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A disaggregation of agriculture projects by )ED showed that credit and irrigation institutions have been relatively more successful largely because they seem to have had better defined functions and clearer mandates. Livestock and area development projects, on the other hand, had much less success with ID. The ID problems in agriculture projects noted by OED were similar to those found in other sectors: lack of skilled management and staff, staff turnover, tension between expatriate experts and local counterparts, mismatch between project needs and training proposals, lack of borrower commitment and Bank-borrower disagreements on objectives. In an analysis of impact studies from 27 agriculture and 4 education projects, OED observed that in almost all projects which were found to be unsustainable, the impact evaluations had pointed to areas where institutional capacity needed to be strengthened in the post-implementation period. On the other hand, OED found that good ID work had contributed much to the sustainable projects. Sustainability for agriculture activities, as in other sectors which deal with diverse populations, require that project goals and actions to achieve them match the needs and motivations of the affected publics as well as the concerns of the borrowers. A series of projects in the same sector offers an opportunity to improve the prospects for sustainability. Even in a series of projects, however, when the ID measures were limited by the time horizon of each project and focused only on current project implementation issues, the strengthening of long term institutional capacity essential to sustainability did not follow. While there are success stories among education projects, OED reviews offer examples of how in some of them the lack of adequate assessment of the capacity of implementing agencies led to negligible ID achievement.

The sectoral patterns of success or failure reflected in this analysis of OED data confirm the patterns found by a more detailed study made on the basis of 175 projects completed about a decade ago.<sup>23</sup> This review showed a pattern by sector, subsector, and act'vity but, except in a few cases, not by country. Although some sectors subsectors, and activities have had consistently good or bad results over long periods in most countries, few countries have consistently had successes or failures in most sectors. The most successful institutional development programs were in industry, telecommunications, some utilities, development finance companies or industrial development banks, and "industrial" types of agriculture such as plantations. A mixed performance was found in other utilities (a rather large group), transport projects (ports and highways), and agricultural credit .Lnstitutions. Poorer results were registered in most other types of agriculture, education, and railways. Differential sectoral performance was 2 attributed to the factors of specificity and competition.1 Specificity is defined as the degree to which it is possible to specify the objectives of an activity and to measure and control its performance. Competition refers to the extent to which an activity is subject to external or market competition or to surrogates of competition such as pressure from clients or from the internal control devices of the organization managing the activity. Sectors 23 Israel, ob. cit.

24 Ibid.