Strategy

A strategy is in essence the plan of action to achieve the desired result. The ProDoc did not include a strategy section as this was not a requirement for a UNEP ProDoc at that time. However, key elements of the overall strategy can be identified from different parts of the ProDoc and other documentation relating to the UNEP P&EP. These demonstrate that the overall strategy to achieve the project objectives was to:

x Apply the concept of ecosystem services to argue that the environment was linked to development

x Demonstrate these links by carrying out integrated ecosystem assessments and x Build national capacity to integrate such links into national development planning

processes.

The ProDoc included a section ‘Strategy for Effective Implementation’ which contained sections on the P&EP implementation strategy and arrangements. These referred to selecting countries on the basis of high-level political support and of maintaining such support through continuous effort. The project was implemented in seven countries, Mauritania, Mali, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique. Originally the project was to focus on five countries, but two more were added at the request of the Belgian donor.

Formal country commitment was signalled by a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) or project documents signed with respective governments.

Co-ordinating and co-operating with other agencies in the field, including UN Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, the European Union and the Department of International Development (DFID) was seen as of the “utmost importance”. There was specific reference to working in close co-operation with the existing UNDP PEI projects in Tanzania and Kenya. It was stated that Eco-system-Capability Augmentation Poverty Eradication Approach (ESCAPE) guidelines would be applied to implement the project. Specific emphasis was placed on internal co-ordination within UNEP to assist with implementation.

In addition to what was contained in the ProDoc, a description of other key elements of the strategy were found in an information paper presented to UNEP’s Government Council that focused on UNEP’s poverty and environments work. This indicated that key elements of the strategy included national workshops to highlight the importance of poverty-environment linkages; establishment of task forces focused on the most important linkages; preparation of national poverty-environment assessment reports; and finally, a national poverty- environment strategy (UNEP/GC.22/INF/30, 2003).

Although not set out in this section, a key element of the UNEP P&EP strategy was the use of four international institutes to provide support to the implementation of the seven PEI country projects.

5.2.2 Comment and Assessment

As noted above, the strategy was not set out in the ProDoc in a comprehensive or coherent manner, as evidenced by the ProDoc not having a strategy section.

The development of the ProDoc also did not take a participatory approach, either with respect to governments or the UNDP, and was developed at UNEP Headquarters. The lack of a participatory approach to ProDoc development was a key reason why the depth and width of country ownership necessary for successful implementation was not obtained. This reflected the failure to adequately involve country partners in the choice of countries and when designing country PEI projects, and was identified as a problem by the Belgian evaluation.

There was inadequate prior consultation with the participating countries and as a result the period of gaining country ownership and preparing to launch the sub- projects at the country level was prolonged and time consuming (p21, UNEP 2006).

With regard to the depth of country ownership, there also appeared to be a misunderstanding within UNEP regarding the type of country-level ownership that was most important. For example, while the ProDoc states high-level political support was important, strong ownership at the level of the government officials key to successful implementation of the project was more important.

The lack of real country ownership manifested itself in several ways. For example, in one country, the senior government official in the national environment institution requested that he and all staff involved in the project be paid a salary to compensate for the time spent on the project; this was even though the project was directly aimed at achieving implementation of the environmental sustainability provisions of the country’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). While this was agreed to by UNEP, key officials in this country did not devote the agreed time to the project implementation. (This practice was legal by UNEP rules and is referred to as a salary top-up, but was later discontinued when a new phase of the PEI commenced, as it was inconsistent with broader UN and donor procedures.) It is not unusual to find it difficult to get the necessary level of commitment for complicated, high- transaction costs projects like this from civil servants in developing countries, many of which are paid less than US$300 a month, gross. This is one reason why they support significant amounts of travel to UN funded workshops, as the UN daily allowances can equal more than half of a month’s salary.

The strategy applied was inappropriate for addressing the problem, since the causes of the problem had not been adequately identified and because it did not follow standard development aid good practice. Further, the strategy combined normative and operational elements, whereas the objective of the project was operational. As the problem had not been identified correctly, the strategy placed too much emphasis on using one methodology, integrated ecosystem assessments (as per the MA model), to convince governments to take sufficient action to decrease environmental degradation. This emphasis reflected the view that the application of this particular methodology, plus building capacity in the application of that methodology, was key to convincing governments to integrate environmental sustainability into national development strategies. The belief was that once environmental sustainability was included in such strategies, governments would then take the action needed to significantly reduce environmental problems.

In fact, the experience of the (P&EP) when restructured into the UNDP-UNEP PEI Africa programme as discussed in Case Study 2, indicates that a key factor for success was identifying the links between environmental sustainability and national economic priorities in an operational sense. The strategy evolved to use a range of tools, rather than using one. In particular, the later use of standard economic analysis in the PEI Africa programme to

assess sector-level costs of environmental unsustainability was found to be particularly useful, not least because governments make policy and budget decisions on a sector basis, not on an ecosystem basis. For example, the later PEI Scale-up proposal based on the lessons learned from the P&EP highlighted the importance of economic evidence (UNDP- UNEP PEI, 2007). The usefulness of economic assessments was that they more clearly demonstrated the link between environmental unsustainability and the achievement of development goals, using methodology and language with which the relevant development decision makers were already familiar. The importance of a sector focus was included in the poverty-environment mainstreaming guidelines developed by UNDP and UNEP in 2009 (UNDP-UNEP PEI, 2009).

Additional evidence that the problem was not understood and accurately reflected in the strategy and project design: The ProDoc indicates that an assumption behind the analysis of the problem is that including poverty-environment objectives in national development processes will lead to the action necessary to reduce or fix EDPs. However, this assumption was incorrect. Internal UNEP papers drafted as a precursor to the UNEP P&EP being restructured, plus the ongoing experience of the PEI, indicates that even if environmental sustainability objectives are included in national development plans, that does not mean that governments will necessarily make the policy changes or budget allocations necessary to implement these objectives without continuing engagement and support from the UN and/or other development partners, like DFID. The UNDP-UNEP poverty-environment guidelines recognise this by including ‘Meeting the Implementation Challenge” as one of the three poverty-environment mainstreaming model components (UNDP-UNEP, PEI, 2009). As the Norwegian evaluation points out, poverty-environment mainstreaming is a 10–20 year process of institutional change (Bass and Renard, 2009). Literally years of effort are needed to achieve the necessary improvements in policy, budgets and capacity to successfully address EDPs, which also reflects the complexity of the problem. One of the consequences of the misdiagnosis of the problem is that the planned duration of the UNEP P&EP of three to four years was too short.

At the country level it was found that the strategy of applying integrated ecosystem assessments (IEA) was of limited value for improving the integration of environmental sustainability into national development strategies, for a number of reasons. These included that the methodology was new and needed more development—for example in terms of incorporating the economic aspects and increasing application capacity at the country level. (That the methodology still (2012) needs more development is evidenced by the Government of Sweden in 2010 providing funding to the UNDP-UNEP PEI to further develop the methodology for application at the country level (Government of Sweden,

2010.) Another factor that limited the usefulness of the strategy is that the terminology and concepts used by the IEA methodology differ from those used by the decision makers in ministries of planning, finance and key sectors, who should have been the target audience for this project. This was recognised in early 2005 by UNEP, which stated in an internal paper that the

ecosystem services concept not understood at country level. Too difficult to explain and implement. OK to build understanding in Environment ministries, but no good for convincing Planning and Finance (p2, UNEP P&EP, 2005).

It remained an issue—for example in 2008, a senior UN PEI manager repeatedly requested the programme managers promoting the IEA approach to explain what they would say to economists of the ministry of planning who asked why they should use the ecosystem servicesapproach. The relevant ecosystem managers could not provide any clear answer to these questions (UN official, pers comm., 2008). Another and more senior UN PEI manager identified the academic approach by the proponents of ecosystem services methodology as a major obstacle to convincing decision makers in ministries of planning that environmental sustainability should be a higher priority (UN official pers comm., 2008).

This debate over the use of the IEA methodology highlights a broader point relative to the effectiveness of UN (in this case UNEP) in addressing EDPs at the country level: Developing and testing a new methodology (normative task) and working to bring about policy and budgetary changes (operational task) are different tasks and combining the two, as this project essentially did, makes achievement of the desired operational outcome more difficult. If the normative task has not been adequately completed, then one is seeking to bring about change through a methodology that is not fully developed and operationally proven. Evidence that the two tasks were combined is contained in the UNEP Governing Council (GC) document, which stated: “The next step[s]…is to operationalise the conceptual framework and to test this approach in a number of country studies” (p4, UNEP/GC.22/INF/30, 2003), with operationalising and testing being a mix of operational and normative tasks. Normative and operational roles and requirements should be identified clearly at an early stage and the strategy developed should be consistent with their differences.

Far more emphasis in the strategy and other parts of the ProDoc was required on how to integrate pro-poor environmental sustainability objectives into national development plans, and then how to implement such objectives via sector policies, plans and budgets. Further, the ProDoc should have made it clear that the design of detailed PEI projects in each country was necessary to achieve such integration. Ongoing experience, as reflected in later documents, made it clear that deep, continuing engagement with development institutions

and processes at the country level was a key to success, rather than any particular tool or approach (UNDP-UNEP PEI, 2007, 2007a, 2009). This is consistent with the literature review’s findings on the importance of institutions in designing effective development aid (Langhammer, 2004; Paul, 2006: Leonard, 2010).

The strategy did not reflect the fact that some countries had already partially incorporated environmental sustainability into national development processes, so the strategy needed to focus on operationalising or improving environmental commitments, not convincing governments that environmental sustainability was important, because this had already been accepted. (Operationalising environmental commitments can be defined at integrating them into national and sector policies, programmes and projects, and then assigning the necessary budgetary and management resources to ensure that they are implemented.)

A critical flaw of this project is that while it seeks to convince planning, finance and key line ministry officials that environmental sustainability is a development issue, there was inadequate ownership or involvement in the project in all but one of the seven countries from the planning and finance ministries. As the project aimed to integrate environmental sustainability into national development processes, the strategy should have made it clear that the key ministry in each country for this project was the one responsible for the national development planning process. This planning ministry should have been the lead for the project. However, UNEP chose the environment ministry or agency to be the lead agency for the PEI country programmes in all but one of the seven countries. (In the seventh, Kenya, UNDP had already established a UNDP PEI project and they had chosen the Planning ministry as the lead).

In a number of countries, including Mauritania, Mali, Uganda and Mozambique, the failure to adequately focus on the ministry responsible for the national development resulted in inadequate progress. In one country a key reason for phasing out the PEI programme was the continuing failure of the environment agency to adequately work with the planning ministry. One key reason for the lack of progress is that environment ministries lack the power to influence planning, finance and key sector ministries. Another reason is that many environment agencies are very short of funds and saw the UNEP P&EP as an agency funding mechanism, rather than as a strategic cross-government policy-influencing project. The need for planning or finance ministries to lead or co-lead is reflected in later UN guidelines (UNDP-UNEP, 2009).

In contrast, in Tanzania the poverty eradication and environment departments were co- located in the Vice President’s Office (VPO), and the deep involvement of the poverty eradication office was an important factor in the success of the project. Conversely, when

the poverty reduction department was moved from the VPO and the environment office became the sole lead, progress slowed significantly (IIED pers. comm., 2008). Consistent with this, the Norwegian evaluation found that working with ministries of planning and finance was important for success (Bass and Renard, 2009), and the PEI Scale-up proposal noted the importance of focusing on development ministries (UNDP-UNEP PEI, 2007). Subsequently, it became a conditionality that new PEI country programmes were led or co- led by the ministries responsible for development planning.

In addition to ownership, a key part of a successful strategy turned out to be substantive continuing engagement in existing government national and sector-development planning processes, and nowhere was this indicated in the ProDoc. Nor was such engagement a reality before restructuring of the UNEP P&EP. Key elements of the UNEP P&EP strategy indicates that new task forces would be formed in the P&EP countries, yet good aid practice as articulated in UNDG, UNDP and OECD Development Aid Committee guidelines promotes the use of existing country processes and mechanisms. Contributing to existing national development planning process working groups and other mechanisms was the way to succeed, as indicated by the Norwegian evaluation (Bass and Renard, 2009). The ProDoc states that the final output of the UNEP P&EP at the country level was a poverty- environment strategy, when what was needed was that the government’s existing national development strategy better include poverty-environment objectives. These lessons are reflected in the UNDP-UNEP PEI Scale-up proposal, ProDoc and the PEI mainstreaming guidelines (UNDP-UNEP PEI, 2007, 2007a, 2009). Finally, the ESCAPE methodology, referred to above as an element of the strategy, was not applied and no explanation for this could be located.

A core element of the project implementation strategy as set out in the ProDoc was support to the seven PEI countries from the four international institutes. However, the work plans and budgets for the four international institutes were developed and included in the legal agreements between UNEP and the institutes without any consultation with the seven countries—that is, the support from the institutes for the project was decided without finding out what kind of support was needed in the countries. Also, the international institutes were located outside of Africa, and so could not provide the level of support needed to countries. (Two were in North America, one in the UK and another in Japan). Perhaps more importantly, the institutes did not have country-level experience of poverty-environmental mainstreaming. One subcontract developed under an institute did provide useful support at the country level, largely because it was subcontracted to an Africa-based organisation. In addition, there were very high transaction costs associated with managing four institutes

providing assistance to seven countries, since this meant co-ordinating and managing 28 interactions, and this proved to be impractical.

While the ProDoc identified partnering with UNDP as a key part of the strategy, the collaboration with UNDP PEI and UNDP country offices was most inadequate. While the failure to collaborate with the planning ministries could be explained by UNEP’s lack of experience with country operations of this type, the failure to co-operate with UNDP was inexcusable. This was especially true as UNDP had a well-established poverty- environmental mainstreaming programme in the UNDP PEI and it would have been entirely logical to join forces with this existing, well-funded programme at the earliest stage possible. Further, it was inexcusable as the negative consequences of not working adequately with UNDP (and others) had been previously recognised and reflected in the ProDoc, which indicated that co-operation with UNDP was “a must” and that “failure to establish such cooperation will result in duplication of activities, high transaction costs, confusion from the host countries as to who is doing what and ultimately to a failure of the projects” (p14, UNEP, 2004).

This warning proved to be accurate and the implementation of the UNEP P&EP at the country level was seriously inhibited as a result of the failure to co-operate with UNDP. The reasons for not co-operating adequately with UNDP were mainly attitudinal— a reflection of the broader organisational culture of UNEP that saw UNDP as a competitor and a reflection