The TDA/SAP Process

The GEF IW TDA/SAP Process

Notes[1] on a proposed best practice approach

1. Introduction to the TDA/SAP process

The formulation of a Transboundary Diagnostic Analysis (TDA) followed by a Strategic Action Programme (SAP) is recommended for most projects proposed for financing in Operational Programmes 8 and 9 of the GEF International Waters Focal Area.

The advice on TDA and SAP approaches given by the relevant GEF documents is rather limited. The design of new information gathering mechanisms and the experience of a number of GEF projects to date in the design of TDA’s provides an opportunity to develop more formal guidelines to assist with the preparation of TDAs and to ensure inter-regional comparability.

The GEF recently commissioned a comprehensive programme study for its Operation Programmes 8 and 9. The Final Report of the International Waters Program Study is available on the IW:LEARN Web site at: http://www.iwlearn.net/ftp/iwps.pdf..

The Programme Study found that the current emphasis on undertaking a science-based TDA prior to the design of a SAP is appropriate for projects in Operational Programs 8 and 9. Such scientific and technical assessments are needed to:

(1)  identify, quantify, and set priorities for the environmental concerns that are transboundary in nature, and

(2)  to identify their immediate, intermediate and fundamental causes. The identification of causes specifies practices, sources, locations and human activity sectors from which environmental degradation arises or is threatened.

A TDA thus provides the factual basis for the formulation of a SAP embodying specific actions (policy, legal, institutional reforms or investments) that can be adopted nationally, usually within a harmonized multinational context, to at least address the top priority transboundary concern(s) and over the longer term restore or protect a specific body of water or transboundary ecosystem.

The Programme Study found that there are a variety of ways in which a TDA is conducted. Some are more resource-intensive than others, but these usually offer advantages in providing greater insight and specificity, thereby providing an improved information base for the formulation of SAPs. The TDA permits the logical development of a strategic action program that is based on a reasoned, holistic and multisectoral consideration of the problems associated with the state of and threats to transboundary water systems. Furthermore, it is a valuable vehicle for multilateral exchanges of perspectives and stakeholder consultation as a precursor to the eventual formulation of a SAP.

2. Underlying principles

The following are some of the key underlying principles incorporated into the TDA/SAP approach:

·  Full stakeholder participation.
All parties involved in or affected by an environmental problem and/or its solution can be termed ‘stakeholders’. In order to be objective in analysis and effective in solutions, the TDA/SAP process must reflect a shared vision that enables stakeholder to be independently identified, fully involved in the TDA and fully consulted throughout the SAP process. Whilst understanding that some solutions may not be acceptable to all parties, it is imperative that those that are eventually adopted should reflect a rigorous social assessment and be subjected to open stakeholder consultation.

·  Joint fact-finding.
The TDA should be conducted with the best available independent expertise, sourced locally where possible. The specialists should be selected by stakeholder representatives, many of which are typically included in national inter-ministerial committees (see below), and consult with them during the process. This is important to ensure regional ownership of the process and its products.

·  Transparency.
The TDA is a document that will be in the public domain. During the fact-finding process, stakeholders should agree to freely share the necessary information and information products, taking care that full recognition is given to information sources.

·  The ecosystem approach.
A useful working definition of the ecosystem approach has been developed by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, 1998): The ecosystem approach is based on the application of appropriate scientific methodologies focused on levels of biological organization which encompass the essential processes and interactions amongst organisms and their environment. The ecosystem approach recognizes that humans are an integral component of ecosystems.
The ecosystem approach has the following key features:

·  Management objectives as societal choice

·  Management decentralised and multi-sectoral

·  Appropriate temporal and spatial scale

·  Conservation of ecosystem function and resilience

·  Appropriate balance between conservation and use

·  Management within system limits

·  The outward vision (respect interconnectedness) and long-term vision (change is inevitable)

·  Broad use of knowledge, scientific and traditional

·  Incorporation of economic considerations (costs and benefits, removal of externalities, etc.)

The GEF IW Programme has the potential of delivering the ecosystem approach as it defines systems within natural boundaries (catchments or LMEs) rather than political ones.

·  Adaptive management.
Adaptive management, sometimes described as ‘learning by doing’, is a process by which agreed long-term environmental goals are achieved in a series of pragmatic action-based steps. Within each step agreed achievement indicators are monitored and there is a joint planning exercise to review progress and to plan the next step. For the purposes of many GEF IW projects, the adaptive management process consists of: (1) establishing long-term Ecosystemic Quality Objectives (EcoQOs) for identified key problems, (2) agreeing upon the most practical and achievable short-term (project length) measures for making substantive progress towards resolving the problems, (3) setting time-limited operational objectives as project targets, (4) agreeing upon the appropriate process, stress reduction and environmental and living resource status indicators to monitor progress and setting new operational objectives, (5) consulting with stakeholders on the proposals, (6) ensuring that the appropriate institutional measures are in place to oversee implementation of the agreed joint actions, and finally (7) conducting a review to document progress toward the long-term EcoQOs in the light of any new scientific information and to agree on a new set of measures, operational objectives, etc. The details of the process and its components will be elaborated further in section 3 of the current notes. The document describing stakeholder commitment to the process for a particular transboundary system is the Strategic Action Programme. A key requirement of this approach is a monitoring and assessment programme to determine the effectiveness of the approach and guide it as it moves forward (see Fig. 1 for details).

·  Action that takes into account social and economic root causes of the problem.
The analysis of causal chains between key transboundary problems and their social and economic causes is a critically important element of the TDA process. It is important to appreciate that the geographical scale may change between the environmental and social impacts of a problem, the problem itself and the causes of the problem. Actions taken nearer to the root causes are more likely to have a lasting impact on the problem. The causal chain analysis is an important reference point when designing the practical actions that will be included in the SAP.

·  Accountability.
Parties committing themselves to implementing the SAP must be fully accountable for their actions. The stakeholder group/ sector/ government agency(ies) responsible for implementing the actions proposed within the TDA must be clearly and unambiguously identified.

·  Inter-sectoral policy building.
Current systems of government are highly sectoral in nature. In order to develop a pragmatic programme of action, direct participation should be achieved by the key sectors involved in the problems. This involvement will normally consist of national Interministerial committees, including appropriate government sectors as well as other relevant stakeholder representatives.

·  Stepwise consensus building
Effective management requires a consensus to be built at every step. It is important not to advance to the subsequent step until a clear consensus emerges. By including clear stakeholder representation at all stages of the process, consensus-building is more likely to occur, ensuring a greater probability of long-term sustainability of the process and its outcomes.

·  Subsidiarity
Practical solutions to transboundary issues require action at regional, national and sub-national (or local) levels. The more closely defined are the national and sub-national actions, the greater the likelihood of reaching the EcoQOs. The SAP should clearly address the balance between regional and national actions, attributing the most appropriate implementation mechanism to each level of action.

·  Incremental costs.
The SAP should distinguish those actions involving agreed incremental costs from those of purely national interest (baseline actions).

·  Donor partnerships.
The SAP process is designed to build partnerships between development partners (donors) in order to address the identified problems and, where necessary, to assist governments to cover the costs of baseline actions. An effective donor partnership will act as an incentive for commitment to the SAP and avoid duplication of efforts by the donor community.

·  Government commitment.
Approval or adoption of the SAP as a binding agreement between governments should be an important management objective of the process. If the process has been conducted in a stepwise manner, this final step should not be difficult to achieve (though it may well require administrative time). An SAP that does not involve a high level of formal commitment is unlikely to be taken seriously as a roadmap for policy development and implementation.

Figure 1: Diagram illustrating the approach towards monitoring and assessment within the paradigm of adaptive management. There are two feed-back loops in the process. The first step consists of the selection of Ecosystemic (or Ecological) Quality Objectives based upon the results of the Transboundary Diagnostic Analysis. Operational objectives, negotiated and set within the timescale of a project implementation cycle, are pragmatic steps towards achieving the EcoQOs. Both the EcoQOs and the operational objectives require quantitative indicators and these are incorporated within a regular monitoring programme. The results of the monitoring programme are used for (1) implementing regulations and checking compliance with the operational objectives, and (2) measuring the status and trends of key system state indicators (environmental and socio-economic) in order to assess progress towards the EcoQOs and ultimately the relevance of the EcoQOs themselves.

3. Key steps in the TDA/SAP process

Figure 2 describes a TDA/SAP process as a series of steps divided into three components: (1) development of a project idea, (2) joint fact-finding, and (3) preparing the SAP. These will be described in the current section. Please note that the linear arrangement of most of the tasks has been adopted for the purpose of simplicity in presentation. In practice, some of the tasks can be performed in parallel, especially during the information gathering process for the TDA.

3.1 Development of the project idea

·  Project process initiated – Facilitator identified

The initial preliminary request for a project is submitted to one of the GEF Implementing Agencies through the GEF Focal Points following the usual procedure. If the GEF-IA task manager is satisfied with the legitimacy of the request, he/she may solicit start-up funding (PDF-A). At this point, it is advisable to appoint a neutral facilitator with full knowledge of the TDA/SAP process. The facilitator may be a member of the IA staff, an external consultant or and expert from another organisation. She/he should not be from any of the interested regional parties in the project however. It is important that the facilitator should have appropriate language skills and cultural sensitivity.

·  Identify/consult with stakeholder groups

A stakeholder consultation is a formal process designed to identify the main stakeholder groups (and their representatives) and to solicit their opinions on the main transboundary issues in the region. The consultation is conducted on the basis of formal structured face-to-face interviews using open questions. The interview has three principal parts (1) questions regarding the nature and severity of the transboundary issues, (2) questions regarding who are the other stakeholders, and (3) questions about who are the main persons empowered to resolve the identified problems (a ‘power analysis’). The facilitator visits the countries requesting project support and conducts the interviews (based upon an initial list supplied by the GEF focal points or the organism initiating the proposal[2]). If the results of the interviews suggest the omission of a major stakeholder, he/she may request access to them for the purpose of an additional interview.

Having completed the interview process, the facilitator formulates a report to the IA that contains observations regarding stakeholder representation on the project technical task team.

·  Form technical task team (TTT)

The IA task manager visits the GEF focal points to discuss the outcome of the stakeholder consultation and to agree upon the composition of a technical task team. Note that the TTT is a broadly representative technical body that will undertake the joint fact-finding work of the TDA. It is important that stakeholder groups feel part of this process. If the technical work is ‘captured’ by a single sector, the first step in the consensus building process will be lost. Note also that broad representation at this stage does not mean selection of the best academic scientific experts. There will be an opportunity to fully involve the science community at a subsequent stage. The initial TTT should be relatively small (a convenient maximum size would be 12 but number will vary between geographical regions). Project that have taken this approach include the Mekong River and the Dnieper.

·  Design project concept

The TTT meets with the facilitator to design a project concept for undertaking the TDA/SAP process. This implies a good understanding of the overall TDA/SAP process. Train Sea Coast, together with IWLearn is developing a training package to ensure that the general process is understandable. All facilitators will have already attended a colloquium on the TDA/SAP and project delivery.

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