Taking the Rules of the Game Seriously : Mainstreaming Justice in Development - The World Bank's Justice for the Poor Program
This paper explains the ideas and approaches that underpin the World Bank's Justice for the Poor (J4P) program. J4P is an approach to legal empowerment that focuses on mainstreaming sociolegal concerns into development processes, in sectors ra...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2014
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2009/11/11409967/taking-rules-game-seriously-mainstreaming-justice-development-world-banks-justice-poor-program http://hdl.handle.net/10986/18103 |
| Summary: | This paper explains the ideas and
approaches that underpin the World Bank's Justice for
the Poor (J4P) program. J4P is an approach to legal
empowerment that focuses on mainstreaming sociolegal
concerns into development processes, in sectors ranging from
community-driven development and mining technical assistance
to labor-rights advocacy and classic judicial reform. It has
developed out of a perspective that legal and regulatory
frameworks and related justice concerns cannot be conceived
of in terms of a 'sector' or a specific set of
institutions, but are integral to all development processes.
Further, while there is broad agreement that justice reform
and building an equitable justice sector is central to good
governance and sustainable development, there is limited
understanding of how equitable justice systems emerge and
how such processes can be facilitated by external actors.
J4P addresses these knowledge gaps with intensive research
aimed at understanding the ways in which development
processes shape and are shaped by local context, and in
particular, how the poor engage with and/or are excluded
from the multiple rule systems ('legal pluralism')
governing their everyday lives. Through three case studies
of the program's work, this paper illustrates how
understanding the various roles of law in society provides
an innovative means of analyzing and responding to
particular development problems. The cases also demonstrate
the principles that underpin J4P: development is inherently
conflict-ridden; institutional reform should be seen as an
iterative and thus 'interim' process; building
local research capacity is critical to establishing an
empirically based and context-driven reform process;
integrating diverse sources of empirical evidence is needed
to deeply engage in local contexts; and rule systems are
ubiquitous in all areas of development, not just the
'legal sector.' |
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