Elegantes Telefax - JAV der TUB - TU Berlin

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focusing on country strategy and controlling the country budgets with which they
hired most of the personnel to perform the evaluation functions in the project cycle.
The remaining country personnel and the personnel from the technical departments
were moved to regional sector groups with one environmental sector
group (Gutner 2002) and they had to rely for their administrative expenses more
on the income they gained from being contracted by country managers. The environmental
professionals in the various units are linked by an Environment
Board consisting of the heads of these units and they are part of a network,
called Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development (ESSD) which
contains professionals dealing with rural and social development topics under a
sectoral vice-presidency with the same name. In 2006, the Vice Presidency of
ESSD, however, was merged with the VP for Infrastructure.
The size, the location and resources controlled by the environmental staff is one
important factor for the incentives and resources to monitor and control potentially
environmentally adverse project designs and to create and pursue environmentally
beneficial projects. The other set of factors is the relationship between the environmental
staff and the task managers responsible for the design and operation of the
projects. If one follows the literature (Wade 1997; Rich 2002; Gutner 2002), three
phases of the organization of environmental management, close to those outlined
above, can be distinguished which created a specific institutional set up with a different
incentive structure and expectations about the environmental quality of the World
Bank’s lending. Nielson and Tierney (2003) identify changes in 1994 as an additional
cut off point, thus, introducing a fourth phase. These four phases created different
incentives for environmental assessment and monitoring and for lending stand-alone
environmentally beneficial projects:
• The first phase between 1970 and 1987, basically established by President
Robert McNamara, led to the creation of the Office of Environmental Affairs
which was understaffed for its screening function (3-5 professionals for more
than 200 projects per year), was involved late in the planning cycle, lacked veto
power and had to rely on relatively unspecific guidelines issued late in 1984.
“These were easily ignored, since they left compliance to the discretion of the
task managers” (Gutner 2002, 53). The understanding of environmental management
was largely restricted to the control of industrial pollution and pesticides
use. There was no structure for separate environmental lending.
• With the 1987 reorganization, separate environmental units were created, both
as a central unit and within the regional divisions and within a year the number
of environmental staff increased by 50 within a year. Although it took until 1989
before the specific Environmental Assessment (EA) procedures were in effect,