Lessons from World Bank natural resource management projects

The World Bank has increased investment in natural resource-related projects significantly in recent decades, and especially since the 1992 Rio Summit. Originally focused more on forestry projects, the portfolio has expanded to include projects guided by the Bank's policies for forest and water resource management, which emphasize environmental concerns. The Bank's overall natural resource management (NRM) portfolio has expanded with increasing emphasis on lending for improved land forest, and water management and supportive policy and market reforms. Reviews by the World Bank of its completed and ongoing natural resource projects, draw lessons for future project design and implementation. The reviews suggest that monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is a weak point in many NRM projects. The identification, design, and implementation of key indicators of environmental conditions and results, involvement of local stakeholders, and provisions made for their institutional support, have been inadequate for many projects. Existing performance indicators focus on project implementation issues and outputs, rather than on the extent to which the project had achieved desired outcomes and impacts. More attention needs to be paid to assessment of the poverty impacts of NPM projects, and to monitoring environmental progress.