine citizens' entitlements related to basic services and ensure their fulfillment on the part of the state. The social guarantee concept gives operational expression to fundamental human rights principles by providing mechanisms for awareness, participation, equity, and redress in the delivery of social policy. In addition, the social guarantees approach responds to an emerging.

Building and operating successful public institutions is a perennial and long-term challenge for governments, which is compounded by the volatile conditions found in fragile settings. Yet some government agencies do manage to take root and achieve success in delivering results earning legitimacy and forging resilience in otherwise challenging contexts. Drawing on mixed-method empirical research carried out on nine public agencies in Lao PDR, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, and Timor Leste, this volume identifies the shared causal mechanisms underpinning institutional success in fragile states by examining the inner workings of these institutions, along with the external operational environment and sociopolitical context in which they exist. Successful institutions share and deploy a common repertoire of internal and external operational strategies. In addition they connect this micro-institutional repertoire to the macro-sociopolitical context along three discernible pathways to institutional success. Institutional development is a heavily contextual, dynamic, and non-linear process but certain actionable lessons emerge for policy-makiers and development partners.

All development is about people: the transformative process to equip, link, and enable groups of people to drive change and create something new to benefit society. Development can promote societies where all people can thrive, but the change process can be complex, challenging, and socially contentious. Continued progress toward sustainable development is not guaranteed. The current overlapping crises of COVID-19, climate change, rising levels of conflict, and a global economic slowdown are inflaming long-standing challenges—exacerbating inequality and deep-rooted systemic inequities. Addressing these challenges will require social sustainability in addition to economic and environmental sustainability. Social Sustainability in Development: Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century seeks to advance the concept of social sustainability and sharpen its analytical foundations. The book emphasizes social sustainability’s four key components: social cohesion, inclusion, resilience, and process legitimacy. It posits that •Social sustainability increases when more people feel part of the development process and believe that they and their descendants will benefit from it. •Communities and societies that are more socially sustainable are more willing and able to work together to overcome challenges, deliver public goods, and allocate scarce resources in ways perceived to be legitimate and fair so that all people may thrive over time. By identifying interventions that work to promote the components of social sustainability and highlighting the evidence of their links to key development outcomes, this book provides a foundation for using social sustainability to help address the many challenges of our time.

This book brings together qualitative studies conducted during 2008-11 in communities in sixteen countries, with eight case studies that illustrate how people in specific localities were impacted by global shocks and what coping mechanisms they used.

While major strides have been made in the scientific understanding of climate change, much less understood is how these dynamics in the physical enviornment interact with socioeconomic systems. This book brings together the latest knowledge on the consequences of climate change for society and how best to address them.

Opening the Black Box: Contextual Drivers of Social Accountability fills an important knowledge gap by providing guidance on how to assess contextual drivers of social accountability effectiveness. This publication aims to more strategically support citizen engagement at the country level and for a specific issue or problem. The report proposes a novel framing of social accountability as the interplay of constitutive elements: citizen action and state action, supported by three enabling levers: civic mobilization, interface and information. For each of these constitutive elements, the report identifies 'drivers' of contextual effectiveness which take into account a broad range of contextual factors (e.g., social, political and intervention-based, including information and communication technologies). Opening the Black Box offers detailed guidance on how to assess each driver. It also applies the framework at two levels. At the country level, the report looks at 'archetypes' of challenging country contexts, such as regimes with no formal space or full support for citizen-state engagement and fragile and conflict-affected situations. The report also illustrates the use of the framework to analyze specific social accountability interventions through four case studies: Sierra Leone, Pakistan, Yemen, and the Kyrgyz Republic.

'Local and Community Driven Development: Moving to Scale in Theory and Practice' provides development practitioners with the historical background and the tools required to successfully scale up local and community driven development (LCDD) to the regional and national levels. LCDD gives control of development decisions and resources to communities and local governments. It involves collaboration between communities, local governments, technical agencies, and the private sector. Since the 1980s, participatory approaches have received new impetus via participatory rural appraisal, the integration of participation in sector programs, decentralization efforts of developing countries, and greater space for civil society and the private sector. This book traces the emergence of the LCDD synthesis from these various strands. 'Local and Community Driven Development' provides the theoretical underpinnings for scaling up, guidance on how to adapt the approach to the specific institutional and political settings of different countries, diagnostic tools, and step-by-step instructions to diagnose the national context, adapt policies, and expand programs. It will be a useful guide for rural and urban development practitioners, public administrators, and policy makers who wrestle daily with the problems the book addresses.