Accountability

Background

Development Policy Lending (DPL) Retrospective consultation

19 April 2012 | Minutes

This was a consultation meeting organised by invite for 18 April.

Aloysius Uche Ordu, Director, Operational Policy and Quality, World Bank

  • The full consultation process will be launched on 1 May, with a dedicated website, papers, email addresses, and a form for sending comments.
  • This is the start of a process that should finished by mid-October to deliver a report for the IDA deputies at the time of the IDA mid-term review
  • This is not a policy reform process but purely a stocktaking exercise

Presentation by Manuela Francesca, OPQ, World Bank on the initial findings of the retrospective

Edward Mountfield, Manager OP and Country Economics, World Bank, on conclusions

  • Consolidated earlier progress on greater selectivity in use of prior actions
  • DPOs performing well and managing corruption risks
  • Need to strengthen quality of poverty social and environmental impact analysis, should we be doing more DPLs to have positive impacts?
  • 6 issues for consultation presented

Discussion points

JICA person: how is it gradually changing away from conditionality?

  • Since DPO increases in crises – how do you set prior action in crisis when conditions are not welcome because of crisis management?
  • Quality of prior actions?

Peter

  • Need deeper analysis and breakdown of prior actions in economic policy sectors
  • Why so many neutral prior actions?

Australia ED office

  • Appropriateness of DPL versus IL
  • DPLs focussed on low-hanging fruit – instead of critical reform issues
  • Sub-sectoral analysis needed, especially on ownership
  • Subnational work on budget transparency would be good to see
  • Need more independent impact assessments

Liz Stuart

  • General budget support is a preferred modality
  • 30% cap on DPLs is a psychological barrier at the country level
  • Conditionality – need fewer, poverty-based, outcome-based conditions
  • DPLs over three year tranches
  • Concerned about the PSIA finding on weakness of analysis, need PSIA process to consider alternative policy reforms so that it drives poverty reduction efforts

Mariana Gonzalez

  • Mexican climate change DPL in April 2008 – March 2012 – no active disclosure, lack of translation, no status reports, no ICR, no results reports online
  • Very serious lack of transparency on DPL, 4 DPLs in the last year with huge values of loans attached
  • No disaggregation of these resources on the national budget

Francesco, Transparency International

  • No mention of DPLs in INT annual report – at least in this review you can ask for INT input
  • Lack of disaggregation means INT can not track down corruption

Korinna Horta, Urgewald

  • DPLs on management of natural resources – massive environmental impacts but no EIAs

Cesar Gamboa, DAR, Peru

  • We follow 3 DPLs in Peur, Weak evaluation at the end – only quantitiy indicators not quality indicators
  • Need clearly process of consultation, design and assessment

Nadar Tatose, IBP

  • Transparency in budgets, can requirements on transparency be made more enforceable procedures
  • Audit reports also need to be made available

Carlo, French Development Agency

  • Transparency also needed on the tool for policy dialogue not just the budget outcome
  • Especially where there are donor policy matrices
  • Challenge to link central to local level – how do DPLs translate into reform at local level
  • Value this as a modality, but have to think about entry and exit strategy, weighting of instrument is important

Christian, BIC

  • With 80% weak M&E framework, how solid is the data on which we conduct the exercise of a retrospective
  • Why weak M&E? Maybe review OP 8.6 to make this more important

Rick Jacobsen, Global Witness

  • .033% prior actions have negative env impact does not seem right, we need to look more closely at that assessment
  • DRC case is a good flag for us – Inspection Panel found impacts, yet the DPL preparation hadn’t specified any environmental/social impacts

Cecilia, Sierra Leone

  • Natural resource management is key, contract transparency is needed
  • CSO only come in after the fact, need to be there in the negotiation process
  • Bank needs to have a forum for regular dialogue with CSO
  • Conditionality of the Bank to force FOIA act in our countries

Christine Thompson, from an ED office

  • Easy to focus on big DPLs, but small DPLs are also important to small countries
  • Development of P4R – does it have any lessons for us?

Vince, BIC

  • Evaluation of “sustainable env management” DPL in Brazil context
  • We need evaluation not retrospective, we need a full evaluation
  • Need a balance of quantitative and qualitative information – process tracing of policy reform process
  • What about looking at practice after the instrument was closed? What was the frequency of impact evaluation?
  • ICRs are not useful because they are very diluted, no country can use this as a learning tool
  • All data is not in the public domain – especially quality data, deliberative data, transparency gaps

Desiree, African Development Bank

  • Which group of countries being reached with DPL? Need to not focus on poor performers or good performers – need to get the ones in the middle of the governance chart – and then focus on just one or two core conditions
  • Crisis use of DPO – we should be very open to this

Kadi, Christian Aid, Sierra Leone

  • Need three way dialogue CSO-Govt-Priv Sect
  • PFM reforms important, especially procurement
  • Audit reports show terrible results – Bank needs to use those and link up to DPL`