Seriación de los ejercicios del texto universitario TU3L10P10TIC

5.1.1 Description

Consistent with the UNEP project document format that applied at that time, the Project Document (ProDoc) did not include a situational analysis section. However, the ProDoc

included a section titled ‘Background/Problem Description’ that contained elements of a standard situational analysis. Other sources that provided evidence on UNEP’s understanding of the problem include UNEP Governing Council papers (UNEP P/GC.22/INF/30 2003).

As described in the ProDoc, the problem was the continuing environmental degradation that exists in Africa and the relative failure of existing efforts to halt this degradation. Explicitly stated issues that the project was designed to address include the failure to reflect the links between environmental sustainability and development goals in national sustainable development strategies and national development plans. The ProDoc further stated that it was necessary to move away from sector-based assessments to integrated assessments of the links between environment and development, i.e. to “capture the links between ecosystems and ecosystem services, their impact on human wellbeing and poverty reduction…” (p4, UNEP P&EP, 2004). The type of integrated assessment chosen for use by the project was the integrated ecosystem assessment (IEA). An IEA is “a synthesis and quantitative analysis of information on relevant physical, chemical, ecological and human processes in relation to specified ecosystem management objectives” (p4, Murawski and Menashes, 2007). In other words, it is a tool primarily aimed at achieving improved ecosystem management.

Additional problems included inadequate capacity to carry out IEAs and to design the necessary policy interventions within poverty-reduction strategies. Additional elements of the problems are contained in the listing of needs in the ProDoc logframe. Eighteen needs are identified, organized into four levels—local, national, regional and global. These needs include increasing the capabilities of local communities to achieve policy coherence at the national level, and the establishment of regional African expert networks to create synergies between actors at the global level.

5.1.2 Comment and Assessment

Overall, the ProDoc did not meet the relevant indicators of effectiveness for the situational analysis and was thus inconsistent with good development aid design practice. The situational analysis is important because without it, it is less likely that the problem and its causes will be accurately identified. This makes it more difficult to design a project to correctly identify and implement the required solutions. Without an adequate situational analysis it is also difficult to understand how higher-level or broader policy and institutional factors contribute to the problem or to understand their implications for designing solutions to it.

The problem description was adequate at a general level in referring to the failure to include the links between environmental sustainability and development goals in national

development strategies. The reference in the problem description to countries facing the “challenge of integrating responses or intervention strategies within national development or poverty reduction strategies” was also most relevant (p4, UNEP P&EP, 2004). But the project design and implementation at the country level did not adequately respond to these factors, as will be discussed in subsequent sections.

The lack of an adequate response to the problem and the resulting challenges were primarily because the analysis of the cause of the problem was faulty. According to the P&EP, a key cause of the problem at the country level was failure to carry out integrated ecosystem assessments. In fact, the problem cause was a more conventional failure to include assessments of environmental issues and their potential economic impacts on development goals in established national and sector development planning processes. For example, it was not the country-level practice of carrying out agriculture-sector assessments rather than ecosystem assessments that was a key cause of the failure to integrate environmental sustainability into agriculture sector development plans. Rather, it was the failure to carry out any meaningful assessment of the economic costs of environmental degradation on agricultural productivity and then the subsequent failure to take action to lower these costs in the agriculture-sector plan. Thus, as will be seen in the Strategy section, the ProDoc placed too much emphasis on using one methodology— integrated ecosystem assessments—to convince governments to take sufficient action to decrease environmental degradation. The ProDoc included no substantive analysis of the higher-level issues and processes relevant to the project. The situational analysis should have provided a general overview of likely higher-level issues and of development planning and environmental institutions and associated processes at the country level.

The absence of an adequate situational analysis was also a key factor resulting in a project design that was too ‘top down’ and not adequately responsive to the circumstances in different countries. This observation was documented in donor evaluations of the UNEP P&EP and the PEI (UNEP, 2006; Bass and Renard, 2009). An adequate situational analysis would have identified that the countries in which the UNEP P&EP were operating had varying EDPs and national development planning institutions, processes and timetables, which would have highlighted the need for a country-based design process. But this country- based approach did not occur, despite development aid manuals highlighting that this was standard good practice. As quoted in the literature review, “Where Bank programmes have not been well aligned with country conditions, there has been substantial risk of failure, even when the ownership environment was otherwise favourable for Bank support” (p39, World Bank, 2004). These conditions include the national and organisational cultures that characterise a country and the in-depth country knowledge needed to prepare a good

situational analysis thatwill also provide ongoing guidance on ‘how things are really done around here’ to help ensure project success. For example, UN officials state that Francophone West African countries have national and organisational cultures that are substantively different from those in Anglophone East and Southern African countries, and that a different approach is needed to project management and inter-actions with country counterparts in the two country blocks. More specifically, that Francophone West African country national and organisational culture is more hierarchical and formal, with a higher requirement for protocol. These views are consistent with the findings of Trompenaars and others as referred to in the Literature review. The failure to carry out a situational analysis in potential P&EP countries also meant that the suitability of countries for a P&EP country project was not assessed beforehand.

In conclusion, the lack of an adequate general and country-level situational analysis contributed to a misdiagnosis of the causes of the problem. Moreover, there was inadequate or no analysis of higher-level policy factors, institutions and processes. This led to an inappropriate design of the UNEP P&EP such that the actual problem was not accurately targeted, which led to an inappropriate strategy being adopted, which in turn led to the poor results of the project.

5.2 Strategy