Annotation This book details the World Bank assisted forestry projects implemented in the MENA region over the last ten years. It contains a definition of forests in the region and describes their current status.

The World Bank's Forests Strategy, adopted in October 2002, charts a path for the Bank's proactive engagement in the sector to help attain the goal of poverty reduction without jeopardizing the environmental values intrinsic to sustainability. This strategy replaces the Bank's 1991 Forestry Strategy, and was developed on the basis of the findings of an independent review of the 1991 strategy and a two-year consultative process with development partners and stakeholders around the world. The revised strategy, Sustaining Forests, is built on three guiding pillars: harnessing the potential of forests to reduce poverty, integrating forests into sustainable economic development, and protecting global forest values. Recognizing the key role forests play in contributing to the livelihoods of people living in extreme poverty, government and local ownership of forest policies and interventions are emphasized along with the development of appropriate institutions to ensure good governance and the mainstreaming of forests into national development planning. The strategy also aims to support ecologically, socially and economically sound management of production forests by ensuring good management practices through application of safeguard procedures and independent monitoring and certification. Implementation of the strategy will center on building and strengthening partnerships with the private sector, non-governmental organizations, and other donor agencies to promote better forest conservation and management at country and global levels.

Water Management in Africa and the Middle East: Challenges and Opportunities

In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries price subsidies are common, especially on food and fuels. However, these are neither well targeted nor cost effective as a social protection tool, often benefiting mainly the better off instead of the poor and vulnerable. This paper explores the challenges of replacing generalized price subsidies with more equitable social safety net instruments, including the short-term inflationary effects, and describes the features of successful subsidy reforms.

The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries, increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to critically examine culturally constructed views of the environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the questionable policies and practices born of these environmental imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge production.

Prior to the COVID-19 shock, the key challenge facing policymakers in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia region was how to generate strong, sustainable, job-rich, inclusive growth. Post-COVID-19, this challenge has only grown given the additional reduction in fiscal space due to the crisis and the increased need to support the recovery. The sizable state-owned enterprise (SOE) footprint in the region, together with its cost to the government, call for revisiting the SOE sector to help open fiscal space and look for growth opportunities.