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Recommendations
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The Bank should continue its engagement with MICs but take steps to produce greater development effectiveness. This requires it to depart from business as usual and to reinvigorate its relationship with clients, incorporating the four main dimensions highlighted below.
Draw on MIC Capacity
- To promote greater country ownership of the Bank's work, and to create better opportunities for the Bank to learn from MICs and share their experience with LICs, Bank support needs to more systematically draw upon and develop each country's own expertise. To this end Management should require that country assistance/country partnership strategies and significant analytic and advisory activities (AAA) assignments plan clearly to do this.
- The Bank ought to identify incentives and obstacles to MICs' involvement in the governance of global programs. This could involve producing an inventory of governance arrangements for global programs which it supports, and conducting a formal consultation exercise with MICs (and other developing countries).
Demonstrate Best Practice
- To deliver the maximum impact from the Bank's limited financial role in MICs, in partnership with clients the Bank's projects and programs must be selected to go beyond conventional approaches and clearly demonstrate how they will add to best practice development activity in the respective country setting. They should also show whether, when, and in what way they are expected to play a catalytic role, being scaled up using resources beyond those initially provided by the Bank.
- Country programs, prepared in full partnership with MIC clients, must pay renewed attention to achieving greater effectiveness in three pressing and complex issues: combating corruption; reducing inequality; and protecting the environment. Programs need to draw on the full range of Bank and other resources available to meet these challenges.
- The Bank could more actively share best practice and encourage arrangements for knowledge transfer across countries, regions, and sectors. Three specific measures to do this would be: (i) giving more weight to this goal in strategically managing staff rotation; (ii) ensuring that research and policy work goes beyond general principles and focuses on specific country-by-country needs; and (iii) reviewing the performance of the networks on this dimension
Become More Agile
- To help the Bank more quickly and easily adapt its services and areas of focus for MICs' evolving needs, it needs to set up a program to test new approaches for a selected group of countries. The first element of the program would be a much more decisive push on the existing slow-moving pilot for the use of country systems in the execution of Bank lending, and significantly increasing the number of countries and projects actually implementing the new approach on-the-ground by mid-FY08.
- The trial program would do well to go further and offer the selected MICs, each with strong institutional capacity, a new menu of support incorporating features such as fast-track procedures, faster response times, and more flexible strategies.
- The Bank should continue efforts to expand the choice of services it offers. This can be done by accelerating the development and deployment of: (i) new financial instruments such as those helping countries manage and reduce vulnerability to external shocks; (ii) existing and new products which help tackle subnational challenges; and (iii) new arrangements-with clear, consistent, and user-friendly guidelines-for fee-for-service technical expertise, including that for project design and supervision.
Make the Most of Bank Group Cooperation
The Bank Group must develop a more pragmatic approach to cooperation across the Bank, IFC, and MIGA, to successfully offer clients a more effective package from its combined resources. This approach could include new incentives or channels for cooperation such as piloting single country management arrangements. In cases where joint country strategies are appropriate they should be prepared more rigorously, and followed through with performance monitoring designed to trace through the net gains from cooperation. Any new approach must be communicated to and gain the support of staff, who ultimately determine the extent and success of such cooperation. |
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