37. As of April 2010, a total of 119 countries have completed their NCSA. The quality of the NCSA Final Reports and Action Plans were assessed by a team of independent reviewers and given an overall rating of 3.4 on a scale between 1 and 5, ranging from poor to excellent. This assessment was conducted using six criteria: (i) Clear identification of environmental issues and objectives; (ii) Identification of priority issues for each focal area and across focal areas; (iii) Adequate analysis of the identified capacity constraints; (iv) Capacity constraints are determined at the underlying system level; (v) Action Plan is clear and succinct; and (vi) Action Plan makes connections between environmental objectives and actions.
Instead, as a group, the quality of their reports received an overall rating of 3.4. 39. Correlating the quality of the Final Reports and Action Plans with their length indicates that the quality increase if the report is longer. Reports with fewer than 40 pages had an average rating of 2.6, peaking at 4.0 for reports ranging in length between 121 and 140 pages. Longer reports had a slightly lower quality rating13.
Figure 3: NCSA report length vs. quality 5.00 4.00 3.00 2.00 1.00
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38. No major differences were found among these six criteria, with the average rating for each criterion ranging from 3.1 for (vi) to 3.6 for (iii). The weakest aspect of the NCSA Final Reports and Action Plans was the actual content of the action plans themselves, as well as the connection between environmental priorities and recommended actions. On the other hand, the most positive aspect of these same reports is that they gave an impressive analysis of their capacity constraints. When the data is disaggregated by groups of countries, such as LDC or SIDS countries, the results do not indicate significant differences from all other NCSA reports.
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40. A review of the 119 NCSA Final Reports and Action Plans, as well as interviews with key informants, indicate that a significant number of countries experienced difficulties in implementing their NCSAs. Anecdotally, these implementation difficulties can be summarized into three main categories: (i) NCSA guidance was too broad, limiting NCSA country teams’ ability to focus on specifics resulting in broad statements about issues, constraints, and capacity development needs and actions; (ii) NCSA guidance was too product-oriented and did not provide stronger guidance on various methodological approaches. NCSA country teams wanted more guidance on the ‘how to’, to help them plan the various self-assessment steps; and (iii) NCSA guidance on how to structure the various reports was insufficient, in particular the Final Report. The NCSAs also called for cultural elements to be taken into account when developing a methodology for a global programme. The take-away is that, given the unique culture and social dimensions of each country, NCSA methodology needs to be specifically tailored. 41. Of the 119 countries that have completed their NCSA, 23 countries are at different stages in implementing priority recommendations identified in their NCSA Final Report and Action Plans, while benefitting from the leveraging support of the GEF through follow-up cross-cutting capacity development projects, referred to as CB-2 projects. Nearly half of these projects were approved for the ECIS region, with the rest distributed equally among other regions, with the exception of the Pacific region.
The differences may not be statistically significant. 1=poor; 2=fair; 3=satisfactory; 4=good; 5=excellent.
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National Capacity Self-Assessments: Results and Lessons Learned for Global Environmental Sustainability