5.5.1 Challenges set by the new aid agenda

Bird and Caravani (2009) [link to references] argue that civil society and other stakeholders face a number of challenges in securing improved environmental outcomes in a context where the Paris Declaration is driving the agenda for official development assistance. They highlight six main challenges:

• Mainstreaming of environmental issues across government;
• Defining the role of government with regard to environmental stewardship;
• Challenging the status quo over benefits accruing from environmental assets;
• Moving the aid debate beyond budget support;
• Moving beyond policy conditionality to national accountability;
• Monitoring progress.

Two of these are particularly important to environmental mainstreaming:

Mainstreaming of environmental issues across government

The move towards budget support has heightened reliance on the mainstreaming of environmental issues across government programmes. However, defining how this can best be done in practice is a considerable challenge (Hanrahan and Green, 2007). An evaluation of budget support carried out by IDD and Associates (2006) highlighted the limited integration of cross-cutting issues such as environment into Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). Even when such issues are integrated there is often little follow-up in budget allocation and associated budget support arrangements. Attention by donors and civil society therefore needs to shift away from a focus on policy processes to give greater attention to (i) the underlying regulatory framework and (ii) the institutional architecture of national environmental governance and management.

Defining the role of government

With regard to the institutional architecture for national environmental governance, Ministries of the Environment and their departments largely remain on the margins of the public administration, lacking the political clout to coordinate environmental actions across government. However, a common response to this situation - that of creating semi-autonomous agencies to provide greater managerial flexibility, has tended to disengage these organisations from the national budget. With an emphasis on the internal generation of funds, activities that tend not to bring in funds have been ignored in favour of those that do. As one example, national forestry authorities tend to spend considerable resources on the collection of timber harvesting fees and leave forest protection activities undone. This calls for greater clarity of organisational mandates. Civil society has a role to play here; one early focus might be through highlighting conflicting institutional functions that undermine environmental protection by government agencies.