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Dams and Development E-Paper Contents

p. 41 of 74 BACK | NEXT Home Page of Dams and Development Foreword I. Why an e-paper on dams and development? II. Assessing options III. Participatory processes IV. Social impacts V. Environmental impacts VI. Benefit distribution What benefits can be shared? Distribution analysis Secondary benefits What do ADB polices say? VII. Dam safety and sustainability VIII. Existing projects IX. Improving governance X. What other organizations say XI. ADB, Dams, and Development XII. References Contact Us

Distribution analysis- who benefits and who bears the cost?

WCD proposes more explicit analysis of who is likely to gains and who to lose from a project at the stages of assessing options and determining feasibility of a particular intervention (WCD Guideline #9).

A review of methods for distributional analysis was undertaken as part of the WCD knowledge base, 'Financial, Economic and Distributional Analysis', in response to the concern that:

'Unfortunately, neither cost-benefit analysis nor least cost analysis or multi-criteria analysis have the explicit objective of providing decision-makers with information about how different groups fare as a result of projects'.

The impacts to be assessed included:

1. effects that can be priced and therefore assessed as monetary costs and benefits,
2. effects that can be partially priced like environmental impacts,
3. effects that can not be priced but yet can be assessed as a gain or a loss like empowerment changes, and
4. effects for which even the direction of the impact is contestable, for example whether modernisation of traditional societies is a gain or a loss.

Five approaches to distributional analysis were identified, moving from the most direct and .economic. approach to the broadest assessment:

• Economic Distributional Analysis (EDA) - the distribution of economic costs and benefits of a project as measured in DCF and CBA;
• Economic Impact Analysis - the analysis of economic impacts of a project using a regional or macroeconomic model;
• Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (EIA and SIA) - these techniques can serve to identify project impacts that fall outside the scope of CBA and macroeconomic models, but that have important distributional consequences;
• Equity (or Poverty) Assessment - assessment of the impacts (in economic or non-economic terms) of projects on specific sub-populations/groups of concern; and
• Distributional Analysis - consideration of the full range of distributional impacts, regardless of whether they are financial, social, environmental or economic and whether they are assessed in a qualitative fashion, quantified in non-monetary terms, or valued in financial/economic terms.

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