Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-66)
MR DOMINIC
WHITE, MR
TOBY QUANTRILL
AND MS
SALLY NICHOLSON
23 MARCH 2006
Q60 Chairman: A significant
amount of DFID aid is spent through multilateral bodies like the
World Bank and the EU. Do you think they are any better at incorporating
environmental concerns?
Ms Nicholson: There is not a perfect
solution, unfortunately, and I do think with something like environment,
which is a cross-cutting issue, the Department of Trade will say
we will put all our money through them and we know the environment
will be taken care of, it is something that every donor in every
country needs to think about in terms of development. The World
Bank does have some environmental and social safeguards, of course,
and they have been at times promoted as being very good practice,
but the question is the practice; when they are put into practice,
do they happen? The EU most recently during the UK presidency
came out with something called the European Consensus which is
a review of the EU development policy—which they have not
done for five years or more—which points very strongly to
the need to integrate natural resources management into development
policy as well as to look at particular issues where there are
global and environmental challenges, where the EU as a whole,
Member States and the Commission together, can look at how they
can make a difference in terms of climate change or illegal logging
or fisheries management, or good water management. It is a question
of working together with others to ensure that the environment
principles and standards are the best, the use of good environmental
tools such as strategic environmental assessments, and I think
the use of, say, the 25% that DFID currently spends through the
EU should equally be scrutinised by the EU Court of Auditors to
look at how the environment has been treated within that. We should
not just assume that that is in place, you have got your safeguards
in place so that is all right, we should continue—Members
of Parliament, ourselves, watchdogs—to ensure that the environment
is considered properly within the development agenda. DFID has
done an awful lot in terms of how important environmental sustainability
is to poverty reduction and we would like to see them maintain
that lead in terms of other European Member States. They look
to DFID in terms of its experience and its cutting edge expertise
on this issue.
Q61 Chairman: You have
called for ministers to support a strong, well-funded, environmental
thematic—I am not sure what a thematic is but we are hearing
about lots of strange words—within the EU Environmental
Development Fund. Could you give us a bit more background on that?
Ms Nicholson: Yes, it comes back
to this new development policy that was adopted by the Council
during the UK Presidency and it includes certain areas which the
EU as a whole—Member States, the European Parliament and
the Commission—believe are important and cannot be always
dealt with through a country-led approach. The bulk of the money
of course is always going to be spent through country-led approaches
on country priorities, and that is where environment issues may
appear—in fact there is an obligation under EU treaties
to mainstream the environment within those—but there are
certain areas like governance, like human rights where they believe
that these things perhaps need to be tackled in a different way
by the environmental thematic, as it is phrased, a programme on
environment, natural resource management and energy. That is going
to be looking at particular things they could do in terms of promoting
the millennium development goal on sustainability, looking at
things which cannot be dealt with necessarily at a country level,
and where these things are shared resources. Very often, they
are global challenges, and they need to be dealt with in a very
co-operative inter-regional, or intra-regional manner. If you
think about something like illegal logging and timber resources,
the forest law enforcement governance and trade issue, which I
am sure you are familiar with, it might be about advising Russia
on trade between Russia and China in the EU, looking at consumers,
looking at producers, looking at forests which are natural resources
of importance to countries, to regions and ultimately to the planet,
so it cannot be just dealt with at a country level. The EU thematic
is therefore one way, perhaps, to promote environmental issues
on the development stage.
Q62 Chairman: Do you think
there is any sense of urgency in these multilateral organisations
to deal with climate change—in the World Bank, the IMF,
the EU for that matter—and is DFID bringing any sense of
urgency that you might be aware of into those arenas?
Ms Nicholson: In my experience
of working with DFID for a good many years now I have seen them
certainly bring that sense of urgency, I have seen them work at
EU level, I have seen them work at UN level in terms of really
pushing for some of these things. For example, before the World
Summit in Johannesburg one of their real priorities was to make
sure that MDG 7 on environmental sustainability was not ignored
but was brought back into the debate, they would ensure that the
order of the MDGs could be treated holistically rather than one
being achieved at the expense of the other, it is not about cherry-picking.
I do think that they certainly have done this, I think that perhaps
they have been rather slow on climate change, it is only very
recently that they have picked this up as such an important issue
and it has been on the global agenda for much longer—after
all, it is not an environmental issue, it is an environmental,
social, economic and everything else issue. I personally have
got a lot of respect and admiration for many of the staff in DFID
with whom I have worked who have taken forward environmental issues,
climate change, forestry and water.
Q63 Chairman: Do you think
the balance between what we support through multilateral agencies
and through bilateral agencies is the right one as it stands?
Ms Nicholson: There is a lot to
be said for the so-called donor harmonisation agenda at OECD level
which is where the big donors are saying we cannot keep doing
things separately and putting different reporting requirements,
different onuses on recipient countries. They want us to get our
act together in terms of how we work together, but I think there
will always be an added value in having bilateral support as well
as support going through the big UN agencies or the World Bank.
I do think that we as the UK should continue to be pushing, whether
it is at World Bank or UN level for the coherence of the activities
to make them more effective—for example, Gordon Brown is
now on this UN panel on coherence between environment, development
and human rights across the UN system and that is something we
really need to make sure we encourage.
Q64 Chairman: Do you think
the global environmental facility is an effective delivery tool?
Ms Nicholson: I think it is a
very important delivery tool, it is mostly very effective. Again,
DFID has been very supportive of GEF, I have seen them argue hard
for replenishment of the global environment facility. Before Johannesburg
they made extra voluntary contributions because they believe it
is an important way forward in terms of global commitments, in
terms of global public goods that nobody is individually responsible
for but where we do need to work together in a co-operative fashion.
DFID has also tried to encourage the US, for example, to wake
up to its responsibilities in this respect.
Q65 Chairman: Do you think
the international push that DFID is making on these issues is
the result of the work of just a few individuals, or is it more
institutional, ingrained in its very being. Is it down to one
or two visionaries at the top, perhaps, or do you think that the
whole department is really all pulling in the same direction?
Mr White: They have dedicated
resources to work on global environmental assets, but they are
few and I think a lot of what we see is the direct result of those
individual efforts. I do not see, necessarily, that some of these
commitments are institutionally supported throughout all echelons
of the department, but there again equally supported at ministerial
level.
Q66 Chairman: If that
is the case and they are not quite so influenced by the people
at the top all the time, what other influences are there? Is it
other departments, the Foreign Office, people out in the field?
Where do the other influences come from?
Ms Nicholson: They come perhaps
from other donors. We mentioned in our evidence about the Poverty
Environment Partnership which is a group of many donors; they
do a lot of very interesting work there in promoting the poverty
and environment links. The influences can come from other countries—I
know in terms of China, for example, to my knowledge the Chinese
government particularly said in terms of our development co-operation
and economic co-operation we have got plans to deal with poverty
ourselves, we have a plan in place to eradicate poverty over this
length of time and we are investing in that. Where we want help,
where we want to work with other donors is in terms of the environment,
so that influence can come from many different places.
Chairman: That brings us to the end,
so thank you all very much for giving evidence this morning. It
has been very useful once again. Thank you.
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