Somewhat similarly, World Bank programing is dominated
by incentives to disburse rapidly and in a cost-effective manner.
Although the lengthy and convoluted project preparation
process has greater scope than DFID’s for careful analysis of
governance risks, its actual programing requirements are
heavily biased against conducting and implementing any kind
of political analysis. 15 Despite the stated aims of the 2007
Governance and Anti-Corruption Strategy, there is no formal
programing requirement to conduct governance studies. Project
preparation guidelines for investment financing make no
mention of PEA as a potential source of background information,
and requirements of institutional appraisal refer to the
capacity of local implementing agencies, not the governance
or political context (OPSPQ, 2013c). The “Project Appraisal
Document”, which is the central assessment step in project
preparation, does begin with a section on strategic context,
but this is not intended to be longer than two or three pages,
and it is supposed to convey country context, capacity constraints,
sectoral and institutional context, and links between
the project and higher-level objectives (OPSPQ, 2013b). In
fact, project appraisal documents themselves do not contain
a section on political or institutional assessment (OPSPQ,
2013b) 16 Governance and corruption do feature in the
attached “Operational Risk Assessment Framework,” but
they can easily get lost in it given the number of boxes to tick
and the likely prioritization of managerial risks; indeed, for
some specialists risk assessment box-ticking can become a
way to get politics out of the way. In any case, the framework
can only assess risks after project identification, so it is unlikely
to lead to the identification of alternative entry points
or counterparts, as political-informed projects are supposed
to do.