Country Environmental Analysis (CEA)

The World Bank regularly monitors and reports on many aspects of development in its client countries through diagnostic tools such as poverty assessments, public expenditure reviews, country financial accountability assessments and institutional and governance reviews. In the context of country level environmental analytic work, in the past, an array of tools has been used by different Regions at the Bank to facilitate integration of environmental issues into policy dialogue with client countries. The quality of environmental economic and sector work varied and there was little systematic effort to coordinate learning from upstream analytic work between Regions. These factors constrained the Bank's ability to effectively integrate environmental issues into country programming.

Recognizing these challenges, the Bank's Environment Strategy (2001) emphasized the need to strengthen the analytical foundation of environmental work both at the country and sector level. In this context, Country Environmental Analysis (CEA) was identified as one of the key country-level diagnostic tools designed to evaluate systematically the environmental priorities of development in client countries, the environmental implications of key policies, and countries’ capacity to address their priorities.

A number of review papers on methodology for CEA have been prepared. CEA pilots have been completed in several countries including Belarus, Serbia and Montenegro, Tunisia, Egypt and the Dominican Republic. Others are at various stages of preparation or finalizaton   for example, Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Orissa (India), North East states (India), Pakistan, Vietnam, Ghana and Nigeria.

To access CEA toolkit please click here. The toolkit is also located in the left menu under Analytical and Advisory Assistance.