Translation issues
The lack of access to pertinent project documentation prior to its approval is a major obstacle to civil society participation. Unfortunately, this is the rule rather than the exception as the Bank does not release early project concept notes. Project information that is released before approval is often not kept up to date. Environmental and social assessments are disclosed before approval, but the Bank withholds complete descriptions of projects and programs (the Program Document/Project Appraisal Document, PAD) until after approval. The lack of information prior to project approval is a consistent concern of development and transparency activists.
Although English is the official language of the Bank, it routinely translates general information and its flagship publications into Arabic, Mandarin, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. However, for projects, only borrower governments bear translation responsibilities, and these are quite limited (such as summaries of environmental assessments and plans related to resettlement or indigenous peoples). Additionally, project information that is translated is difficult to locate. Core Bank documents on projects, such as Project Appraisal Documents or Program Documents, such as development policy loans, are rarely translated.
Transparency issues
On December 6, 2007, the World Bank’s Board of Directors approved the Institutional Policy Reform Development grant, though it wasn’t until December 11th that the 80-page Program Document [PD, a more detailed companion to the brief Program Information Document (PID)] was posted on their website. Though dated April 2007, the Bank posted a PID consisting of a mere 6-page summary of the project on December 12, 2007, after the posting of the PD and after the grant had been approved by the Bank’s Board of Directors! The chronology of these events was in clear violation of the Bank’s information disclosure policy, as it stipulates that a PID is to be released before project approval and a PD is released following the Board’s approval of a given project. Furthermore, the project was never listed on the proposed projects list prior to Board approval.
According to the World Bank translation framework, the translation of any program or project-related document is left up to the country manager’s discretion. The Bank’s disclosure policy also requires borrowing governments to translate certain project documents (for the use of parliamentarians, etc.); however, the Bank does not require the government to then submit these translated documents along with the English documents, which would then automatically be disclosed upon receipt by the Bank.