Environment mainstreaming is understood as the deliberate and proactive integration of environmental concerns, including climate, into development policies, plans, budgets and actions. This chapter explains the genesis of this peer-learning exercise on environment mainstreaming, a priority challenge which Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members identified as urgently requiring more research and learning. It outlines the challenges facing DAC members as they seek to go beyond using environment safeguards, choosing to integrate a wide range of environmental potentials and threats in their development co-operation activities.
Greening Development Co-operation
Lessons from the OECD Development Assistance Committee
Report
The Development Dimension
Table of contents
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1. The purpose and scope of this report
Abstract
This peer learning exercise on mainstreaming environmental issues in development co-operation was conducted by the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC). The DAC is a unique international forum of many of the largest government providers of development co-operation, promoting knowledge management, exchange of best practice and peer review.1 Formal DAC peer reviews2 are a well-known requirement of membership and serve two purposes: 1) holding DAC members accountable for the commitments they have made, and reviewing their performance against key dimensions of development co-operation and other domestic policies with an impact on developing countries; and 2) allowing members to share and learn from good practice.3 For emerging trends and pressing challenges in development co-operation for which there is not yet clear DAC guidance, or where members are finding implementation challenging, the DAC has begun peer-learning exercises to help move forward. This report summarises the second formal peer-learning process, which was informed by the first, on private sector engagement for sustainable development (OECD, 2016[1]).
In 2017, DAC members identified managing and mainstreaming environmental concerns as a priority challenge which urgently required more research and learning. They agreed that to deliver the holistic 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,4 it was critical to tackle environmental challenges and threats such as climate change, pollution, loss of ecosystem services and biodiversity at local, national and global levels. Managing environmental opportunities and challenges is clearly essential to achieve the environment-focused Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) on climate (SDG 13), on aquatic systems (SDG 14), and on land systems (SDG 15).5 However, the integrated nature of the SDGs also requires environmental concerns to be addressed across all the goals – and this is the challenge now facing DAC members.
Environment mainstreaming means the deliberate and proactive integration of environmental concerns including climate into development policies, plans, budgets and actions.6 This is required to ensure environmental sustainability in all activity, but it has been difficult to achieve in practice. While most DAC members have environmental safeguards in place to screen out bad environmental practice in planning development interventions, and have increased their attention to climate change, they recognise that their policies, capacities and approaches for integrating the wide range of environmental potentials and threats are not robust enough to meet growing challenges.
It is strikingly clear that the challenges driving environment mainstreaming are changing, and most are escalating. There have been rapid advances in many areas, with recent improvements in scientific understanding of environmental functioning and the threats to it. Climate change has dominated environment mainstreaming in the last decade, driven to the top of the agenda by sound scientific consensus, increasing government and business concern, as well as public pressure. But other ecological limits have also become apparent,7 challenging DAC members to better understand and tackle issues as diverse as pollution and biodiversity. There is now almost universal government commitment to increasingly ambitious international environmental and sustainability policies (notably embodied in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change8 and SDGs). The stakes are being raised by non-government actors: market drivers to apply environmental standards to investment and production are expanding, with many leading companies now avoiding carbon-intensive production and aiming for certified markets; while escalating civil society protests in developed and developing countries alike are highlighting environmental degradation and calling for environmental rights (including schoolchildren in several countries striking to call for government action and street protests on the climate emergency).
The parallel changes in development assistance, including decentralisation to country offices and the increasing role of the private sector and new (blended) finance mechanisms, are diversifying development partners and funds. This demands greater clarity over the objectives and approach to environmental integration. The time is therefore ripe for the DAC to share experiences and lessons on how best to advance the individual and collective responsibilities of development co-operation to mainstream environment.
This learning exercise aimed to assess how all relevant environment issues – not only climate, the current prevailing focus – are integrated into DAC members’ strategies and programmes. The approach was to look at actual practice and involved peers visiting one another and exchanging experience and views (Chapter 2). They looked at environment mainstreaming across all the programme cycle tasks from assessment, strategy, planning and financing, to reporting and review, as well as staff and partner capacity development. The peers sought to find out what worked for environmental integration and why, to pinpoint persistent and emerging challenges, and to explore ideas and opportunities for improving practice.
This report summarises the lessons gathered through the peer-learning process (Chapter 3). It offers demonstrated lessons and documented good practices that can be used by DAC members and others to enhance their approaches to mainstreaming environment, and to inform future DAC work – including peer reviews. Chapter 4 concludes with preliminary suggestions on how the DAC can support improved approaches to environment mainstreaming. While addressed to DAC members, it is hoped that this report will also interest development and environmental authorities and professionals more broadly, particularly those operating in developing countries.
References
[1] OECD (2016), Private Sector Engagement for Sustainable Development: Lessons from the DAC, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264266889-en.
Notes
← 2. These are available at: https://www.oecd.org/dac/peer-reviews
← 3. Currently each DAC peer review covers the following topics: global efforts for sustainable development; policy vision and framework; financing for development; structure and systems; delivery modalities and partnerships, globally, regionally and at country-level; results, evaluation and learning; fragility and crises; and humanitarian assistance. All of these have implications for environmental mainstreaming.
← 5. The text of the SDGs is available at: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals
← 6. The term used by Sida is not mainstreaming, but integration, which works better in Swedish. ‘Integration’ is also used by many others, sometimes because it does not imply a hierarchy between the elements which are being brought together.
← 7. Such as Stockholm University’s research into the nine planetary boundaries: www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries/planetary-boundaries/about-the-research/the-nine-planetary-boundaries.html