When Do Environmentally Focused Assistance Projects Achieve their Objectives? Evidence from World Bank Post-Project Evaluations

Mark T. Buntaine and Bradley C. Parks
Additional contact information
Mark T. Buntaine: Mark T. Buntaine is assistant professor of government at the College of William and Mary.
Bradley C. Parks: Bradley C. Parks is co-executive director of AidData and research faculty at the College of William and Mary's Institute for Theory and Practice of International Relations.

Global Environmental Politics, 2013, vol. 13, issue 2, 65-88

Abstract: Scholars and practitioners have paid considerable attention to the factors that promote successful outcomes in environmentally focused assistance projects. Previous studies have identified various potential predictors of successful outcomes, including the political commitment, institutional capacity, and governance quality of the recipient country; the severity of environmental pressures in the recipient country; donor-recipient contracting dynamics; project characteristics; and civic participation in the recipient country environment sector. We test the influence of these variables on project success using a dataset of outcome ratings for all environmentally focused World Bank projects approved since 1994. We find that strong public sector institutions in the recipient country and proactive staff supervision foster project success and that projects seeking to achieve global environmental objectives are less likely to succeed. Future research will be most fruitful if it focuses on how operational and management characteristics of individual projects lead to successful outcomes. © 2013 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: environmental assistance; global environmental assistance; World Bank projects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q50 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GLEP_a_00167 link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:glenvp:v:13:y:2013:i:2:p:65-88

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1526-3800

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is currently edited by Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().