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Safeguard Policies: Improving Development Effectiveness.
Background
The World Bank Group (which includes the Bank, IFC and MIGA) has been a leader among development institutions in promoting attention to sustainable development. For more than 20 years, the Bank has had policies requiring that potentially adverse environmental impacts and selected social impacts of its investment projects be identified, avoided, or minimized and mitigated; and in 1997, Bank Management designated this specific set of policies as “safeguard policies” to stress their importance for achieving its environmental and social objectives and for enhancing the quality of its operations.
In the past two years, the Management and the Executive Directors of the Bank have taken a number of steps to strengthen the implementation of their safeguard policies: for example, by enhancing the procedures for risk assessment, review, and sign-off; strengthening staffing, funding and reporting mechanisms; and improving procedures for applying safeguards consistently across Regions.
This past year, the Bank’s Executive Directors reaffirmed the importance of continued compliance with safeguard policies, while requesting an opportunity to discuss the future of the Bank’s safeguard system. In particular, they asked what additional steps the Bank Group might take to make safeguards more relevant to changing development practices, to promote borrower ownership, and to build country capacity to apply safeguard principles in national development programs.
Key Documents
To answer these questions, a dialogue is being initiated with borrowers and other stakeholders on ways to strengthen the ownership and effectiveness of safeguard principles and practices. To facilitate this dialogue, and to create a broader awareness of safeguard objectives and issues, the Bank is distributing several related documents. These documents can be accessed through the links below:
- The Changing Bank: this link provides background information on the Bank’s strategic framework and the comprehensive development framework as well as other information on the changing work of the Bank....
The Proposed Safeguards Dialogue
The dialogue on the options for going forward will begin in late 2002 in a selected number of locations to be announced, and it will continue in 2003. Background documents will be translated and posted on the web in preparation for this dialogue.
Comments on the proposals in the Framework Paper (above) can be sent to the Bank through the following Email address: safeguardsframework@worldbank.org. Given the number of comments that are expected, they will not be answered individually, but they will be summarized periodically and summaries will be posted on the web. The views of borrowers and other stakeholders will also be reflected in further reports to the Executive Directors.
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