Task 2 - Legal, Institutional and Policy Assessments

With an agreed analytical framework in place, the IRG team members will begin analyzing the institutional frameworks in the selected focal countries. The analysis will begin by decomposing the water institutions in each country into three main components: laws, policies, and organizations. Laws provide the enabling framework for decision making, policies specify intentions and priorities and guide lower-level decision making, and organizations give concrete shape to arrangements designed to make and implement operational decisions. These three components will be analyzed separately based on the comparative advantages of our partner organizations, and then combined for each country and for a multi-country framework. While implementation arrangements for the three components are discussed separately, work under all of them will be carefully coordinated through regular sharing of plans and timelines to maximize synergy. For example, legal and policy documents for inclusion in the OSU database could be collected by an IWMI or Nile Consultants team member while visiting a focal country for another purpose.

Following the decomposition, the team will identify key functions that are performed in a well-functioning water sector. Examples include water allocation and reallocation, effective and efficient water service provision, and protection of aquatic environments. Key function analysis will rely on a combination of the scientific literature, expert opinion, and focal country input. One characteristic of these key functions is that they cut across the three domains of laws, policies, and organizations. We will use a matrix showing the key functions on one side, and the three domains on the other to analyze the completeness of functional coverage in each country. This final analysis will occur toward the end of Task 2, following the completion of the three component analyses.

Legal review. Under this sub-task the team will collect a comprehensive set of legal instruments from the focal countries focusing on water and supplemented with laws from other sectors, such as environmental regulation, health, and important economic sectors that relate to water. We will also collect documents from non-focal countries in the region, though these documents may be less complete. Documents will be converted to digital form and indexed to allow searches across documents and countries; the most relevant ones will be translated, if necessary, so that both English and Arabic copies are stored in the database. The database will employ approaches developed for the transboundary waters database created by Aaron Wolf and housed at OSU/IW,. and may be initially used by our own team to review topics defined in the Task 1 framework. This will be a useful tool for project team members, and will also help to test and validate the functioning of the document database.

We will also search out and collect legal reviews related to the focal countries in both published and the gray literature and supplement these, as needed, with fresh legal analyses. We will then conduct a critical analysis of the legal framework in each focal country, guided by the conceptual framework developed under Task 1. Our analyses will include recommendations for changes and reforms as appropriate.

Institutional mapping. This subtask will begin with a critical review of existing literature on water-related institutions in the focal countries to gain as comprehensive a perspective as possible and to identify gaps and need for updates. Key documents will be converted to digital form, indexed, and included in the database under development by OSU/IWW. The literature review will be followed by a supplemental mapping exercise to update and fill in gaps, yielding a comprehensive picture of the water-related organizations in each focal country. Organizations covered will span the full range from public to private. Information will be consolidated into a descriptive profile of water-related organizations and their important functions (see below) in each focal country.

This step will be followed by the development of a detailed matrix crossing functions and organizations in each country to assess completeness of coverage, gaps, and inconsistencies. Analysis will take place with mixed water focus groups led by a project member and comprised of government officials, researchers, consultants, and NGO representatives. This analysis may be conducted for several points-in-time to gain a sense of expected future organizational configurations and their relationship to the present set-up which will help guide future target-setting and monitoring of change as a part of post-project implementation. This process will also provide important insights relative to the effectiveness and efficiency of the key management organizations, which will also be documented.

Strategy and policy review. The IRG team will collect all available strategy and policy documents from the five focal countries, translate them as needed, and enter them into the repository database. The database can then be searched to compare policy approaches to given topics (e.g., service cost recovery) across countries. As part of this process, we will review existing on-line document repositories, such as those supported by EMWIS, to identify documents already available on-line. As with the legal database, we will collect a comprehensive set of documents from the focal countries, as well as readily available policy and strategy documents from other regional countries.

The team will critically analyze water policy and strategy for each country in terms of the four overarching objectives identified in the Task Order: optimization of water allocation and use, resolution of conflicts, encouragement of stakeholder participation in decision making, and improvement of water and waste water services. Although not specifically called for in the Task Order, we will also review policies related to irrigation service provision to enable possible future analysis of this important water-using sector.

In the critical analysis, we will pay close attention to the four key relationships highlighted in the RFP: how and whether strategic priorities relate to actual needs, relationship of strategic priorities to investment programs, relationship of strategic priorities to working policies and practices, and whether targets for implementing policies are identified and monitored. Following the analysis, we will recommend improvements and revisions in both national water strategy elements and water-related policies designed to implement the strategic priorities. We will carry out reviews for individual countries and place the reviews into a framework (keyed to the Task 1 framework) for comparison.

Data system review and website development. Benchmarking systems require reliable standardized data collection, storage, and retrieval procedures to operate effectively. As a supplementary activity, the IRG team will conduct a rapid on-line review of the capabilities in each focal country to provide the types of data needed to support the benchmarking process. The team will also review existing regional information systems, such as EMWIS, to assess their current capacities and contributions, and to identify appropriate ways for this project to complement and integrate with them.

The team will work with AWC to help upgrade the functionality of its website, train staff in website development and management, and create portals on the Arab Water Council (AWC) website for accessing the ReWaB searchable document database and the ReWaB project website (a part of Task 4) for project reports, analyses, and collected documents. Working with AWC, we will also begin the process of building capacity to regularly collect and process data needed for a regional program of performance benchmarking (a Task 3 function). Though initially the ReWaB document database is hosted at OSU, it will be seamlessly accessible from the AWC website. Toward the end of the project, we will assess the merits of various options for permanently housing and maintaining the document database and recommend a final solution.

Consolidation of legal, policy, and institutional analyzes. The IRG team will bring together the three analyses for each country developed under Task 2 and consolidate and cross-reference them, including identifying deficiencies and incompatibilities and recommending improvements.

The specific activities are:

1. Legal Review: In each focal country, collect relevant legal documents: (1) convert documents to digital form, index, and translate as needed; (2) store documents in searchable database; (3) interview experts and stakeholders; and (4) conduct critical analysis, including recommendations for change/reform
2. Institutional Mapping: (1) interview experts and stakeholders; (2) develop descriptive profiles of water-related organizations in each focal country; and (3) develop detailed matrix crossing functions and organizations for each focal country
3. Strategy and Policy Review: (1) in each focal country, collect relevant policy and strategy documents; (2) convert documents to digital form, index, and translate as needed; (3) store documents in searchable database; (4) interview experts and stakeholders; (5) critically analyze each country strategy and policy in terms of RFTOP overarching objectives and develop recommendations; and (6) place strategy and policy analyses in Task 1 developed framework and compare them among the five focal countries
4. Consolidation of Legal, Institutional and Policy/Strategy Reviews and Analysis
5. Data Systems Review and Website Development: (1) rapid review of focal country capabilities to provide data for benchmarking; (2) review of regional information identifying complementarities and opportunities for integration; and (3) support upgrading of AWC website functionality and creation of portal for database of project reports, analyses, and collected documents