Deborah Davis | World Bank (original) (raw)

Papers by Deborah Davis

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

This introduction to the latest edition of Katharine the Great tells the story of how the first e... more This introduction to the latest edition of Katharine the Great tells the story of how the first edition of the book was suppressed. The author wrote this piece based on documents she obtained during her lawsuit against the publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, for breach of contract and damage to reputation. The publisher withdrew the book in response to pressure from Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, and Post executive editor Benjamin Bradlee.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

This document proposes a Gender Monitoring Framework (GMF) for Samoa’s Enhancing the Climate Resi... more This document proposes a Gender Monitoring Framework (GMF) for Samoa’s Enhancing the Climate Resilience of Coastal Resources and Communities (ECR) project, funded by a Strategic Climate Fund–Pilot Program for Climate Resilience grant for the period 2014-2018. The purpose of the GMF is to ensure that the project design takes account of the different ways that women and men are impacted by climate disasters, and that its community-based resilience activities result in equally good outcomes for both women and men.

The project’s innovative approach to community management of ecological systems incorporates knowledge from what have essentially been two separate ways of thinking about and responding to climate change. The resilience approach has generally focused on identifying biological thresholds, describing environmental systems, and creating physical barriers to block the biophysical drivers of change. The vulnerability approach, by contrast, has typically focused on the social, political, and equity issues critical to the management and governance of social and ecological systems (SES). With the increasing evidence of the differential impacts of climate disasters on men and women, however, more attention is being given to understanding why women (and the poor and marginalized) should be so much more severely affected than men (and the privileged) by the same biophysical event.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

This case study, carried out for the World Bank's Knowledge and Learning unit, traces India's eff... more This case study, carried out for the World Bank's Knowledge and Learning unit, traces India's efforts to clean up the Ganga River, which flows through four Indian states and has a fertile delta that sustains 40 percent of the country’s population. The river is used for drinking, washing, fishing, religious rituals, irrigation, disposal of animal and human remains, dumping of industrial waste, and mining. The World Bank estimates that pollution in the Ganga accounts for 80 percent of the country's disease burden. The first major effort to clean the river was the Water Prevention and Control of Pollution Act of 1974, enacted under Indira Gandhi. The Act created a central pollution control board (CPCS), and state pollution control boards (SPCBs) to address river pollution, but the state boards did nothing to enforce central directives. The second major effort was the Environmental Protection Act of 1986, enacted under Rajiv Gandhi, which set discharge standards for industry and created the Ganga Action Plan, which provided the state boards with funds to build wastewater treatment plants and take action against polluting industries. After 20 years and expenditure of nearly one trillion rupees (about $1.8 billion), however, the river was dirtier than ever. Holy men began " fasting-unto-death " and a many citizens' groups petitioned the state high courts and central Supreme Court to demand urgent action. In 2006, the courts ordered a legal audit of the Ganga Action Plan. The audit found misappropriation of funds; the failure of state agencies to enforce central regulations; and a lack of scientific data on how pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, dam construction, and other factors were all impacting the river. The GAP was shut down and, in an effort to appease citizens' groups, a Ganga Monitoring Committee was formed to make recommendations to civic bodies along the river to address local concerns. However, none of the committee's recommendations was implemented, and it ceased to function, at which point a prominent scientist from one of India's premier technology institutes (IITs) resigned his position on the Central Pollution Control Board and began his own " fast unto death. "

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

The EDPRS identifies gender as a cross-cutting issue that has to be mainstreamed in the planning ... more The EDPRS identifies gender as a cross-cutting issue that has to be mainstreamed in the planning and budgeting of all sectors if Rwanda is to achieve its development goals. The EDPRS predicts that 75 percent of districts will meet (yet to be) established benchmarks for mainstreaming gender and other cross-cutting issues (environment, HIV/AIDS, social inclusion) by 2012. It then goes on to say: Implementation of an engendered EDPRS depends on several factors. The most important is to ensure that gender issues are fully integrated into sector and district plans from the start. Unless and until this is achieved, gender…risks being marginalized by policymakers. Clear budget commitments must be made to promote gender as an issue [so that] the Government and its citizens see where progress is being made and where remedial support is required. Tracking gender-disaggregated data through the monitoring system will allow policymakers to identify the differential impact of policies and service delivery on men and women. Following a comprehensive needs assessment (emphasis added), capacity must be strengthened to enable line ministries to… implement EDPRS actions on all cross-cutting issues. (para. 5.69) The concern expressed in the EDPRS about the possible marginalization of gender issues, and the emphasis on integrating gender into sector planning and budgeting, is in direct response to negative assessments of how gender was handled in Rwanda's first PRSP. In particular, (1) a gender audit carried out in 2003 found that gender was not integrated into the PRSP's growth and economic development components; (ii) ODI's Independent Evaluation of Rwanda's Poverty Reduction Strategy 2002-2005, carried out in 2005, found that while gender was mentioned in the policy matrix for education, it was not mentioned in the matrices for agriculture, economic infrastructure, governance (including community development and justice), private sector development, social capital for vulnerable groups, public expenditure management, or coordination and monitoring of the PRSP; and (iii) the Government's own self-evaluation of the PRSP, based on sector evaluations carried out in 2006, found " a lack of evidence of progress " in gender and other cross-cutting issues. " The particular concerns, " the self-evaluation noted, " are the absence of objectives, the weaknesses of data and monitoring and the lack of empirical budget evidence. " It also reported that some of the sector working groups did not consider gender issues to be relevant to their sector.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

The author was part of a research action team that assessed the World Bank's pilot CDD program in... more The author was part of a research action team that assessed the World Bank's pilot CDD program in six countries on five continents. The pilot involved channeling funds directly to communities based on their own project proposals, instead of through line ministries. The field evaluation of the Second Kecamatan Development Project (KDP) looked at community-designed and -led microenterprise, small livestock and primary education projects. The author also wrote the overview paper summarizing the results of all of the field evaluations.

One goal of the evaluation was to determine the importance of local government support to the success of CDD projects. The conclusion was that CDD projects are not sustainable without the technical and political support of local government.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

The first phase of the Scaling-up Action Research Project was undertaken to determine whether the... more The first phase of the Scaling-up Action Research Project was undertaken to determine whether the current framework for community-driven development (CDD) projects can create the right conditions for such projects to evolve into programs that are sustained through normal resource transfer systems, so that poverty reduction activities are not forever dependent on government borrowing and NGOs. The concern with the donor/NGO approach is that it does not lead to sustainable change in how national poverty programs are implemented, and does nothing to promote the efficient use of public resources. CDD, by contrast, has been shown to be up to 40 percent more efficient in the use of public resources, while at the same time fostering community empowerment and building the social capital necessary for poor communities to take an active part in their own development. In this context, scaling up refers to the incorporation of CDD principles into national poverty programs, and to CDD activities being made sustainable through permanent resource transfer mechanisms. This synthesis paper compares the scaling up experiences of a total of 15 community-driven development projects in six countries in four regions—Benin, Uganda, and Zambia in the Africa Region; India in South Asia; Indonesia in East Asia and the Pacific; and Mexico in Latin America and the Caribbean. Weighing the strengths, weaknesses, and findings of each case was an inherently imperfect exercise, given the vastly different institutional, social, and political environment in which each CDD project was designed and carried out; and considering, as well, the newness of the analytical framework and assessment tools. One purpose of the research was, in fact, to test the usefulness of this framework and these tools for evaluating CDD – to determine whether the concepts, questions, and hypotheses that guided the reviewers' work were both precise enough and flexible enough to capture the complexities of scaling up in different cultural and institutional contexts, while providing a basis for comparability across all the studies. The questions at the heart of this exercise were whether: • the five basic principles that make up the CDD framework—community empowerment, local government empowerment, decentralization, accountability/transparency, and learning by doing—adequately define the necessary conditions for scaling up;

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

A profile of a remarkable former child soldier from Uganda who escaped from the LRA and developed... more A profile of a remarkable former child soldier from Uganda who escaped from the LRA and developed a multifaceted peacebuilding program for Uganda refugees.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Drafts by Deborah Davis

Cross-sectoral expertise in environment and climate change; trade and market development; agricul... more Cross-sectoral expertise in environment and climate change; trade and market development; agriculture and rural development; gender, governance, other issues underlying poverty and conflict. Specializing in Systematic Country Diagnostics, Country Partnership Strategies, analytic studies, policy and strategy documents, project proposals and impact evaluations, knowledge and learning case studies.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact