Miscellaneous Knowledge Notes

Items in this collection

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

Monitoring Investments

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03) UNCTAD ; World Bank

This note provides guidance on how to monitor the performance and impact of agricultural investments, and on which aspects to observe. Ongoing monitoring of investments is a key way to hold investors accountable for contractual commitments and deliver the expected benefits to the country and surrounding communities. It also facilitates early identification of emerging negative impacts or of failing investments, enabling remedial actions. Monitoring is often deficient because of a lack of resources and systematic procedures, which allows negative impacts to escalate beyond what will otherwise be the case. Internal monitoring is likewise good practice for investors and their financiers, though the field research indicated room for improvement.
Screening Prospective Investors

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03) UNCTAD ; World Bank

This note provides guidance to governments on how to screen and select prospective investment projects to ensure they maximize the social, economic, and environmental benefits while minimizing the risks. It provides investors information on what can be expected in cases of good screening practice. The acceptance of investors that later fail financially or have poor social and environmental outcomes has had damaging impacts on many countries as well as communities. Screening investors is a critical component of a country’s policy framework to mitigate those risks and to improve the likelihood that investments will have a positive effect on sustainable development priorities. This note summarizes available resources on how to screen agricultural investments and calls on donors, international organizations, and civil society to develop more. It is complemented by note 7: tools for screening investors, which provides a detailed toolkit that can be adapted to host countries’ individual circumstances.
Water Access and Management

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03) UNCTAD ; World Bank

This note provides guidance on how to ensure that the impact of agricultural investments on water resources is effectively measured, monitored, and regulated. Water is essential to agricultural production and processing, and has been a driving factor in private and public decisions on where to locate investments. Despite global concerns about water scarcity and pollution, the water use of agricultural investments is in many cases not rigorously measured, monitored, or regulated. Where regulations exist, enforcement is often weak. Some investors improve local water access with community development programs, but such schemes require consultation and careful management.
Environmental and Social Impact Assessments

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03) UNCTAD ; World Bank

This note provides guidance on the conduct of environmental and social impact assessments (ESIAs) and the implementation of associated environmental and social management plans (ESMPs). Crop and livestock production, forestry, fisheries, and aquaculture all depend on the use of land, water, and other natural resources that are inextricably linked to rural livelihoods, social systems, values, and culture. ESIAs and ESMPs are key tools for identifying and assessing social and environmental risks and benefits at the planning stage of an investment, and for building risk mitigation measures into project design and implementation. Although usually legislative requirements, too often they have been treated as box-ticking exercises. There remainssignificant room for improvement in the conduct of assessment and the rigor with which findings are incorporated into management plans.
Tools for Screening Prospective Investors

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03) UNCTAD ; World Bank

This note supplements note 6: screening prospective investors. The investment screening process requires suitable tools for assisting government agencies in their work. This note provides examples of tools that government agencies can adapt to their national context and use to develop the technical capacity to screen and select investors.
Public Transparency

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03) UNCTAD ; World Bank

This note provides guidance on the type of information about agricultural investments that investors and governments can make publicly available. Transparency about certain aspects of investments can improve relations between investors and communities, enable external stakeholders to hold investors to commitments, and improve investors’ public image. Although some information should be kept private to protect commercial interests, in general the amount of publicly available information is insufficient for transparent, accountable conduct of agricultural investments. This has often led to fear, mistrust, and resentment, and created operational and financial difficulties for investors. Some investors and governments have recently shifted toward a more transparent approach, but the risk of misuse of information needs to be managed.
Introduction to Responsible Agricultural Investment

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-03) UNCTAD ; World Bank

The United Nation Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) - World Bank knowledge into action note series is a compendium of practical, thematic guidance documents for use by governments, investors, and other stakeholders in the implementation of responsible agricultural investment principles. This document provides background to the knowledge into action note series and the underlying research; it also explains the logic, structure, and sequence of the notes, and suggests some guidance for their use.