The Bank should have an explicit engagement strategy for each GRPP in which it is involved, including the following elements: The expected roles of the Bank in the program at both the global and country levels, along with the expected duration of these roles How the programs activities are expected to be linked with the Banks country operations How the risks to the Banks participation will be identified and managed, including conflicts of interest among the Banks roles in the program.
Original Response: Partially Agreed. Management sees the need for a more holistic approach to partnerships as envisioned by explicit engagement strategies and will work to provide guidance to task team leaders of new GRPPs, informed by the work on the partnership management framework noted above and the work of the Matrix Leadership Team noted below in response to recommendation 6. However, Management would modify the recommendation on country-level linkages. Instead of an explicit link with the Banks country operations, the design of country-level linkages within the engagement strategy should be tailored to cases where the Bank will be the primary interface at country level, versus others where the Banks operational role is limited, or where the program objective, such as global knowledge or research, has an indirect linkage to Bank country operations.
Management's progress update is noted. There has been good progress on ensuring active Bank engagement in partnership programs financed through FIFs. It is not clear, however, that there has been the same progress for other types of partnership programs not financed through FIFs.
Several concrete steps were taken in FY15 to further implement the 2013 Management Framework for World Bank Partnership Programs and Financial Intermediary Funds (FIFs). Revisions to the Trust Fund Handbook were published as a Bank Guidance on January 8, 2015. A Bank Directive and a Bank Policy on a Management Framework for World Bank Financial Intermediary Funds, and a Bank Guidance on Initiation of FIFs were issued on February 9, 2015, providing a current approach to the Banks overall engagement strategy with GRPPs. At a micro level, the Bank has engagement strategies for each individual GRPP in the form of Program Documents, which describe the program design, proposed activities (including how the program is expected to be linked with the Banks country operations), roles and responsibilities of the Bank, and expected duration of these roles. With regard to the identification and management of risks associated with the Banks participation in a GRPP, this occurs throughout the life of a GRPP. The updated Trust Fund Handbook and Management Framework for FIFs details how these risks are identified and managed in both the establishment of the FIF/TF as well as on an ongoing basis once established. In developing a TFP, the TTL must ensure that any risks, including those arising from any conflicts of interest or any restrictions on its use are explicitly noted, considered and are judged by management to be acceptable and manageable by the Bank. A Bank Guidance on Communications for FIFs was also issued on February 9, 2015, detailing communications staff roles and accountabilities, and outlining the Banks approach for reaching donors, other partners and stakeholders, and the public, with a view to ensuring transparency around the FIFs purpose, activities and results to safeguard the Bank against potential reputational risks.
Management's actions in response to IEG's evaluation are a work in progress. IEG agrees with Management's ratings as indicative of where more work is currently being done those areas rated 'substantial as opposed to medium. IEG reserves judgment on the outcomes of this work, such as the preparation of the new Partnership Program Management Framework (PPMF) and the revision the DGF eligibility criteria, until these are completed and start to be implemented by the Network and Regional VPUs responsible for partnership programs and by the programs themselves. Overall, IEG is pleased to see that Management is doing a substantial amount of work on implementing its policy agenda to promote effective partnership arrangements in comparison with the previous 23 years.
IEG also interprets these ratings against what Management agreed in the cases where Management did not fully agree with IEG's recommendations. For example, IEG recommended that the Bank should develop a formal policy on engaging with GRPPs a recommendation with which the majority of EDs who commented on the recommendation agreed. IEG hopes that the preparation of the Partnership Program Management Framework will end up being the first step towards a formal policy. IEG remains doubtful that the Bank's accountability for governance, management, and results of the GRPPs in which it is involved will be sufficiently accepted and exercised Bank-wide in a decentralized Bank in the absence of a formal policy, like, for example, OP/BP 14.40 on trust funds. IEG sees a particular and pressing need for a formal policy on hosting the management units (secretariats) of GRPPs in the Bank in order to address the existing confusions regarding their status.
IEG agrees that systems, databases, and business processes for engaging with GRPPs should be linked to the ongoing work on Trust Fund and DGF reforms. There should be one reliable Bank-wide system for tracking GRPPs and the sources of funds that finance their activities. However, trust funds and DGF grants are not programs in and of themselves, although they have often been labeled as such. They are dedicated sources of funds to support GRPPs and other activities agreed between the donors, the Bank, and other partners. They are like the fuel in an automobile. And like a car and its driver who steers the car towards a destination, it is the programs, their governance and their management that produce the results with the aid of the fuel provided by trust funds, DGF grants, and other resources dedicated to the programs. Partnerships are first and foremost about building relationships among the partners, and IEG found in its recent evaluation that past systems, databases, and business processes had put excessive emphasis on the funding of the programs to the relative neglect of forging strong institutional relationships among the program partners.
The essence of partnership programs, as opposed to other activities that trust funds and DGF grants support, is shared governance. IEG continues to recommend that the PPMF should focus, at least in the first instance, on partnership programs with shared governance, for the three reasons given on pages 1214 of our evaluation: (a) such programs challenge the Bank's traditional programmatic and financial accountability mechanisms; (b) the Bank is dedicating increasing amounts of senior management time to their governance; and (c) the Bank expects the programs activities to be appropriately linked to the Bank's country operational work. In addition, the Bank can reasonably expect more requirements from such programs when they are established, such as a charter or some other constitutive document which defines the partnership.
Everyone in the Bank, including IEG, is dependent on the systems and databases that Bank Management establishes to keep track of the Bank's activities, in this case GRPPs. Since Bank Management appears to have decided to include partnerships without shared governance in the Bank-wide database, IEG would ask that those partnership programs with shared governance should be readily identifiable, and extractable from the database. This involves each program answering a simple question: Is the consultative group, program council, or steering committee, etc. that has been established to oversee the program a collaborative or a consultative body Do the members of the body have shared responsibility for programmatic oversight and shared accountability for results (collaborative), or does one partner, i.e. the Bank in the case of in-house programs, simply listen to what the other partners have to say while continuing to make the major governance and management decisions and to accept accountability for results (consultative). Authority and accountability should be aligned. Each partnership should have to declare on which side of this collaborative-consultative fence it stands, so that the Bank can avoid the continuation of situations in which it has little or no authority but most of the accountability.
IEG also hope that processes will finally be put in place to ensure that TTLs provide both CFP and IEG with electronic copies of recently completed evaluations within one month of their completion, and that copies of these evaluations will be easily accessible on the Bank's intranet. IEG has recently shared its own database of recently completed evaluations of GRPPs with CFP as a foundation on which to build this system.
These are some of the things that IEG will be looking for when the new Partnership Program Management Framework is presented for Bank-wide review and to the Board.
This report, which is an assessment of the Bank's engagement in a subset of partnership programs of global and regional scope, was issued in spring 2011. The Management Response expresses appreciation for IEG's work in this area, and indicates that most of the recommendations are partially to substantially agreed. Some of IEG's recommendations contain sub-recommendations, some of which Management plans to fully adopt and some not. Hence, the actions to be taken under these recommendations in the coming years may respond more to the spirit than the letter.
Overall, Management agrees with IEG's message that stronger oversight over partnership programs is warranted, including upfront selectivity and ongoing management of both individual programs and wider portfolios. To achieve this, Management is currently preparing a Partnership Program Management Framework paper, to be discussed by the Board in H2FY12. However, Management's view of these programs is also hat they are closely related to their funding instruments and other Bank operational work. Hence, systems, databases, business process, and strategy development needs to be linked to the ongoing work on Trust Fund Reform and on the Bank's operational and strategic agendas, as opposed to freestanding approaches.
The population of GRPPs identified by IEG includes both internally and externally managed programs, and they are supported by Trust Funds, Financial Intermediary Funds, and the Bank's Development Grant Facility. Intensive work has been carried out on all three types of funding instruments in recent years. The DGF Reform process has resulted in a more dynamic portfolio in line with DGF's intended catalytic role, with exits of longstanding recipients. IEG has recommended revisiting the DGF criteria (the one recommendation to which Management fully agreed), and Management will raise this topic with the DGF Council. The next phase of DGF reform is focusing on better results frameworks for programs receiving DGF grants. A FIF Framework paper is currently under preparation by Management, and FIFs provide the largest volume of funding to the GRPP portfolio. Finally, the Board is regularly briefed on the Trust Fund Reform process, which is also increasingly focused on mainstreaming trust funds into Bank operations and on efforts to improve results and reporting.
The forthcoming new Partnership Program Management Framework will build on this work by creating guidelines for program-level aspects of GRPPs and other similar programs. These guidelines will cover selectivity criteria, the applicability of Bank policies and procedures, managing partnership structures (including secretariats), providing appropriate Terms of Reference for Bank staff involved in governing bodies, and promoting global-country linkages. While much of this work pertains to internal Bank procedures, external partners are also being consulted to prepare this Framework.
IEG concurs that the implementation of this recommendation will depend on how the forthcomingManagement Framework for PPs and FIFs is implemented. While the current concept note template -- the PRN -- indicates how the Bank plans to be engaged with the program, the information is scattered throughout the form. It would be helpful if this were consolidated into one section along with the expected duration of these engagements, thereby constituting a well-defined engagement strategy for the Bank. IEG would also like to see the principle of "global-country" linkages effectively operationalized, since this has been one of the most consistent principles in the Bank's strategic documents on PPs going back to 2001. IEG suggests distinguishing between strategic linkages, operational linkages, and institutional linkages.
As part of the implementation of the forthcoming Management Framework for Partnership Programs and Financial Intermediary Funds (July 2013), all partnership programs (funded by Trust Funds, DGF, or FIFs) will have a Concept Review at the design stage, which will include consideration of their activities at the global, regional, and country level, alignment with the Bank Group strategy and operations, risk management, and expected results.
See the response to IEG recommendation #66. The Management Framework on Partnership Programs and FIFs provides a current approach to partnership engagement. Strengthening the matrix through the current change process in the Bank also provides opportunities for strengthening the linkages between country programs and global partnership engagement. In particular, the introduction of multi-year, integrated budgets ensure that external financing becomes subject of the institutional dialogue between GPs and RVPs around the business planning and budget forecasts.