General/Overall Comments
- The document is too long and often repetitive. The content of the Executive Summary (ES), the conclusions of the various chapters, and the content of the Conclusions chapter seem more or less the same. Perhaps you need to re-think the content in your Conclusions section (not much sense if it just repeats what has already been said before). Also, go through the document with a fine comb to remove repetition. And the whole thing can be MUCH shorter.
- It is unclear to me what you hope to achieve with this document. Who is the document for? Why did you do it? And what is its purpose? It is a good compilation of information about the WCD process. You also make some good analytical insights about political and social contexts, gender, constituencies, representation, etc. But these insights are buried among all the descriptive stuff you have. You need to pull out the key insights in each chapter and highlight them (perhaps it’s just a presentation issue). Then your final conclusions can be your evaluation based on the insights and other analyses.
- There are too many unclear sentences (some examples pointed out below). Also, you seem unwilling to take firm positions. Who are you worried of offending? People need to be able to learn something new from our document, and they can’t do tht unless you are firm, succinct and clear.
Specific Comments
Pg 2, 2nd para and pg 99, last para, pg. 143 para 2: here (and elsewhere too) you use language such as “appear fair” and “appearance of openness.” Gives the impression that you see a difference between genuine fairness and openness, and a perception of fairness and openness; and that you are advocating the perception over reality.
Pg 2, para 2 and pg 3, para 5: I don’t agree that there was a stalemate in the dams debate; the “transaction costs” as you put it became increasingly higher because social movements and supporting CSOs were able to show the absolute inequities and other problems of large dams…
Pg 3, para1: true, MSP recommendations are not binding, more normative, etc., but then you need to discuss a bit more the value of MSPs. Why the different parties agreed to get into it in the first place. Did the World Bank (WB) and IUCN agree BECAUSE MSPs are non-binding and the WB could walk away from it? Did Dam opponents agree because they want to promote alternative approaches to policy development? Maybe you should talk a bit more with Paddy and Shripad about this.
Pg 4, para 3: here and elsewhere, you talk about the importance of a “consensus-driven” process; I agree that consensus is very important, but the process is not necessarily based on equality (depends on the people involved); too often, there were exercises of power by some commissioners and trade-offs, that the CSO commissioners had to make; also led to some agreements that were pretty watered down.
Pg 7, para 2: here and elsewhere you talk about governmental participation and representation on the WCD, and their non-acceptance of the WCD’s findings; this is a much more complex issue than you present, and needs further discussion—how do MSPs affect State-society relations?
It was definitely a shortcoming that the WCD did not involve governments more; there is already a growing gap between some forms of civil society (CS) and governments in the traditional South, and the WCD may have contributed to this gap; but at the same time, governments anywhere cannot claim full representative legitimacy since they often protect quite specific interest groups; there is thus a larger challenge to liberal democracy here–community activists may not be “elected” through ballots, but are representative of and accountable to their constituencies; govt. representatives on most commissions are bureaucrats and even if their ministers are elected through ballots, govt. reps are certainly not elected, nor are they accountable to the public (or to anyone for that matter!); and in this mess we have the IFIs and other policy bodies (such as the WB), who are unwilling to examine their own operations and power plays, and hide behind both governments, and civil society as they find expedient; the WB played this very cleverly in the WCD process…
Pg 7, para 3, p 9 para 1, p. 125, para 2, Pg 132, last para, pg. 141 para 4: The WB being more directly involved has little to do with their accepting the report; they did not like the findings and so they fudge around with committing to operationalising them, using governments as their front; please make no mistake, the WB will manipulate processes of consent and dissent to suit their purposes, no matter what.
Pg 7, last para: pg 50, para 4: you need to be more explicit that most Secrt. Staff came from techno-development-professional backgrounds and had a propensity towards scientism; what “extremes” in the debate are you talking about? There were no grassroots activists or staff with experience in alternative and participatory research methods in the Secrt; Secrt. staff were nice guys, sure, but they were as mainstream as you can get; the struggle against large dams is also a struggle between knowledge systems; and in the WCD Secrt., modernisation had an edge over alternative knowledge systems…
Pg 8, para 3: here and at many places you call the WB and IUCN the “midwives” of the WCD– it gets quite tiring to read this over and over again; if they are credited as the midwives, why don’t you credit the anti-dam movements with the conception and pregnancy stages?
P 9, para 1: same objection as stated above—WB would not accept a report if it contradicts its own interests; this is quite similar to governments’ positions.
But there is also a larger issue of what we expect from “ownership” in such a process; if the WB had more ownership, then perhaps the report would be a lot weaker and sure, they would accept it but the problems underlying large dams would remain as is… ; referring back to your discussion about legitimacy and representativeness, here is a completely non-representative body whose positions and actions man people seem reluctant to challenge! We need to take principled positions against the schoolyard tactics of such a bully institution; there are many recommendations that the WB has not embraced, the WCD is not the first; instead of looking back at what the WCD could have done to get them on board, perhaps you should think about ways of throwing the book at them and shaming them into acceptance.
Congratulations! I think you’ve done an impressive job of synthesizing and analyzing a huge amount of information and I agree with the bulk of your conclusions. I think your report will be very useful. One aspect of the report I strongly disagree with however is the analysis of why the World Bank has failed to endorse the WCD’s recommendations and how this could have been avoided. The Executive Summary states that: “When the Bank later issued a weak response to the Commission’s findings, many observers asked whether providing the Bank a seat at the negotiating table would have increased its buy-in to the Commission’s outcomes.” (p.7) I believe this statement is factually misleading. I hear a lot of opinions on the WCD but I have never once heard an ‘observer’ voice this opinion. If this question is being asked by people outside the WRI review, I think it is misleading to say that ‘many observers’ are asking it. The ES continues that: “When the WCD released its final report, the disadvantages of independence from the Bank became apparent. The Bank failed to embrace the WCD’s package of recommendations, demonstrating that it did not have a sense of accountability to the process …(p.9) I very much disagree with this conclusion. The Bank failed to embrace the recommendations because it didn’t like them, not because it wasn’t sufficiently involved. Witness the more favourable ‘embrace’ from the ADB and AfDB, even tho’ these institutions were far less involved in the process than the World Bank. Had the World Bank been more closely involved I have no doubt that they would have done everything in their power to make the recommendations more palatable to the Bank. If they had succeeded, civil society groups would likely have withdrawn from engagement with the Commission with a serious impact on its multistakeholder legitimacy. Close Bank involvement with the Commission would therefore likely have killed it. (As is implied in the first para on p.18). (The analysis of WB involvement in the Exec Summ seems inconsistent with statement on p.47 of main report that “On balance the decision to not seek direct representation for the WB was likely the right one. . “)
