A case of benign neglect

Project information

The accessibility of project information differed significantly between the organizations. Only four – the World Bank, GEF, IFAD and UNESCO – had searchable project portfolios available online. The World Bank and the GEF were the most accessible organizations and provided easy online access to project titles, objectives, status, budgets and target countries. The other organizations were contacted by e-mail to request access to their project archives. FAO provided overviews of relevant projects and UN Environment gave access to abstracts for all current projects, which were searched to identify the number of projects relevant to pastoralism and/ or rangelands. The study also looked at the project portfolio of three international agricultural research centres under the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), namely ILRI, ICRAF and ICARDA. Most hits within the ICRAF portfolio were from project titles, indicating that the search engine may not be effective in screening project descriptions. If this is the case, the hits identified would not be representative of the project portfolio. The project databases of the CGIAR agencies were less accessible than those of the World Bank and the GEF in providing information on the funding granted to each project. Table 1 presents the results of the screening of the 13 organizations. Observations Not all countries are eligible for funding from multilateral agencies, meaning that this information source is biased against certain parts of the world. However, project documents can be an important source of information of what is happening on the ground and offer recommendations for improving the sustainability of pastoralism and rangelands.

In total, 585 projects were identified (from 2000 until present) that included one or several keywords related to pastoralists and/or rangelands. However, since donor agencies are sometimes project partners, there may have been an overlap in the projects identified, which meant that it was not possible to obtain an accurate figure for the percentage share of projects compared with all projects related to

pastoralism and rangelands. For example, as five of the donor agencies are partners of the GEF, more time was given to further explore the GEF project portfolio. In the GEF project portfolio, 124 projects were identified that were relevant to pastoralism and/ or rangelands. These included projects at different stages and some that had not been approved. Thus,

Table 1: Screened project portfolio results

Number of relevant projects

Total number of projects

Accessible project portfolio

Multilateral organizations

60*

Not available

No

FAO

124

10,051

Yes

GEF

29*

29*

No

ICARDA

4

185

Yes

ICRAF

27

Not available

Yes

IFAD

5

108

Yes

ILRI

Not available

Not available

No

UNDP

8**

439**

No

UN Environment

4

1,351

Yes

UNESCO

Not available

Not available

No

UNICEF

Not available

Not available

No

WFP

Not available

Not available

No

WHO

354

13,190

Yes

World Bank

* Not publicly accessible; identified and shared by FAO and ICARDA. ** Not publicly accessible; accessed through Uniform Resource Locator (URL) provided by UN Environment.

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