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As part of its new corporate strategy, the World Bank has put together a new strategy for “Citizen Engagement” that aims to engage citizens throughout the development process and across Bank operations. Civic engagement is defined by the Bank as being a set of interrelated conditions that impact on the capacity of citizens and civil society organizations to engage in development processes in a sustained and effective manner. They include legal, regulatory and policy frameworks, and political, socio-cultural and economic factors.
The World Bank has also adopted a new model for country engagement that requires a Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) as part of the process for developing Country Partnership Frameworks (CPF) to govern the Bank’s operations in a certain country within a period of 4 to 6 years. The SCD is according to the Bank, an objective analysis based on available evidence which aims to assess the most critical constraints to, and opportunities for poverty alleviation and shared prosperity in a given country.
In an effort to hold the Bank accountable to its commitment to meaningfully engaging citizens, a group of organizations from around the world, including thirteen groups from the MENA region, sent a letter to the World Bank President Kim demanding that the World Bank includes in its SCD an assessment of the environment for civic engagement in the countries for which the CPF is being developed. If the World Bank truly believes in citizen engagement as an imperative factor to attain its two stated goals, this factor should be thoroughly analyzed and taken into account in identifying the opportunities and obstacles for inclusive and integrated development in the Bank’s countries of operations.