World Bank and Adaptation: The Need to Think Small

A  revealing interview at DM2009 was the one of Ian Noble, a top World Bank expert on climate change, and member of the World Development Report 2010: Development and Climate Change team who was also a DM2009 juror.  Noble was questioned by Habiba Gitay, Senior Environmental Specialist at the World Bank Institute, about the big development projects that the World Bank has traditionally fostered and financed and the micro-sized, early-stage or seed projects (up to $200,000 in value) that are part of the Development Marketplace competitions. Noble's answers underscored how the Bank, in responding to the destructive impacts of climate change on the people and natural resources of developing countries, is increasingly thinking small about adaptation projects.

"Ultimately, adaptation is going to be carried out by individual people, households, small communities," Noble answered.  "So one of the challenges of the World Bank is to shift out-sourcing to that level.  This is a huge, rich body of information flowing into the World Bank from Development Marketplace, especially in the case of this [competition].  With the tension between community-based adaptation and adaptation funding at the national level, a bridge has to be built [between the two]."

"What are some of the challenges in building that bridge?" Gitay asked.

"We’ve been asking the finalists how do they plan to scale up, and they’ve been putting the question back to us," Noble said.  "How do we plan to meet them with our resources.  So that’s one of the challenges we have to meet."

Gitay then asked Noble which finalist projects in general stood out for him.

His answer: "To me the ones that caught my attention is where you’ve got a pressing problem and evidence that the problem is going to get worse, and somebody comes up with an innovative idea, something as simple as modifying an existing technology.  It could be completely new idea.  But most of the really innovative stuff is incremental, but could have enormous impact.  That’s what Development Marketplace is about.  The power of Development Marketplace is in those increments."