Elegantes Telefax - JAV der TUB - TU Berlin

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had their administrative budgets lowered so that they had to find country or task
(project) managers who would contract for their services, imitating a market for
consultancy services. Furthermore, the country managers formulated the lending
priorities with the recipient country finance ministries which had lower priorities
for environmental projects. One of the previous sources of environmental
lending, the environmental staff with staff time and own resources, had dried up.
Environmental assessment now relied on an established set of guidelines, but
the incentive structure of environmental staff changed as they became dependent
on task managers for work assignments. In the words of the author of the
2001 Operations Evaluation Department (OED) report on the Bank’s environmental
performance “the quality of the EA process deteriorated” (World Bank
2001a, 21).
The empirical research on the effects of these changes progressed considerably in
the last five years (Gutner 2002; Nielson, Tierney 2003; 2005), but remained somewhat
inconclusive, mostly for the difficulties of operationalizing the variables: First,
the dependent variable ‘environmental behavior’ and second, ‘environmentally relevant
changes in the institutional structure of the World Bank’ as the independent
variables are subject to an intensive debate. True, for the dependent variable, there
are the cases of damaging projects which were the basis for the criticism and the
NGO-campaigning against the World Bank since 1983 (Rich 1994), the results of internal
evaluations of the World Bank (World Bank 1996b; 2002a), the results of the
evaluations by the Wapenhans Commission and the Morse Commission 1992 and
the Inspection Panel evaluations (World Bank 2003e). This evidence is sufficient to
identify the problem, but for analytical purposes it suffers from the small numbers
problem.
The most comprehensive effort so far to solve this problem has been by categorizing
Board approved project commitments according to their environmental quality in time series
between 1980 and 2000 (Nielson, Tierney 2003). The authors first classified 5300 World
Bank (and Global Environmental Facility) projects (numbers and volume of committed spending)
into free-standing environmental, traditional, agricultural, economic and social. In a later
paper (Nielson, Tierney 2005), they classified the projects on an ordinal five point scale from
strictly dirty to strictly environmental independently from the World Bank classification (see
Figure 1): Here, the major changes are the continuous decline of broadly “dirty” projects over
the whole period, the decline of the strictly ”dirty” project only in the first decade and the increase
of environmentally neutral projects. Environmental projects increased only slightly
until the mid-nineties and then declined (Nielson and Tierney 2005, 795).