Publications & Documents

The need to reform water policies is as urgent as ever. Water is essential for economic growth, human health, and the environment. Yet governments around the world face significant challenges in managing their water resources effectively. The problems are multiple and complex: billions of people are still without access to safe water and adequate sanitation; competition for water is increasing among the different uses and users; and major investment is required to maintain and improve water infrastructure in OECD and non-OECD countries.   Despite progress on many fronts, governments around the world are still confronted with the need to reform their existing water policies in order to meet current objectives and future challenges. Building on the water challenges identified by the OECD Environment Outlook to 2050, this report examines three fundamental areas that need to be addressed whatever reform agendas are pursued by governments: financing of the water sector; the governance and institutional arrangements that are in place; and coherence between water policies and policies in place in other sectors of the economy. The report provides governments with practical advice and policy tools to pursue urgent reform in their water sectors.

For the most part, the findings are clear: while many donors and partner country governments have made significant progress towards the targets that they set themselves for 2010, few of them have been met. Partner country authorities appear to have gone further in implementing their commitments under the Paris Declaration than donors, though efforts – and progress – also vary significantly across countries and donor organisations.

As the international community takes stock of what has been achieved on the occasion of the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, Korea (29 November to 1 December 2011), this report sets out evidence of progress and challenges in making aid more effective. This evidence should help forge a consensus beyond Busan that aid – and its effectiveness –represents only one element of a broader landscape of development finance and joint efforts to make aid more effective can and should inform a broader development effectiveness agenda.    

Corruption and other governance problems result primarily from processes generated within the domestic political economy. There are major international factors, however, that interact with domestic processes: international drivers of corruption.   This report introduces an analytical tool to help readers understand how these international drivers of corruption affect governance and corruption at the country level. It provides a means for identifying those drivers that matter most for domestic governance, as well as opportunities for international actors to work more effectively to improve governance in specific country contexts.

The principles of sustainable development play an integral role in making development assistance work at the level of policies, plans and programmes. In response to the  Paris Declaration call to '… develop and apply common approaches for ‘Strategic Environmental Assessment’ at sector and national levels' among donors and partners, the Guidance on Applying Strategic Environmental Assessment was endorsed in 2006 by members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee, representatives of developing countries receiving aid, the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank and many other agencies. Since then, a growing number of countries at all levels of development have legislation or regulations prescribing the application of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA)  and many more are introducing it as part of their policy tools. This is creating unique opportunities for better policy making and planning by incorporating environmental considerations into high-level decision-making and opening new mechanisms to build consensus on development priorities within governments themselves and between governments and societies.Many development co-operation agencies and their partners are already making good progress in applying SEA. This publication presents the nine most interesting case studies of SEA in progress, selected from a total 100.  These nine cases highlight that SEA can:
• Safeguard environmental assets for sustainable poverty reduction and development;
• Build public engagement in decision making;
• Prevent costly mistakes by alerting decision-makers to potentially unsustainable development options at an early stage in the decision-making process;
• Speed up implementation of projects and programmes;
• Facilitate co-operation around shared environmental resources and contribute to conflict prevention.