Despite strong beliefs that property
titling and registration will enhance credit access,
empirical evidence in support of such effects remains scant.
The gradual roll-out of computerization of land registry
systems across Andhra Pradesh's 387 sub-registry
offices allows us to combine quarterly administrative data
on credit disbursed by all commercial banks for an
eleven-year period (1997-2007) aggregated to the

Croatia, the newest member-state of the
European Union (EU), undertook significant justice reforms
during the last decade. Many were part of its
justice-related EU accession process, including the
enactment and implementation of new laws and amendment of
others, improved case management and enforcement and
computerization of land registers. Benchmarking
Croatia's justice sector indicates that it compares

This report was produced for the Global
Program on Forced Displacement and describes why and how to
conduct political economy analysis (PEA) of forced
displacement. It also illustrates how PEA may contribute to
understanding forced displacement crises with nine case
studies: Casamance (Senegal), Colombia, Cote dapos;Ivoire,
Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, the Philippines,
Somalia, South Sudan, and Zimbabwe. Forced displacement is

Community-based paralegalism has been
active in the Philippines for the past 30 years, and yet its
contribution to access to justice and the advancement of the
rights and entitlements of the poor has been largely an
undocumented. This paper attempts to provide a framework
study on the history, nature, and scope of paralegal work in
the Philippines, based on the experience of 12 organizations
that are active in the training and development of

Community-based paralegalism has been
active in the Philippines for the past 30 years, and yet its
contribution to access to justice and the advancement of the
rights and entitlements of the poor has been largely
undocumented. This paper attempts to provide a framework
study on the history, nature, and scope of paralegal work in
the Philippines, based on the experience of 12 organizations
that are active in the training and development of

Justice interventions in Solomon Islands
over the last decade have focused largely on assisting
Honiarabased state institutions in the form of a variety of
capacity-building programs. This has included a heavy
reliance on expatriate expertise positioned in central
justice agencies. The National Judiciary has benefited
significantly from this support, although to date the direct
effects of increased assistance have not been felt in most

Island courts have been in operation in
Vanuatu since 1984. Official documents have hitherto
provided little information on their practical operations or
utility, and our preliminary research in 2010 found that not
much was known at the state governance level about their
real circumstances. In 2011, we conducted fieldwork research
on five islands, Efate, Santo, Malekula, Epi, and Tanna, to
provide better information on the practical operations of

The institutional landscape of local
dispute resolution in Bangladesh is rich: it includes the
traditional process of shalish, longstanding and impressive
civil society efforts to improve on shalish, and a somewhat
less-explored provision for gram adalat or village courts.
Based on a nationally representative survey, qualitative
evidence from focus groups, and a telephone survey of 40
Union Parishad chairpersons (a little less than 1 percent of

The note is designed to assist Bank task
teams, working together with their country counterparts, who
may have varying levels of experience with promoting the
Rule of Law (ROL); some would be familiar with the African
context but not ROL, and for others, vice-versa. This note
may also represent a first introduction to ROL reform; for
those who have worked on such projects in the past, it
should supplement existing knowledge about this emerging

The past decade has witnessed major
shift thinking about water, including how water
infrastructure development strategies can help advance
sustainable development and the global fight against
poverty. This reflects, in part, greater attention now being
paid to governance reforms promoting integrated water
resource management (IWRM), the efficient and wise use of
water, and expanding access to water and energy services. In

This paper develops a framework and some
hypotheses regarding the impact of local-level, informal
legal institutions on three economic outcomes: aggregate
growth, inequality, and human capabilities. It presents a
set of stylized differences between formal and informal
legal justice systems, identifies the pathways through which
formal systems promote economic outcomes, reflects on what
the stylized differences mean for the potential impact of

This paper develops a framework and some
hypotheses regarding the impact of local-level, informal
legal institutions on three economic outcomes: aggregate
growth, inequality, and human capabilities. It presents a
set of stylized differences between formal and informal
legal justice systems, identifies the pathways through which
formal systems promote economic outcomes, reflects on what
the stylized differences mean for the potential impact of