International Review of Waste Management Policy - Department of ...

There is evidence to suggest that environmental funds have been developed in-line
with the St. Petersburg Guidelines, therefore they have the intention of following best
practise. For example, Sita, on behalf of the LCF, include the following in their
Guidance Notes:
“Projects should be self-sustaining once the initial project funding has been
invested. This will include ensuring that the project can be managed and
maintained and that funding is available to cover these costs into the
future.” 1137
The problem lies in post-evaluation of the fund, where although user-friendly casestudies
are frequently available to show project specific outcomes of the funding,
data to analyse overall fund efficiencies is not widely released. That is not to say that
detailed evaluation of the fund does not take place, because it most certainly does,
but the results of which are not widely circulated.
60.9 Environmental Impact of Fund
The OECD’s 2006 ‘Recommendation of the Council on Good Practices for Public
Environmental Expenditure Management’ provides a good practice checklist for
establishing, reviewing and reforming public environmental funding programmes in
terms of environmental effectiveness. It is structured using 5 principles, under which
good practices are provided, a summary of which is below:
Principle 1: Additionality and consistency with other environmental policy instruments
Good Practices: the need for the fund should be justified through the polluter-pays
/user pays principle. 1138 They should not be used to reach objectives which should
have been reached via a policy mechanism, or to fund projects which could have
received private investment. The fund should compliment existing policies. It should
be used to finance capital costs, not operational. The fund should be regularly
audited, and phased out when their role is fulfilled.
Principle 2: Well-defined programming framework
The fund should be distributed via a publicly-available expenditure programme which
is set within a wider policy-setting, and which has been approved by the appropriate
bodies.
Principle 3: Clear identification of environmental outcomes
Quantitative and qualitative information on projects’ environmental outcomes should
be submitted in a standard format, and expressed in monetary format where possible
to allow cost-benefit analysis to be undertaken. Environmental outcomes should be
1137 Sita Trust, Enhancing Communities Large Grants Scheme Guidance Notes, Available:
http://www.sitatrust.org.uk/resources/documents/LGS/LGS_Guidance_Notes3mile11.03.09.pdf
1138 The Polluter-Pays-Principle (PPP) requires polluters to pay the full costs of any subsequent clean-up
without subsidies. The User-Pays-Principle states that revenue generated by users must cover all the
costs related to the use of a natural resource.
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International Review of Waste Policy: Annexes