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, decentralisation 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. "Local and Community Driven Development: Moving to Scale in Theory and Practice" is a very timely reminder that 65 years is long enough for piloting and demonstrations to establish the credentials of local and community driven development (LCDD) to be taken to scale. There is overwhelming empirical evidence that LCDD as an organic, pragmatic, and sociological approach has pulled millions out of poverty by unleashing their potential.

Despite 250 years of land reform all over the world, important land inequalities remain, especially in Latin America and Southern Africa. While there is near consensus on the need for redistribution in these countries, much controversy persists around how to redistribute land peacefully and legally, often blocking progress on implementation. This book focuses on the 'how' of land redistribution in order to forge greater consensus among land reform practitioners and enable them to make better choices on the mechanisms of land reform. Reviews and case studies describe and analyze the alternative implementation options.

Stronger agricultural growth is needed to reduce poverty in Africa, yet the region continues to fall behind. During the past three decades, many traditional African export crops have lost their competitive advantage in international markets, and many food crops consumed in Africa have faced increased competition from imports. In contrast to Africa's experience, during the same period farmers in two remote and formerly unpromising agricultural regions elsewhere in the developing world - Brazil's Cerrado and the Northeast Region of Thailand - conquered important world markets, defying the predictions of many skeptics. What accounted for their success? And could the experience of these two regionscarry important lessons for African agriculture? Awakening Africa's Sleeping Giant: Prospects for Commercial Agriculture in the Guinea Savannah Zone and Beyond summarizes the findings of the study on Competitive Commercial Agriculture for Africa, a collaborative effort led by the World Bank and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The study focused on Africa's Guinea Savannah zone, a vast and still largely unexploited area that shares many similarities with the Brazilian Cerrado and the Northeast Region of Thailand. Based on detailed case studies carried out on three continents, the book concludes that opportunities abound for Africa's farmers to compete effectively in regional and global markets. Considerable challenges will have to be overcome, however, and recent progress observed in a number of African countries could easily be reversed by bad policy choices. Making African agriculture competitive will depend on getting policies right, strengthening institutions, and increasing and refocusing investments in the sector.