A new Eurodad report provides a critical analysis of the World Bank’s role in Climate Finance. Civil society actors have long been contesting the role of the World Bank as an appropriate channel for climate finance based on the Bank’s questionable green credentials and its history of advising economic policy reforms to developing countries. The report concludes by outlining the reasons why – in light of the analysis of the Bank’s delivery of climate finance as it relates to the financing instruments - the World Bank is not the best-placed institution to channel climate finance or to set the highest standards for a legitimate and development-friendly climate finance architecture for the future.

Since the discovery of copper deposits in Zambia during the 1930s, copper has spelled both doom and boom for the country’s social, political and economic activities. This paper looks at the current mining contracts (development agreements as they are officially called) entered into between the Government of the Republic Zambia (GRZ) and the different mining companies working in Zambia. The assumptions on which the bargaining theory is based are questioned in the light of the evidence emerging from the Zambian situation.

Land grabbing in Mozambique by transnational corporations, that hire rural workers who are not able to access lands to produce, is one of the issues that concern peasants of that country the most. Real World Radio interviewed Jose Mateus, leader of the National Farmers Union of Mozambique, member of La Via Campesina, who is participating in activities at the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal. Mateus regretted that many peasants of his country end up working for big agribusiness transnational corporations, because they don’t have the support of the State to access lands.

'NGOs don't mobilise people, desperation mobilises people,' said a Cambodian land activist as he related the experience of Boeung Kak villagers who were driven off their land by their own government to make way for corporate profiteering. Such stories were abundant from all corners of the world this week at the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal. The forum, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, attracted representatives from civil society organisations, social movements and unions from more than 123 countries. Present among them were land rights activists and small farmers, who came to relate and decry the unfettered grabbing of their land.