The approval of new programs should include criteria against which programs will subsequently be evaluated, including: Evidence of an international consensus. Evidence of developing country demand. Subsidiarity. The absence of alternative sources of supply
Original Response: Partially Agreed. Management agrees that approvals of new programs should include clear criteria against which the programs will subsequently be evaluated. However, Management does not agree in the entirety with the recommended criteria. Management recognizes the intent behind the criteriamost of which are already applied to new partnership approvals, though not always consistently. Past reports suggest documentation at approval is quite thorough but follow-through monitoring and reporting remains the real issue. The Matrix Leadership Team work program includes the selection and monitoring of GRPPs. It will develop and implement a set of actions to address this issue and report on progress in the context of the regular updates to the Board on internal reforms. While international consensus has been used in the past, Management would call for the need for collective action to replace international consensus as consensus may be increasingly open to interpretation as the aid architecture evolves. Management disagrees with the specific requirement for evidence of developing country demand as many partnerships are created to address global and regional public goods, stimulating incentives (and demand) for action at the country-level. Instead, the link to the ultimate country beneficiaries should be defined in terms of how the partnership programs will link to country-level priorities where clear evidence of demand is not available exante. Management agrees in principle with the subsidiarity and absence of alternative sources of supply, though it would not ask for strict adherence to these two criteria (which are in practice difficult to prove or disprove). Management agrees that partnerships should not duplicate what can be achieved by other existing instruments. Nevertheless, coordination among implementers is sometimes the objective behind partnerships driven by broader international calls for action. In this context, some degree of flexibility is called for. In terms of alternative sources of financial supply, some partnerships are created to help leverage other sources of finance. As part of the efforts going forward, Management will look at defining better guidelines so that duplication and complementarity (versus substitution) can be assessed more readily in the selectivity and approval processes.
IEG notes that the guidance and other progress applies to FIFs, not to the broader category of partnership programs as intended by this recommendation. The intent of the recommendation is to reduce duplication and improve selectivity of all partnership programs, regardless of how they are financed. WB management has taken relevant steps on FIFs and MDTFs -- including in FY15 -- but less so on partnerships.
Referring to the response to recommendation 70, a Bank Guidance on Initiation of FIFs was issued on February 9, 2015. The guidance clarify the steps in deciding on the Banks engagement in a new FIF, and in particular the issues that need to be discussed at the Concept Review stage. It provides a template for the Concept Note, which must discuss the proposed FIFs consistency with the Banks purposes and mandate, its strategic alignement with the Banks objectives, the country and sector context, and the alternatives considered and reasons for rejection.
Additional Information:
The set of Bank Procedure, Directive and Guidance related to the Management Framework for FIF, all published in FY15, is a very significant and tangible achievement in the path towards improving management oversight of partnership programs. While it is correct that they only apply to FIF, however this family of trust funds represent 67% of total assets under management ($33 billion out of $49 billion) and 57% of FY15 trust fund disbursements ($5.8 billion out of $10.1 billion). It was therefore appropriate to start with the FIFs.
Besides, as noted in recommendations 69 and 84, the Bank continues to work towards greater oversight and integration of new Partnership programs into the Bank Groups strategy and business planning. In FY15, Management endorsed a Strategic Resource Mobilization Framework and embarked upon the first Strategic Fundraising Plan (SFP) exercise, which aims to integrate external resource mobilization into the corporate business planning cycle (W process), so that strategy and business priorities drive fundraising decisions. The SFPs are three year rolling plans, approved at the VP-level and updated annually as part of the W process. The SFP development process involves substantive cross-matrix consultation upstream of trust fund establishment, which can support consideration of country demand and how WBG fundraising priorities do/do not align with funding partner priorities. Through the Strategic Resource Mobilization Framework, decisions on engagement of the World Bank in new partnership programs are now reviewed and vetted by senior management in a systematic manner. All new partnership programs are classified under three categories: global corporate significance (A), regional or sectoral significance (B) and routine operational partnerships (C). Classification decisions are the result of discussions between senior management and operational GP and regional management. In this light, the use of earmarked trust funds can be considered more holistically as part of the support the World Bank Group delivers to its clients.
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 notes that the principles-based approach to selectivity is largely consistent with IEG's recommendation and with the way in which IEG evaluates the relevance of the objectives and design of PPs in which the Bank is involved. IEG looks forward to the application of these principles in the "concept note template" and the "program document template", among others, so that programs will address criteria at the outset against which they will subsequently be evaluated.
The forthcoming Management Framework for Partnership Programs and Financial Intermediary Funds (July 2013) will establish principles for program selectivity and partnership design. These focus on the need forBank involvement; consistencywith the Bank's priorities and comparative advantages;avoidance offurther fragmentation and/or proliferation in development aid;benefits forcountries; ensuringthatpartners share common objectives and demonstrate capacity; and the special considerations when a FIF is proposed.The program design must align the Bank's accountabilities with its control, and roles and responsibilities will need to be clearly articulated and agreed among partners. The funding mechanism selected should be well suited to the design and objectives of the program.
IEG continues to have some concerns about the quality and consistency of ME design and implementation in Partnership Programs.
Refering to the response to IEG Recommendation #66, Management Framework for World Bank Partnership Programs and FIFs was presented to the Board on July 9, 2013. The Framework, which is based on a need for collective action as a guiding criterion, leverages the expertise and resources of multiple participants to achieve the development objectives of the partnership. Significant progress has been made during FY13/14, in implementing the Framework by providing assistance such as a web-based Partnerships toolkit for staff which takes a lifecycle approach to Partnership Programs related to partnership selectivity, negotiation and preparation, operation and exit. Additionally, detailed staff guidance notes on FIFs have been prepared for roll out in FY15. A new Partnership and Trust Fund Handbook will reflect this work and will be brought online in the Q4 of FY15.