While significant development progress has been achieved over the past two decades, with almost 650 million people moving out of extreme poverty in developing countries between 1990 and 2008, nearly 1.3 billion women, men and children have been left behind living on less than US$1.25 per day. Even greater numbers suffer other forms of poverty and deprivation, and inequality both within and across countries has increased. Looking ahead, the challenge of overcoming poverty and inequality will be greatly compounded by ecosystem degradation, climate change and economic disruption, which disproportionately impact the poor and most vulnerable. These increasingly interlinked crises threaten hard-won development gains and prospects for continued progress. While calls for action have multiplied, the world’s collective response has fallen far short of what is needed.

This joint Poverty-Environment Partnership paper aims to stimulate a dialogue among developing country policymakers, development partners and other stakeholders on how best to support country-led efforts to build inclusive green economies.

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Examples of the green economy in practice show great potential for delivering a “triple bottom line” of job–creating economic growth coupled with environmental protection and social inclusion. However, there are significant barriers to realizing this potential on a large scale. To build an inclusive green economy that is equitable and sustainable will require carefully designed policies and targeted investments that enable low and middle-income countries and the poor to contribute to and benefit from the transition.

Of particular importance is the need for governance and policy reforms that extend to poor people secure rights over the environmental assets that underpin their livelihoods and well-being, and that ensure a greater voice in decisions affecting how these assets are managed. At the same time, policies and measures such as green protectionism and aid conditionality that could adversely impact low and middle-income countries and people living in poverty must be avoided if the benefits of an inclusive green economy are to be realized.

- From the foreword of "Building an Inclusive Green Economy for All: Opportunities and Challenges for Overcoming Poverty and Inequality," a Poverty-Environment Partnership joint paper

This draft document demonstrates how effective policies and investments for natural resources can sustain pro-poor growth and support the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. It examines in detail six natural resources which have a critical role to play in sustaining pro-poor growth: fisheries, forests, nature based tourism, agriculture and soils, water and mineral resources and oil.

The objective is for economic decision-makers from Ministries of Finance and development agencies to improve natural resource management, and natural resource decision-makers to make a greater contribution to economic growth.

Many natural resources could be better managed and boom and bust avoided if political challenges were addressed. This paper promotes a political analysis of natural resource decisions to identify the power of different stakeholders, and their incentives and disincentives for sustainable natural resource use. Recommendations focus on the need for innovative coalitions to drive change and promote resources sustainable management.

This draft will be updated as needed. Readers of this document should consider it a work in progress.

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This paper identifies two basic trajectories to a high-income democracy linked to the scale and deployment of rents. Low-rent countries tend to engender developmental political states that competitively diversify the economy and sustain rapid per capita GDP (PCGDP) growth, which

These cases describe how natural resource exploitation has contributed to economic growth in several developing countries. It is discussed how management changes have increased benefits from natural resource in terms of (i) increasing economic growth, (ii) distributing growth to the poor and (iii) sustaining growth and the environment. Challenges related to the specific case studies are also discussed.

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