Consultation on the SecondDraft Framework October 9, 2015
The World Bank/IMF Annual Meetings
Civil Society Policy Forum
Review and Update of the World Bank Safeguard Policies
Consultation on the Second Draft Framework | Lima, Peru | October 9, 2015
TRANSCRIPT
Faith Nwadishi:Good morning, my name is Faith Nwadishi. I'm from Nigeria. I work with Koyenum Immalah Foundation, and I sit on the EITI International Board, representing English-speaking African countries. I want to, on behalf of our colleagues from the civil society and the Bank officials, welcome us to the consultations on the safeguards. We have about one and a half hours for this session, and I hope that collectively we'll work together to achieve the reason why we are here. I thank you for finding time to come here, and I hope that we will utilize the time and come up with suggestions on how to better engage the safeguards.
For me, when I came to the Annual Meetings last year and I was privileged to be part of the audience, it was interesting for me to note that a lot of our colleagues have had very deep engagements with the safeguards. But for some of us, it was kind of new, and we're interested in the realmof consultations. And that was how I took a particular interest in understanding what the safeguards were and how I could better engage using that framework to hold and work together with government. So I'm hoping that – not really – I know that within this crowd, there're a lot of people like me, like the first time I came,and I know there're alsoexperts here.
We have the Bank officials who are working on this issue and will be here to clarify our doubts or give us more information. So it's an interaction, a consultation, where we get feedback on what is happening on the field. And I hope that everyone will keep an open mind, like me, at this meeting. I am very happy that I'm moderating this because it's going to give me an opportunity to learn and to also share some experiences. So once more, I thank you for being here.
We have in our midst some very senior Bank officials, we have civil society colleagues who'll be sharing with us experiences, and then we'd open up the floor for questions and answers. So thank you very much. To go ahead, I would like to ask the World Bank officials that are here to please just introduce themselves; tell us your names and the office and what they do with the safeguards. Thank you.
Mark King: Well, good morning, everyone. You'll get sick of the sound of my voice in a few minutes because I'll be doing the presentation. But my name is Mark King. I am the Chief Officer for Environmental and Social Standards in the World Bank, and one of my responsibilities is to lead the safeguards review.
Maitreyi Das:Hello, good morning, everybody. My name is Maitreyi Das, and I am the Global Lead on Social Inclusion.
Charles Di Leva: Hi, good morning. I'm Charles Di Leva, Chief Counsel in the World Bank Legal Department.
Hart Schafer:Good morning, everybody, my name is Hart Schafer. I'm the Vice President for Operations Policy and Country Services in the World Bank that is basically in charge of the safeguards. I've been at the Bank for over 25 years, spent a lot of time working on Africa. My last assignment was as a Regional Director in Egypt, taking care of Egypt, Yemen and Djibouti. I'm delighted to be here. Good morning.
Bill Rahill:Good morning. My name is Bill Rahill, and I'm Director for Environment and Natural Resources, Global Practice. Delighted to be with you here today.
Maninder Gill: Hello, my name is Maninder Gill. I'm Director for Social Development and working on a range of issues and topics, including the social safeguard policies. Great to be here.
Faith Nwadishi: Thank you very much. I'd like to just give a little bit of information about what the agenda today will be like. We're going to have opening remarks from the Vice President of Operations, Mr. Hart. And there will be a short presentation on where things are in the safeguards review process by Mark. Then we'll take comments from our CSOpanelists, and then it will be opened up for Q&A. So quickly, let's hear some opening remarks from Hart. Thank you.
Hart Schafer: Thank you very much, Faith. And thanks all for joining us here. This is a very important meeting, and I actually have been involved in safeguards not only for the last eight months, but it was, I think, three or four years ago when I was the Operations Director in Sustainable Development. That's when the idea came that we needed to revise, review and update and modernize our safeguards. The safeguards had served us well for the last decades. But things around us had changed. The governments’ own capacity had changed, the governments’ own rules and regulations had changed tremendously over the last decades, but also social issues had become much more important and much more to the forefront. What we wanted to aim for was to have a modern set, a modern framework of consistent safeguards.
The IFC had gone ahead before us, and so we embarked on a process. And if I say I was involved three or four years ago, you can imagine, I mean, this is a process that has been going on for a long, long time. But I think, if you want to get it right, this is the time that it takes because for us in the Bank, it means we have to get on board 188 shareholders. We have to find a solution that everybody will be comfortable with in terms of, how do we identify the risks to the people and the environment? How do we manage those risks to the people and the environment? And if those of you who were listening or were in the opening of the Annual Meetings, Jim Kim, our president, he was saying that what we need to do is, we need to protect the planet for future generations.
And this is where safeguards are important. As a former country director, I have seen safeguards in the frontlines. I have been seeing how the safeguards actually help us get better results, make sure that those people who we actually want to help are protected, that there is fair treatment, that the environment is protected and that we are actually achieving sustainable and better results for the future.
Now, when I look at where we are now with the safeguards after two phases of consultations, we have a draft that we presented to our Board, and we are just now launching the third phase of consultations. Now, you may want to ask, why do we need another phase of consultations? Well, for one reason, there are a lot of issues that are still open, that are not finalized. And if you have looked at the website for the safeguards, you have seen there is a long list of 56 issues that we need to focus on.
Second, we want to make sure that the safeguards that the Bank comes up withare actually implementable, that the borrower capacity is there to implement them so that they're actually taking effect. And in the third phase we are going for consultations to 30 countries across the globe. It will be in-depth consultations to see how these safeguards actually would work on a day-to-day basis – for the borrower, for the civil society, for the World Bank teams. And that is what we are calling road-testing, and Mark will give us a little bit of an overview.
What I want to assure everybody is that safeguards have been a cornerstone of the Bank's implementation of investment projects for the last decades – a very important cornerstone to ensure that the results are sustainable. They will remain a very important cornerstone as we go forward. And what we are looking for is a modern framework that protects and ensures the future of the people and the environment.
With those words, let me thank you again for joining us. I look forward to a number of questions, and I will try to provide the answers as best as we can. And I hand it back to Faith and then Mark.
Faith Nwadishi: Thank you very much for reassuring us that this is really a consultative process and that our concerns will be brought to view [inaudible] and also the fact that in the past days we’ve heard so much about the inclusiveness of persons. We're hoping that it would also include inclusiveness of thoughts and actions. So, I'll call on Mark to give us an overview of where we are from the other consultations to what will be happening with the third [phase of] consultations, what has happened and what we need to do to support the process or know about your consultation programs because I'm sure there are a lot of people who would want to know that. Thank you.
Mark King: Thank you, Faith. I'll be using the presentation there, and I know it involves a lot of people's straining their necks, but it serves two purposes. Firstly, it's good to look at and secondly keeps me on track. So, what we'd like to do today is to basically recap for people present, the reasons behind the safeguards review. I know there are a lot of people in this room who've been engaged in this process for a very long time, but there are also many people who are here for the first time. So, I want to help them get up to speed as much as possible. I want to then talk about the standards, what's changed from the last draft a little bit. And more importantly, I want to talk about some of the unresolved issues because that's the area that we could really benefit from your views and feedback.
So, what we're trying to do in this exercise, this safeguards review, is to basically modernize the World Bank's environmental and social framework; to harmonize with the other development partners, many of whom have revised their policies in the last few years; to cover a broader range of environmental and social issues; to regain some form of leadership in terms of development within the world; and to support the twin goals of the Bank, which are eliminating extreme poverty and building shared prosperity.
Now, as you know, the Bank currently has a set of operational policies. These were developed in an ad hoc manner over time. There was a forestry set of issues and challenges, so we developed a forest policy; indigenous peoples, so we developed an indigenous peoples’ policy. But these policies individually do not represent a cohesive, comprehensive approach to environmental and social issues in development. And so what we want to do now is have one holistic approach to environmental and social issues through an environmental and social framework.
And in doing that, we want to build on the existing operational policies. They have very many requirements and commitments. We do not want to lose those, so we're building on those. We are addressing emergent issues or issues that have been around for a number of years, but the Bank has not dealt with them in a systematic manner. We want to ensure that those are built into the new framework. We want to have, now going forward, more emphasis on what happens after Board approval, through better monitoring and supervision of projects.
There is a term that many people use, which is frontloading. And it's to signify that the Bank spends a lot of time, puts a lot of emphasis, working with borrowers to get documents ready before Board approval. But then during implementation, the Bank does not pay sufficient attention to monitoring and supervision. What we aim to accomplish through this framework is a better balance and to put requirements on ourselves, but also on our borrowers, so that we can monitor outcomes on the ground and manage the risks on projects in a better way. And through this we will support the attainment of the twin goals. We see the Environmentaland Social Framework as a vehicle to bring about sustainable development to support the twin goals – some may see it as an obstacle, but we see this as a vehicle to bring about the twin goals.
Now the review process, as Hart has said, has been going on for a number of years, starting off with a general Approach Paper and directions given to the Bank staff by the Board. Those directions included a request that we harmonize as much as possible with our sister organization, the IFC. We had a number of global discussions, which led to the preparation of the first draft last summer. We then had another round of stakeholder engagement and produced the second draft, and we're about to embark on the third round of consultations. In total, this has been the biggest engagement exercise the Bank has ever undertaken and probably the biggest that any other MDB has undertaken also.
Not only are we going to many, many countries, but we're also having many more in-depth discussions in countries. In some situations, this will be two or three days of discussions with governments, for example. We will then produce a third draft and take this to the Board. The emphasis from our perspective is to have a quality third round consultation exercise and not to rush this. And so, as you see, in mid-16 there in yellow, it says, to be determined or to be confirmed. We’re not quite sure exactly when we will go to the Board, but we expect – as I'll talk a little more about later – we expect this consultation to be over in the spring, and then we’ll prepare a revised draft.
Now, I just want to talk about some of the changes between the first and second draft. And I'll do this quickly because I know many of you have already focused on the differences between the first and second draft. But more importantly, I'd like to get onto the real meat of the third round, which is the list of outstanding issues or issues that the Board wishes us to discuss further with countries and give you, in a frank way, a sense of the political arena, if you like, the political economy, behind these issues and hopefully that will help you understand where we're coming from and the challenges that we have in going forward.
So, in the first standard we tried to clarify how and when we would use borrower frameworks, borrower legislation, to achieve the results we expect to see from projects. We also extended the list of vulnerable groups to make it clear that health status – in other words if someone is HIV+, that’s also a grounds for potential discrimination or vulnerability – that needs to be looked at. We also broadened the definition of disability. Sorry, yes, Melissa, just to mention, this is all online so you don’t have to scramble to write it down. We also firmed up the obligations of the borrower to provide information for stakeholder engagement. We addressed some of the concerns that people raised – many in this room – about land titling issues. And also we introduced the concept of ecosystem services throughout the draft. Labor and working conditions, many pointed out that the previous draft was lacking in that it did not address two of the core labor standards: freedom of association and the right of collective bargaining. These have been included. We've allowed for an alternative grievance mechanism for workers where this is not provided for under national law. We've provided stronger language and extended the scope of protection of this standard to other workers. And based on the advice of the ILO and WHO, we've added additional text on occupational health and safety.
We added into the standard that deals with resource efficiency and pollution control requirements related to short and long-lived climate pollutants. And we've also, after a lot of debate, deleted the threshold for reporting of greenhouse gases – and I'll come onto that in a moment. In community, health and safety, we included communities’ exposure not just to communicable diseases, but also non-communicable health issues – so, living in a polluted environment, for example. We've also introduced ecosystem services there, recognizing that's an important concept when we talk about community and people's health. We recognized that climate causes disasters, so we've put in text related to that. We removed the requirements for product safety, recognizing that the Bank itself does not finance production, manufacturing processes, but rather that's in the realm of the IFC. And then one or two other elements, as you can see on the slide.
On land acquisition, we added an annex, which spells out the detailed requirements related to resettlement planning. We also recognized, which we inherently felt anyway, that in some situations, it's important to consider resettlement as a development opportunity. And in some circumstances, if there is large scale resettlement, then that could and should be considered as a separate standalone project to ensure that it has the attention that it deserves as an issue.
We included more explicit treatment of gender within the standard,and we also underlined the fact – or the requirement – that resettlement has to be financed and the financing for resettlement has to be built into the project documentation that goes to Board. In other words, the Board needs to know the cost of the resettlement so that it can take that into consideration in the project before it's approved. And finally, we clarified that no displacement should take place without provisions being in place for the people to be resettled.