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Appendix A4 Mid-term Evaluation Report (February 2003) Introduction


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Context

This chapter introduces the project and the institutional conditions and priorities that originally gave rise to it. With that background established, the chapter goes on to examine changes in context that have occurred since the project was designed.


“Context” in terms of this chapter does not refer to technical and scientific issues. The project design document provided considerable “background and context” related to threats to wetlands and wetland values and opportunities: these are addressed again in Chapter 4 under project design issues. Instead, this chapter looks at policy and organizational issues as they affect the project.

  1. Project Background and Context

  1. The Wetlands Project

The project, Wetland Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Use in China, was launched in May 2000 as a five-year project involving an $11.7 million USD investment of GEF, a $ 2.59 million USD investment by AusAID and a $20.3 million USD investment by the Government of China (GOC). Final project approval and signing of the project document occurred in December 1999, and the project was slated to end in September 2004; it has since been extended by a year. UNDP is the GEF implementing agency for the project, which it has designated a “national execution project.” Thus, the GEF project office of China’s State Forest Administration (SFA) is the national executor for all but the AusAID portion of the project. Implementation responsibility for the AusAID portion of the project was originally assigned to the United Nations Office of Project Services (UNOPS) but, within six months of project approval, this was shifted to the China International Center for Economic and Technical Exchanges (CICETE) of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation (MOFTEC).3


The overall objective of the project is:
to secure the conservation of globally significant wetland biodiversity in China. To this end, the project will combat threats to wetland biodiversity, promote sustainable development in and around wetland sites and develop local and national capacity to integrate conservation into the development process.4
To accomplish this objective, the project intended to work at the national level to strengthen national policies and legislation and, as well, in four globally significant wetland areas in China. Work in all four areas was to focus on two levels: area-wide activities that related to biodiversity issues for the whole of each area; and local activities within a few nature reserves in each area. Generally, the area-wide activities aimed: to make land-use and development planning biodiversity-friendly; to raise public awareness; and to develop alternative livelihood schemes for local communities living near wetlands. The activities in nature reserves were designed to improve reserve boundaries, management, equipment and staff skills.
The four areas and the specific nature reserves targeted within them were:


  • Sangjiang Plains: Honghe NNR (under SEPA)

  • Ruoergai Marshes: Xiamann PNR, Gahai Lake NNR, Shouqu PNR (all under SFA);

  • Yancheng Coast: Dafeng NNR (under SFA); and

  • Dongting Lakes Basin: East Dong Ting NNR (under SFA).

UNDP has two levels of execution under national project execution: the top level is an executing agency (EA); under this, there are one or more implementing agencies (IAs). In this project, the main executing agency is SFA’s Academy of Forest Inventory and Planning (AFIP), which has set up a project management office – the Central Project Management Unit (CPMU) – to control day-to-day management of the project. The CPMU is an executing agency. The other implementing agency is UNOPS, which is mainly responsible for the recruiting/contracting of required international experts. Four packages of project work have been organized into sub-contracts ranging in value from $270,000 to $2.4 million USD. Three of the sub-contracts are for the area-wide work to be done in all four areas: sub-contract 1 covers land-use ($740,000); sub-contract 2, public awareness ($1,080,000); and sub-contract 4, alternative livelihoods ($2,400,000). The final sub- contract –sub-contract 3 ($270,500) – relates to a single nature reserve (Honghe NNR in the Sanjiang Plains area) and covers hydrological work done with the aim of restoring the water level.


The CPMU is staffed with a national project manager (NPM), a chief technical advisor (CTA), and five to six other technical and support staff (biodiversity advisor, central site coordinator, training specialist, translator, accountant, etc.), all funded by the project. To coordinate work in the four areas, a Provincial Management Unit (PMU) was established in each province. As the Ruoergai Marshes extend into two provinces (Sichuan and Gansu), there are five PMUs for the project as a whole. Each PMU is staffed with a full-time coordinator and a UN volunteer, both paid for by the project.
The inputs described above are funded by GEF/Third Party funds. The Government of China (GOC) is also providing $20.3 million USD co-financing, mainly to fund capital works, project personnel (and training), equipment, facilities and transportation. (See section 2.1.2: Counterpart contributions, below.)
  1. China



Wetlands – When the project was designed, wetlands were still a new issue in China, and they remain so. Again and again, members of the MTR team were reminded that the dynamic nature of wetlands is not yet well understood in China, nor has their ecological value been fully realized. China still has a shortage of people with ecological training and even fewer with a background in wetland ecology.
Priorities related to wetlands – At the time that the project was designed, the GOC gave high priority to water conservation, both in terms of flood prevention and preservation of the water supply. In 1998, serious floods on the Yangtze and Song Hua Rivers resulted in even more emphasis being given to flood protection and gave rise to the 32-Word Policy covering the restoration of marginal agricultural lands to wetlands. This water restoration policy applies to two of the project areas: Dong Ting Lake and Sanjiang Plains. Thus, water conservation was the GOC’s main reason for preserving wetlands. At the same time, however, economic development and poverty alleviation were (and remain) top GOC priorities, and these affect how wetlands are used and managed.
By the time the project was designed, the GOC had signed on to a number of international conventions relating to wetland preservation and biodiversity (notably, the Ramsar Convention, Agenda 21 and the Convention on Biodiversity). It had also designated a number of national, provincial and local nature reserves and had begun to develop policy both for a National Biodiversity Conservation Action Plan and a National Wetlands Conservation Action Plan. Nevertheless, economic and development priorities remained more important than those relating to biodiversity in China, and wetlands areas were valued primarily in terms of their economic value as:
(a) sources of natural resources, including fresh water, fisheries (catch and capture), agricultural land (especially pasture/grasslands and areas for new agroforests) and sources of other exploitatable natural resources, such as fibres for paper-making; and


          1. important service providers, such as flood control, waste disposal and pollution control5 and, in particular regions, water transportation routes and strategic locations for urbanization and industrialization.

Thus, it is primarily in economic terms that the GOC addresses wetland issues; ecological conservation (including biodiversity protection), while recognized, is afforded relatively low value.6


GEF Wetlands Project Office – To underline its commitment to the project, the SFA established a GEF Wetlands Project office and seconded five staff members to manage it during the project development phase. Many of these staff members were experienced with donor projects, as they had worked on the Nature Reserve Management Project, a large GEF World Bank project. Also, they had substantive experience with wetlands, as they had been drawn from SFA units working on the Wetland Conservation Action Plan and other wetland issues.
Counterpart contributions – The $20.3 million USD co-financing provided to the project by the GOC includes: personnel ($3.36 million USD); protected areas operations and maintenance, mostly buildings and infrastructure ($9.96 million USD); equipment and facilities, such as offices and equipment, translation, utilities and use of local vehicles ($6.37 million USD); and transportation for site visits ($600,000 USD). In addition to these co-financing investments, the GOC is investing $56.6 million USD in associated projects, mostly for water restoration activities in Dongting Lake. Although the project document is unclear, it is likely that most of the co-financing contribution (except for capital works) was intended to be in kind. The list of contributions and discussions with Chinese partners suggest that they give considerable importance to the construction of buildings and development of revenue-generating attractions (game farms, environmental education centers, etc.). It is not clear whether the GOC realized that it was also expected to fund implementation of the plans, methodologies and designs arising from the project.7
        1. GEF

The GEF approach to project design involves: identification of the threats to biodiversity; analysis of underlying causes for those threats; identification of mitigation measures; and, finally, project design (based on identified mitigation measures). The design process, which started in 1994 and took over three years to complete, was carried out by Wetlands International and funded by a separate GEF grant of $330,000 USD. Another standard feature of the GEF approach is stakeholder consultation. During the project preparation phase, consultations were held with communities in all four areas and at township and county levels, and local lead groups were set up to represent various stakeholders. Clearly, consultation focused at the local and provincial levels, and early design documents indicate that the project intended to work beyond SFA at the local level to involve other departments and the local county level authorities in project delivery. What is less clear from the design documents is the number of consultations on the project held within SFA.8 The negotiations between SFA and UNDP/GEF needed to secure project approval were long and protracted (according to staff in CPMU, 13 separate negotiations were needed): this suggests that the initial design did not reflect SFA’s interests.


Also in keeping with the standard GEF approach, the project was designed to preserve globally significant biodiversity, so its objectives did not address basic capacity building in any major way. This is because GEF’s mandate is to preserve global benefits, and it interprets this to mean that recipient countries should pay for all items of local or national benefit (such as basic capacity building), whereas GEF should only pay the “incremental” costs required to preserve global benefits that are beyond individual country responsibilities. Taken literally, what this means for the wetlands project, is that GEF would expect that the capacity building of wetlands institutions and staff needed by the Chinese for their own development reasons either was already done or would be done by the Chinese government. In reality, however, the Chinese context had not arrived at a stage where “increments” for global preservation could be made; in fact, basic capacity development was needed (here as in many other projects) before global benefits could be usefully addressed. Thus the project’s stated objectives were designed to satisfy GEF while many of its activities focused on basic capacity building –causing a disconnect between the project’s stated and unstated objectives. On the one hand (from the GEF point of view), the project’s stated objectives aimed to enhance Chinese efforts to preserve biodiversity resources for the global benefit; in the Chinese context, this objective was premature: so the unstated objective was to build long-term capacity as was an essential foundation for sustainable global biodiversity benefits. This fundamental disconnect between the project’s stated and unstated objectives caused the MTR team to seek clarification regarding the real objective of the project, from GEF’s perspective. We were told sustainability and long-term impacts were key for GEF, and thus the primary objective of the project was: capacity building done to preserve global biodiversity long-term.
Again, once GEF designs a project, it typically hands it over to the GEF implementing agency – in this case, UNDP – to deliver. At the time of this particular hand-over, however, GEF had not yet established procedures for assigning responsibilities to the implementing agency. Today, when a project is handed over, GEF also assigns management responsibilities and sets expectations in a formal letter between UNDP and GEF. This was not done for the Wetland Project UNDP, moreover GEF did not give any direction to UNDP about management or supervision of the project.
  1. UNDP

In addition to acting as a GEF implementing agency, UNDP had its own development priorities related to gender and community development/poverty alleviation, and these were added to the project.


Because the project was designed as a national execution project, implementation was handed to a Chinese executing agency. In most cases, UNDP uses CICETE as its executing agency in China. In this case, however, SFA was used, and UNDP had no experience with SFA. Typically, UNDP requires the EA and IA (the two levels of executing agencies referred to earlier) to be separate agencies; in this case, they were not: the SFA acts as both the EA and IA. National execution of projects always follows specific guidelines, referred to as the NEX manual, that are agreed upon by UNDP and the GOC. These guidelines, include specific rules for training, procedures for hiring project staff, procedures for payment of government staff, monitoring, evaluation and reporting, supervision reporting, etc.
UNDP was implementing a policy of “mainstreaming” around the time this project began: mainstreaming means that UNDP does not engage in the micro-management of projects. Instead, it relies on the executing agency to manage the project properly, with UNDP’s role being mainly one of policy guidance and broad oversight. The Wetlands Project, which was treated as a UNDP project, was subject to mainstreaming. In practice, therefore, until this year UNDP provided little supervision, allocated no technical time to project support/supervision and carried out no field visits. Rather, it relied on reports received from the EA and IA and advanced funds to the project as requested.
A related issue is UNDP’s technical capacity to supervise the Wetlands Project. By and large, UNDP concerns itself with basic capacity development and, in a general way, with project management. At the moment, the China country office (CO) has no specific technical focal point for the environment. At the same time, GEF operates at a complex level that demands advanced technical expertise.
Finally, continuity of staff presented certain challenges. UNDP professional staff rotate regularly within the organization as a normal part of career development. A major staff turnover occurred around the time of project approval. At that time, several key people departed who had been involved in development of the project from its beginning in 1994. The result was a serious loss of corporate memory between design, negotiations and implementation.
  1. AusAID

AusAID agreed to participate in the project because, at the time, it fit in with Australian priorities. Moreover, the organization was interested in working more closely with multilateral agencies such as GEF/UNDP, reducing its administrative burden and leveraging its investment for a better return by administering related projects under a single common umbrella.

With respect to Australian priorities, AusAID’s policy interests in China at the time of project design included: the environment; poverty alleviation; and grassroots development. Thus, AusAID took on as its special responsibility the part of the project that related to poverty alleviation and the development of alternative livelihoods.9
When it came on board, AusAID agreed to what it considered – and still considers – to be a sizable financial contribution ($5 million Australian). Because of a requirement to report to the Australian government in detail how those funds were used and what had been accomplished, AusAID required separate reporting arrangements for its funds. To that end, AusAID’s contribution was managed as a separate sub-contract.

      1. UNOPS

UNOPS was brought into the project to support SFA with its expertise on UNDP’s international contracting procedures. UNOPS has extensive experience with the procurement of consultants (both individuals and firms) and equipment according to UNDP rules. Although UNOPS was based in Kuala Lumpur when the project was designed, it was expected to support the project by drawing on its roster of consultants/firms to identify and recruit qualified international consultants and by contracting and managing those consultants and providing quality control.


Early project design documents and comments made by consultants involved in the project design suggest that UNOPS originally was intended to take responsibility for managing the four sub-contracts as well as the international consultants. However, sometime during the design or negotiation of the project, UNOPS’s role was reduced to responsibility for international consultants,10

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