DESIGNING PROJECTS IN A RAPIDLY CHANGING WORLD

FACTORS THAT MAY HINDER IMPLEMENTATION
• Livestock inheritance rules.
• Drought relief policies that discourage farmers from
producing a reliable supply of food.
• Unequal and unfair access to information, markets,
resources, education and health services.
• Lack of treatment for a local animal disease.
WAYS TO ESTIMATE BENEFITS AND COSTS OF PATHWAYS
Cost–benefit analysis is a common method for
appraising development projects, policies or programs.
Principles for guiding its use include:
• the analysis should compare net social benefits with
and without the project, as well as before and after
it, so an estimate is needed of the possible trajectory
without the project;
• the cost–benefit analysis should be developed in
close consultation with stakeholders through the
Multi-Stakeholder Engagement and Governance
component;
• benefits and costs are not usually distributed equally
among households or between genders. It is important
to show this in the analysis, and how that
may change over time;
• benefits and costs can be economic, social or environmental
and encompass a diversity of values,
many of which are not amenable to monetization;
• many important benefits cannot be quantified –
governance capacity for example. It is important
not to assume that quantified benefits are automatically
more important than qualitative ones.
We propose these additional principles when applying
cost–benefit analysis to pathways:
• the pathway as a whole should have an expected
FULL REFERENCES FOR OPTIONS AND PATHWAYS
• Poor infrastructure (transport, communications).
• Low capacity and education levels.
• Corruption.
• Lack of resource-use rights.
• Cultural sensitivity about tasks undertaken by women.
net social benefit, but a net social loss may be acceptable
during the early years provided the local
community does not bear it;
• analyse only the first few years of a project, because
subsequent uncertainty is likely to make a formal
analysis misleading. This does not matter when
only the first few years of the pathway will be funded
initially. If the community does not achieve its
goals with the first tranche of funding, we expect
the pathway to be funded again until self-sufficiency
is achieved;
• inevitably some interventions will not be implemented
when planned and some new interventions
will be implemented instead, so a generous amount
needs to be allocated for contingencies;
• interventions are subject to great risk and uncertainty.
Risk assessments are based on statistical
data and the interactions of climatic with societal
changes have not yet generated the statistical data
we need to quantify risk in a conventional engineering
way. Thus, it may be wiser to apply subjective
probabilities than to use out dated statistics;
• systems subject to threshold changes can display
very large and often irreversible changes in benefits
and costs if thresholds are crossed. It is wise therefore
to make clear and prominent statements within
the cost–benefit document about the consequences
of crossing a threshold.
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102 Appendices