Integrating the Environment into the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers

The authors argue that traditional PRSP review processes, such as those used by the World Bank and IMF, often overlook the critical links between the environment and poverty. They propose a new evaluation framework that shifts from a 'dominant preference model'—where environmental issues are imposed externally—to a stakeholder-driven approach. This methodology uses an ecosystem services framework to identify specific poverty-environment links (e.g., provisioning, regulating, and cultural services) and assesses the degree of stakeholder participation, policy coherence, and monitoring systems. The paper provides a detailed 18-question survey and a scoring system (0-3) to quantify a country's performance in integrating the environment into its poverty reduction strategies.

• Standard PRSP review processes conducted by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund lack specific questions regarding the environment, leading to poor environmental performance scores; for instance, a 2002 World Bank evaluation of 40 PRSPs yielded a score of only 0.9 out of 3 for environmental performance.
• The authors critique the existing World Bank methodology for evaluating environmental performance as a 'dominant preference model' because it imposes a pre-defined set of environmental issues and penalizes countries for omitting issues that may not be critical in their specific local context.
• The proposed methodology replaces traditional categories like land use, water, and air with an 'ecosystem approach' based on ecosystem services—defined as benefits ecosystems provide for human well-being—to better identify critical links to poverty constituents such as hunger, material wealth, and security against natural hazards.
• The proposed evaluation framework is structured around five themes: identifying poverty-environment links, the degree of stakeholder participation, measurement and evaluation, policy coherence, and the review and revision process.
• The methodology employs a scoring scale from 0 to 3 across 18 questions to determine a country's overall performance, using the dominant response from stakeholders to allocate scores for each question.

APA

Duraiappah, A. K., & Roddy, P. (2005). Integrating the Environment into the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. International Institute for Sustainable Development. https://www.iisd.org/system/files/publications/economics_integrating_environment.pdf

Chicago

Duraiappah, Anantha K., and Pumulo Roddy. Integrating the Environment into the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. International Institute for Sustainable Development, 2005. https://www.iisd.org/system/files/publications/economics_integrating_environment.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Duraiappah |first1=Anantha K. |last2=Roddy |first2=Pumulo |title=Integrating the Environment into the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers |publisher=International Institute for Sustainable Development |date=June 2005 |url=https://www.iisd.org/system/files/publications/economics_integrating_environment.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{duraiappah2005integrating, author = {Duraiappah, Anantha K. and Roddy, Pumulo}, title = {{Integrating the Environment into the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers}}, institution = {International Institute for Sustainable Development}, year = {2005}, month = jun, url = {https://www.iisd.org/system/files/publications/economics_integrating_environment.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }