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A growing number of governments seek to adopt an approach based on Best Available Techniques (BAT) as part of the regulatory framework to prevent and control industrial emissions. Providing guidance on BAT-based permitting is, in the short term, a means to strengthen policy in individual countries. In the long term, it might facilitate greater international harmonisation of procedures to establish BAT and BAT-AE(P)Ls. This would assist efforts to protect human health and the environment across countries, and expand the level playing field for industry. This document presents a high-level overview of each step of the process to determine BAT, BAT-AE(P)Ls and permit conditions, including information on the principles and factors that should be considered in this process, based on best practices from OECD member and partner countries. It provides references to more detailed information from countries where such approaches are employed, and includes a range of elaborate examples from national and supra-national jurisdictions as well as international conventions. The document promotes an integrated approach to BAT-based environmental permitting. This is the fourth in a series of documents developed as part of the OECD’s BAT project.

The 2020 edition of Business Insights on Emerging Markets provides a private sector perspective on investment opportunities and challenges in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. This publication brings together analysis and insights from the business meetings of the OECD Development Centre’s Emerging Markets Network (EMnet), interactions with the private sector and desk research, organised in three regional chapters. An opening chapter by Cornell University’s Emerging Markets Institute at Cornell’s S.C. Johnson College of Business complements this publication. At the time of publishing of this report, the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is rapidly spreading around the world. OECD analysis indicates a severe impact on the global economy, whose growth prospects were weak but stabilising when the virus hit. Restrictions on the movement of people, goods, and services together with containment measures, factory and border closures have cut output and reduced demand sharply - first in the People’s Republic of China (hereafter: ‘China’) and then globally. Like the rest of the world, emerging markets are facing an unprecedented health and economic crisis, with potentially extreme economic and social consequences. This publication mostly cites figures from before the pandemic, however more recent figures have been added and a box has been inserted after the executive summary and ahead of every chapter to provide a preliminary impact assessment of the crisis.

Behavioural insights (BI) has become widely used by public bodies around the world, mostly towards improving the way policies are implemented and influencing individual behaviour. As the field of BI evolves to tackle more complex policy issues, there is widespread perception that BI can and should go beyond the study of individual-level decision processes for higher impact. This report presents research on applying BI to changing the behaviour of organisations, with a focus on fostering elements of a safety culture in the energy sector. It presents comparative findings from experiments with energy regulators in Canada, Ireland, Mexico and Oman, as well as guidance for applying BI to safety culture going forward.

Collaboration between governments, civil society and corporations is acquiring increasing importance in the international agenda as a solution to the complex problems currently affecting our societies. It has become clear that issues such as climate change, persistent poverty, increasing inequality, social exclusion and other major current challenges cannot be tackled by a single sector alone. Given this reality, it is encouraging to see that more and more initiatives featuring various forms of collaboration are being enacted to tackle major social issues. However, despite progress, there is limited knowledge of these initiatives in different countries. This study aims at filling this gap by examining in Mexico how foundations and federal government (FG) departments and agencies have been engaging with each other.

In Kenya, collaboration across sectors to foster sustainable development has been recently gaining momentum. Development players have started to work together more closely due to the ambitious scope of Agenda 2030, the limited financial resources available and the need to achieve greater scale. Other factors influencing this trend include new development strategies and tools such as venture philanthropy and the use of basket funds to pursue more sustainable development. Governments, which are the primary drivers of development, have been keen to plug into these new vehicles. Some have provided non-state players, such as the private sector, social businesses, and philanthropists, with a strong policy and regulatory environment, while others have co-financed initiatives. However, the nature, scope and impact of these partnerships have not often been captured. This study provides an overview of the current state of collaboration between foundations and the government in Kenya and offers recommendations for enhancement. It is based on the three pillars of the Guidelines for Effective Philanthropic Engagement (“the Guidelines”): dialogue, data and knowledge sharing, and partnerships. The Guidelines were developed under the leadership of the OECD Network of Foundations Working for Development (netFWD), together with the Worldwide Initiatives for Grantmaker Support (WINGS), the European Foundation Centre (EFC), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Stars Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

This report analyses the experiences of India, Kenya, Mexico and Myanmar in implementing the Guidelines for Effective Philanthropic Engagement, to bring foundations and governments closer together on a theme of common interest. This report compares the results of surveys led in the four countries between 2015 and 2016 to diagnose the level and nature of engagement between foundations and governments (see Box 2 for more information). The report starts by sketching the country contexts and highlighting their specificities. It then presents some key findings on aspects such as differences in the level of engagement between countries or the benefits of dialogue, as well as transversal challenges. It ends by suggesting drivers for engagement. The report will be updated as more countries commit to implement the Guidelines.

This document describes how the OECD DAC Network on Development Evaluation (EvalNet) revisited the definitions and use of the OECD DAC evaluation criteria in 2018-2019. The document lays out adapted definitions for relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability, and for one new criterion, coherence. The document describes how the criteria should be used thoughtfully, and adjusted to the context of the intervention and the intended users’ needs. These revised definitions and principles for use are the result of a global consultation on the criteria and a review of how they are used in evaluation and beyond. Following the consultation, members of EvalNet and outside evaluation experts discussed the concepts in depth and reviewed several drafts. The adapted definitions are clearer and will support more rigorous, nuanced analysis, including of equity issues and synergies, in line with current policy priorities. This adaptation also addresses confusion, by adding an introduction on the intended purpose of the criteria and guiding principles for use. Detailed guidance on the application of the criteria is to be provided separately, after adoption.