Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-192)
DR LINDA
WALDMAN
20 APRIL 2006
Q180 Mr Caton: You have mentioned
your work on how environmental considerations are incorporated
into PRSPs but how important is it that it should happen, how
well is it happening and what are the consequences if the environment
is not in there?
Dr Waldman: I will take them one
at a time. How important is it that it should happen? There are
two answers to that. One of them is that from the donor side,
from the World Bank and IMF, environment is one of the issues
that they wish to see in PRSPs but it is not a crucial issue,
in fact it is fairly low on the World Bank's and IMF's list of
criteria and list of showing results. From in-country experience
often in the first PRSP or the interim PRSP, which usually comes
before the PRSP, there is very little environmental stuff. Surveys
have shown that often the first PRSP barely mentions it, if at
all. Vietnam had two pages on it in theirs. Often it is a fairly
cursory add-on. As PRSPs have evolved, and Uganda is a particular
case in this, so within countries both government ministries involved
in environmental issues and NGOs and civil society organisations
have taken stronger and stronger positions on this and have become
more and more involved in seeking to ensure that environmental
issues are in PRSPs, are maintained in PRSPs, and debate is starting
to happen around that. I am afraid I have forgotten the next two
questions.
Q181 Mr Caton: I think you have partly
answered them. How well is it working? What are the consequences
if we do not get that in there?
Dr Waldman: The best example of
environment being integrated into PRSPs comes from Uganda which
has now done three PRSPs, so a nine year process. What we see
is a consistent sophistication of the messages and an attempt
to grapple more seriously with environmental issues. As a previous
speaker was saying, environmental issues are often not just technical
issues, or water is not just a technical issue, they are often
politicised. What we tend to see in first generation PRSPs is
a very apolitical, very neutral image of environment given. The
messages that are often given are that the environment is being
degraded, better technology, better maintenance, better monitoring
processes, better impact assessments, better infrastructure will
help us to stop that degradation or, alternatively, the environment
is being degraded because poor people rely on it so heavily. In
a sense there are two messages. One is better modernisation, better
infrastructure will help us improve the environment or we need
to change poor people's lifestyles to improve the environment,
a very kind of apolitical, very easy approach to environment.
After nine years of negotiating around environmental issues we
are starting to get alternative messages in terms of the Ugandan
PRSP which is saying not only do poor people possibly denigrate
the environment, they might also make a positive contribution
to it. Industry might make a negative contribution, elites, often
government supporters might have timber concessions and might
be making negative impacts on the environment. Only after nine
years of engagement are we starting to see a more politicised
message come into the Ugandan PRSPs. We can see the same with
Ghana and Vietnam, and more so in the case of Honduras which is
a slightly different case. Often when messages of environmental
degradation get into PRSPs they are very simplistic, very apolitical,
very technical, and it is only through a process of engagement
that those messages start to change and we start to hear alternative
understandings of what might be going on in the environment. That
gets them in and gets something in, but once they are in, as I
was saying earlier, PRSP documents are seen as a list, 300 items,
and when you are in the ministry of finance in Ghana, Uganda or
Honduras, how do you choose between protecting the wetlands or
putting up a new hospital, or between allowing a factory to happen
or some plants to grow? Inevitably when we get to budgeting and
implementation that is where environment tends to drop off the
agenda for a whole range of reasons. Where environment does tend
to come through in developing countries is in small projects which
are donor funded rather than in government incentives to push
environmental issues. In Uganda environmental NGOs and CSOs constantly
pointed to the miniscule proportion of government funding that
went to environmental issues and said, "We don't trust the
government to continue to support environmental issues when we
move to basket funding" because the demands on government
are so much bigger.
Q182 Chairman: Is that because the
governments are always under pressure to increase trade, increase
foreign exchange and so on, that the environment is not seen as
a mechanism for doing that even though you could actually put
a price on it?
Dr Waldman: Absolutely. Within
all of these governments, people doing EIAs, people in environmental
protection agencies, are under pressure to permit the building
of factories on wetlands or to allow anything that will increase
country revenue, which is one of the demands of the World Bank
in order to allow continued HIPC relief. There is a tension between
needing to meet environmental demands, which is low on the World
Bank's and IMF's agenda, and needing to show increased country
revenue, so there is that as well. Of course, there is the very
simple fact that governments have limited resources and hard choices
to make and, unfortunately, environment tends to lose out in those
positions. In Vietnam there is a slightly different scenario where,
in fact, the government's position on environment is on of using
it in order to create economic growth for the short-term that
is going to result in environmental degradation and once we have
economic growth then we can begin to invest back into the environment.
That is a slightly more extreme model but a similar thing with
the environment being the base for economic growth and little
more than that.
Q183 Mr Caton: Another quick perhaps
two-part question, I am afraid. You have mentioned that the IMF
and World Bank indicate things they want to see in a PRSP but
is there any formal process of drawing up a PRSP and is there
guidance in doing so? That is the first one. The second is, is
there any requirement for environmental considerations to be included?
Dr Waldman: Yes, there are formal
processes for drawing up PRSPs and they are often done with templates,
with advice and support and help from the World Bank and the IMF.
Linked to that—there is a term for it which I forget offhand—there
is a process of showing annually how you have met some of the
targets within the PRSP and that is linked to your next tranche
of HIPC relief funding, so if you have not met certain requirements
your tranche of funding might be somewhat reduced. Yes, there
are very clear budgetary incentives to meet those demands and
they can be conflicting. Because they are produced by committees,
they are produced very quickly, you can have two priorities written
in which may well be contradictory and work in opposite ways.
Q184 Mr Caton: Is the environment
in there as an absolute requirement?
Dr Waldman: It tends to appear
in PRSPs as what is called mainstreamed. It is supposed to feature
in all aspects of the PRSP. So if you are talking about economic
growth, about health, about education, you are supposed to have
environment within it. Most of the countries have experimented
with different ways of bringing environmental issues in. Uganda,
for example, initially had it as an add-on approach, "We
will have the world plus environment", and then it moved
on to a more mainstreamed approach trying to integrate it into
everything and in its most recent PRSP it is both mainstreamed
and a sectoral approach in its own right. There it has a very
strong environmental presence. Honduras has gone in the opposite
way, it started off with a sector commission directly focused
on environmental issues but with the change in government that
sector commission has closed and now it is supposed to be mainstreamed.
Chairman: I apologise for having to leave
at this point. I propose that Mr Caton takes the chair.
In the absence of the Chairman, Mr Martin Caton
was called to the Chair.
Q185 Mr Caton: Just to finish off
the question I was asking before moving to a different position.
It sounds like you are saying when you get the environment higher
up within the PRSPs it is because, like you described in Uganda,
there is a maturity of experience. Is that usually the way that
it happens?
Dr Waldman: It is very hard to
tell because Uganda is quite advanced in terms of PRSPs, partly
because Uganda produced a national planning document prior to
the introduction of PRSPs and when PRSPs were introduced it encourage
the World Bank to accept its PRSP. Uganda is the most advanced
example of PRSPs. Many of the others have not developed in the
same kind of way. There does seem to be a trend in which increasing
involvement in PRSPs does lead to increasing sophistication of
the ways in which environmental issues are discussed, but that
is not always the case. In Ghana there was an interim PRSP and
then a PRSP and because of the lack of environmental issues in
that it was complemented with a strategic environmental assessment
which did have a number of advantages. It definitely increased
intergovernmental departmental relationships, communications,
an awareness about environment, some civil society action around
environmental issues, but it isolated or marginalised all the
alternative understandings of environmental problems so it perpetuated
a kind of technical apolitical image of the environment. In some
cases that has happened, but not always.
Q186 Ms Barlow: Does the actual process
of preparing PRSPs suffer from a lack of environmental and regulatory
capacity within governments in developing countries?
Dr Waldman: Yes, very much so.
In fact, that happens throughout the whole process, not just in
the preparation but in the budgeting and implementation phases
as well. What you tend to find is that environmental agencies
tend to be what I call weaker agencies in that they have got less
funding, less technical experience often, less access to donors
and less clout within government. We came across a number of very
clear examples where some agencies, often ones that one would
link to environment, such as the ministry of agriculture and the
ministry of land and forestry, were very strong departments, often
with a lot of international donors working in the departments
providing technical expertise with spending power often funded
outside the country and with prominence within government, and
they were in a position to very quickly and very easily adapt
their plans to PRSPs. They were in a position in which they could
quite easily avoid looking at the environment. Someone in Uganda
from one of these departments said, "We do agriculture and,
well, agriculture is about soil and soil is the environment so,
yes, of course we do the environment" without taking on board
any of the issues about environment and poverty relationships
or adjusting their plans in any way, whereas environmental ministries
were often much more vulnerable and found it much harder to link
what they had been doing to PRSPs, to model their plans on PRSP
plans, and so on. Even in Uganda where there is the strategic
working group around environment, which is composed of donors,
governments, ministries and NGOs, after nine years they are still
battling to model their plans and to follow the PRSP image in
certain ways. They have to develop a sector investment plan, a
budgetary plan, and it is very hard to do in environmental issues,
whereas in something like forestry or agriculture after years
of doing it these kinds of models are much more easily done. The
same when you get to negotiating around budgets. Here you have
a kind of circular effect. Because environment agents are seen
as weaker coming into the negotiations they are less able to adapt
their plans to PRSPs, they get less money and that reinforces
their slightly weaker, slightly marginalised status. The stronger
environment agencies find it much easier and are far more able
to simply continue business as usual with slight deference to
environmental issues without really addressing them.
Q187 Ms Barlow: It sounds like there
is a lack of will to improve capacity, would you agree with that?
Is there any way in which capacity could be improved?
Dr Waldman: It is linked to the
question around prioritising government expenditures. Within governments
there may be some lack of will but I would be reluctant to phrase
it simply like that because certainly with NGOs and civil society
there is quite a strong movement to build capacity and to engage
with environmental issues. Even within environment departments
within governments you might have a strong awareness of capacity
problems, wanting to engage more, wanting to be more involved,
but within governments as a whole environment agents are often
marginalised and they are not seen as priorities.
Q188 Ms Barlow: How could that be
improved, do you think?
Dr Waldman: We were suggesting
a number of things in our research. One was to formalise the relationship
between civil societies and government agencies in PRSPs, not
just in participation. Participation in PRSPs is often at the
invitation of the government and the government has no obligation
to respond if it does not take up people's comments or points
or criticisms or suggestions. What a lot of NGOs were finding
was they would be very proactive in producing material for the
PRSPs and they would put in a submission but whether their submission
made it into the PRSP or in an altered form they were never sure
and they had no comeback. There was no-one they could go to and
say, "Why were our suggestions not taken up?" One of
the things we are suggesting is trying to think of ways in which
we can establish more of a partnership between government and
civil societies and one that includes notions of accountability
and responsibility on both sides. That only partially answers
the question on capacity. Another thing that we felt in terms
of answering the question on capacity was investing more in terms
of donor support and technical expertise with environmental agencies
along the lines as was being spoken about this morning. There
is a careful line that donors have to tread because they have
to be very careful not to take over the role of government ministries
or of civil societies and NGOs. They have to play a fairly careful
role of providing support but not taking over the position completely.
That is something that in Uganda donors have had some difficulty
with because they have been encouraged to participate in drafting
of PRSPs where civil societies have not, so they then become responsible
for making sure that civil societies' messages are put on the
agenda and put into PRSPs in a way that maybe should not be their
responsibility, that should be civil societies' responsibility.
Q189 Ms Barlow: You concluded that
"the decision of donors to support basket funding may, in
the long term, undermine efforts on environmental regeneration".
Can you explain a bit more about that?
Dr Waldman: Yes. That comes largely
from experiences in Uganda where, as I was saying earlier, a lot
of environmental projects, development projects, happen to be
small projects funded directly by donors. There is a trend away
from that and a trend much more towards basket funding where all
money goes to governments and governments allocate funding. In
Uganda a miniscule proportion of PRSP funding goes toward environmental
projects, absolutely miniscule. Everyone within the environment
domain in Uganda argues that this is a reflection of a lack of
government prioritisation on environmental issues. The problem
with basket funding is that environmental ministries, environmental
programmes, will have to complement their needs to the other PRSP
projects and in the light of weaker ministries, weaker sectors,
they find it harder to do. Also, it is far more likely that government
spending will prioritise industrialisation or programmes that
are going to show immediate returns whereas environmental sustainability
and environment and poverty relationships are very difficult issues
to deal with and they do not show very quick returns which make
them hard to include in PRSP projects because governments need
to show quick results as well.
Q190 Ms Barlow: You identified in
your report that the inclusion of the environment in PRSPs does
not necessarily translate into action to address specific environmental
issues. Where this happens should donors focus on improving capacity
to ensure delivery or should they provide direct programme support
to individual environmental projects?
Dr Waldman: The danger is that
with basket funding their direct programme support is likely to
fall away. Again, the concessions idea suggested earlier this
morning might be a way round that. Part of the problem is it is
very hard to give a one-answer-fits-all-scenarios suggestion.
Ghana and Uganda use their sector-wide approaches to planning
in quite different ways. In Uganda it will mean that all funding
for environmental budgets should be directed through government
and come out of basket funding. In Ghana it is used to top-up
government funding, so if a sector feels they have a particular
project they want to do and they cannot do it out of their government
funding because they do not have enough, they can meet up with
donors, develop a plan, present it to government and say, "We
would like to accept this additional funding in order to run this
project". It partly depends on how the governments have structured
their budgets and their finances and their arrangements for using
funding. Certainly at the time when we were doing our research
Uganda would not have been open to that kind of possibility and
with all funding directed through basket funding there was a strong
likelihood that many small projects, some of which have been fairly
successful, would be likely to close. The one we looked at was
beach management units which were very successful in Uganda but
whose initial funding did not come from the government, it came
from international donors, and that arrangement would have to
change under basket funding. At the time we were doing our research
there was no guarantee that funding relinquished from individual
projects would come back through basket funding.
Q191 Ms Barlow: To continue with
the issue of basket funding, previous witnesses have highlighted
the problems of giving budgetary aid direct to government and
that undermines local government and local projects, NGOs, et
cetera, and those local organisations are frequently the organisations
which best improve the lives of the poor, for example, and you
seem to be agreeing with that. Can you expand on that?
Dr Waldman: I was talking about
the messages, the way in which we see environmental issues and
how PRSPs tend to have either technical or apolitical notions
around the environment. Many of the alternative understandings
of environment coming from local people, from NGOs, from civil
society organisations, are much more around understanding the
politics that happen with environmental issues or with environmental
resources. In many cases that we looked at, definitely in Honduras,
Uganda and Ghana, and to some extent in Vietnam, the alternative
messages were calling for more decentralisation. Again, decentralisation
cannot be offered as a standard stock answer, as "You can
have decentralisation and that is going to solve the problem".
In different countries decentralisation has meant different things.
In Honduras, in fact, decentralisation has led to an impasse where
decentralisation is envisaged in the PRSP as moving from centralised
government ministries to decentralised government ministries and
allowing local people very limited access to resources. That has
resulted in a huge tension between centralised and localised ministries
with the one not wanting to relinquish control and the other not
having the resources to take up control. In Uganda, the one example
of beach management units is of a decentralised environmental
programme which has been complemented with legislation and civil
society involvement. Legislation has been put in place giving
people rights to control their environment, to develop it, to
access the resources and any profits generated from those resources.
When we were looking at that project it looked like a very successful
model and informal feedback from the department of fisheries,
from the NGOs in Uganda showed increased fish stock, better natural
resources, improvement in natural resources; it showed local people
participating in governance procedures in ways that they found
interesting and exciting and felt that their voice was also being
heard in government; it showed more women being involved in development
procedures and gaining a better voice, but we did also come across
isolated cases of some people being excluded from the programme
and even within that programme there are dangers one would need
to caution against it being usurped by the more elite within that
community in the future.
Q192 Ms Barlow: Finally, do you think
there is much support within the development arena for a move
away from budgetary support when attempting to address specific
areas, such as the environment? Are any calls for this approach
coming from any area?
Dr Waldman: I think there is a
very strong awareness that budget support may come with difficulties
and may pose new challenges to what is already a very difficult
area. I do not think I have heard any calls to move away from
it but I have heard people discussing ways of trying to modify
it to protect certain areas or ways of trying to influence it
in certain ways. I do know that DFID is starting a new research
project right now which is going to look at environment issues
in relation to budget support and how those might be integrated
and how that is going to work. That is a very new research project
that is about to be initiated and which should show some very
interesting results and help us in terms of thinking further about
these issues.
Mr Caton: Thank you, Dr Waldman. Unless
colleagues have any further questions you have answered everything
we wanted to put to you today. Can I thank you for your evidence,
it has been very, very useful and I am sure you will see it reflected
in our report. Thank you.
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