The World Bank Legal Review, Volume 4

Legal Innovation and Empowerment for Development

Hassane Cissé, Sam Muller, Chantal Thomas, Chenguang Wang

• Publisher: World Bank
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780821395066
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

The World Bank legal review gathers this input from around the world and compiles it into a useful resource for all development practitioners and scholars. The subtitle of this volume, legal innovation and empowerment for development, highlights how the law can respond to the chal-lenges posed to development objectives in a world slowly emerging from an economic crisis. The focus on innovation is a call for new, imaginative strategies and ways of thinking about what the law can do in the development realm. The focus on empowerment is a deliberate attempt to place the law into the hands of the poor; to give them another tool with which to resist poverty. This volume shows some of the ways that the law can make an innovative and empowering difference in development scenarios. Development problems are complex and varied, and the theme of innovation and empowerment naturally has a broad scope. Consequently, this volume reaches far and wide. It considers the nature, promise, and limitations of legal innovation and legal empowerment. It looks at concrete examples in places such as Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, and Latin America. It considers developments in issues with universal application, such as the rights of the disabled and the effectiveness of asset recovery measures. The theme of legal innovation and empowerment for development complements substantive and institutional sensibilities in current development policy. Substantively, development policy discourse seems to have moved away from tacking hard toward statist policy or neoliberal policy. Although this brief introduction cannot do justice to the richness and complexity of these contributions, it does consider each focal point in turn.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Contributors
• Empowerment and Innovation Strategies for Law, Justice, and Development
• The Justice Innovation Approach: How Justice Sector Leaders in Development Contexts Can Promote Innovation
• Legal Empowerment of the Poor: Past, Present, Future
• Beyond the Orthodoxy of Rule of Law and Justice Sector Reform: A Framework for Legal Empowerment and Innovation through the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
• The Political Economy of Improving Traditional Justice Systems: A Case Study of NGO Engagement with Shalish in Bangladesh
• Intellectual Property: Facilitating Technology Transfer for Development
• Transforming through Transparency: Opening Up the World Bank’s Sanctions Regime
• Human Rights and Development: Regime Interaction and the Fragmentation of International Law
• Legal Transplantation and Legal Development in Transitional China
• Rule of Law as a Watermark: China’s Legal and Judicial Challenges
• Achieving Development through Innovative Constitutionalism: A China Story
• The Role of Laws and Institutions in Expanding Women’s Voice, Agency, and Empowerment
• “We Want What the Ok Tedi Women Have!” Guidance from Papua New Guinea on Women’s Engagement in Mining Deals
• Innovation in Asset Recovery: The Swiss Perspective
• International Asset Sharing: A Multipurpose Tool for Development
• Toward a New Law and Development: New State Activism in Brazil and the Challenge for Legal Institutions
• The Role of the Public Ministry in the Defense of the Environment: Hydrogeographical Regions and Attitudes for Coping with Socioenvironmental Conflicts
• OHADA Nears the Twenty-Year Mark: An Assessment
• Legal Innovation for Development: The OHADA Experience
• Index