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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