As the transition to green growth is one of the two overarching objectives of the African Development Bank Group’s (AfDB or "the Bank") Ten-Year Strategy (2013–2022), Independent Development Evaluation (IDEV) conducted an evaluation of the AfDB’s efforts to mainstream Green Growth (GG) and Climate Change (CC) into its interventions between 2008 and 2018. The evaluation considered all AfDB interventions: policies, strategies, guidelines, tools, action plans, and lending and non-lending operations in both the public and private sectors. It aimed at: (i) learning, by providing lessons and recommendations to address strategic, conceptual, and implementation issues related to Bank interventions that mainstream GG-CC and (ii) accountability, by reporting to the Board of Directors and other stakeholders on the results of the Bank's investments in activities included within its GG and CC strategies and frameworks. One of the building blocks of the evaluation is a project cluster evaluation covering the energy and transport sectors.
This evaluation addressed the following two overarching questions:
- How well has the Bank mainstreamed GG-CC into its interventions including policies, strategies and operations?
- How well have the Bank-funded projects that mainstream GG-CC performed in terms of relevance, effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability?
Selected Findings:
Mainstreaming GG-CC into Bank policies, strategies and operations
- The Bank Ten-Year Strategy & "High 5s”: The results of GG-CC mainstreaming activities are increasingly evident during the 2008-2018 period after the Bank’s approval of key policy and strategy documents, such as the ‘Transitioning Towards Green Growth’ framework (2014) following the Bank’s Ten-Year Strategy (2013).
- Substantive references to GG-CC are now observed in the most recent Country Strategy Papers (CSPs) and Regional Integration Strategy Papers (RISPs) and in sectoral policies, but they have been implemented in a limited way, largely due to capacity constraints at country level, GG not being readily ‘actionable’, and a high level of uncertainty about “pathways to change.”
- GG-CC mainstreaming considerations have been introduced systematically during the design of Bank-funded operations, but are not being adequately measured during implementation. The Bank could also do more to facilitate coordinated cross-sectoral action for effective GG-CC mainstreaming.
Portfolio and Performance of projects evaluated
From the Bank’s portfolio of 873 projects that were identified as mainstreaming GG-CC, 20 projects were selected for in-depth analysis. For these projects, the relevance of project objectives and targets was found satisfactory overall. Efficiency was mixed: satisfactory for budget use, unsatisfactory for time use (implementation delays). The sustainability of the projects was found to be unsatisfactory overall. On effectiveness, almost half of the projects couldn’t be assessed due to a lack of data, and of the remainder, about one quarter was unsatisfactory.
Lessons:
- Where specialized GG-CC units are located higher in the structure of a Multilateral Development Bank (MDB), GG-CC results are better achieved.
- An increased role, capability, and GG-CC expertise in Regional and Country Offices tend to enhance the performance of projects and non-lending interventions in the area of GG-CC.
- Monitoring and measuring the Bank’s achievement of GG-CC results is essential to ensuring its intentions and approved intervention designs that mainstream GG-CC are being implemented.
Recommendations:
IDEV made the following recommendations:
- Locate the department responsible for GG-CC appropriately in the Bank’s hierarchy, so that it provides overall strategic oversight and guidance for all GG-CC activities, including responsibility for appropriate targets that are cascaded throughout the institution.
- Strengthen the technical and institutional capacities of the Bank’s GG-CC specialized unit, the Climate Change and Green Growth Department, to provide quality and timely hands-on support to the Bank's Regional and Country offices for effective GG-CC mainstreaming throughout the project cycle.
- Establish a clear theory of change (particularly for GG, but also CC) and an integrated GG-CC results framework, with clear definitions that follow the recently strengthened and agreed GG-CC definitions of MDBs.
- Clarify focus areas for GG-CC interventions for the AfDB that appropriately consider the Bank’s comparative advantage and expertise across sectors.
- Put in place adequate mechanisms to monitor and track GG-CC results throughout the project cycle, to (i) promote continued attention for GG-CC during project implementation, (ii) enable the Bank to address potential barriers to the uptake and effectiveness of GG-CC mainstreaming, and (iii) improve reporting on the results achieved.
Management agreed with most of IDEV’s findings and recommendations and will draw on them as it continues to develop the Bank’s new climate change and green growth policy framework.
Task Manager: Mabarakissa Diomande, Senior Evaluation Officer