Development Policy Lending (DPL) Retrospective consultation
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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`
