Management Response and Action Plan (MRAP): Evaluation of the Weapons Threat Reduction Program, 2018-19 to 2023-24

Recommendation 1

The WTRP should increase its profile and engagement with Canadian civil society and academia. This should be done with the aim of both strengthening project identification and development, as well as increasing the program’s visibility. The program should also take steps to increase its visibility within GAC and the Government of Canada.

Management response and commitment

The WTRP partially agrees with this recommendation.

The program agrees to reinforce and expand its existing efforts to engage with Canadian civil society and academia, but notes repeated and sustained efforts over the past two decades and the limited interest and capacity of Canadian CSOs to engage across most WTRP lines of effort.

With few exceptions, efforts of Canadian CSOs are focussed on policy advocacy and awareness-raising; they do not have sufficient capacity or the required expertise to provide relevant, technical, and broad-based guidance on project development, or to support program delivery internationally, given the limited scope of their own activities and priorities—which in turn do not necessarily align with those of the Government of Canada. The WTRP actively participates in annual Canadian civil society consultation meetings convened by GAC’s Non-proliferation, Disarmament, and Space policy division (IGN); however, the focus of Canada’s CSO community historically has been limited to issues of nuclear disarmament (particularly the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, to which Canada is not a State Party), “killer robots” (Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems), and demining. In this regard, repeated offers by the WTRP in recent years to add additional threat reduction content to the annual civil society consultation have not been supported by the CSO community. This disconnect highlights the reality that WTRP programming is first and foremost a tool to advance Canada’s foreign policy and security priorities, which are sometimes not aligned with those of Canadian civil society.

The WTRP agrees there is likely untapped potential for increasing its engagement with Canadian academia, particularly those academic hubs with a focus on the program’s thematic priorities (for example, the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs). Unlike the Canadian CSO community, which tends to focus on advocacy in narrow priority sectors exclusive to Canadian non-proliferation, arms control and disarmament (NACD) policy, Canadian academia is potentially a broader, more evidence-based community of interest where the WTRP sees the opportunity for more constructive and considered discussions on programming activities.

Recommendation 2

The WTRP should increase the level of sharing of best practices and lessons learned among existing funding recipients, as well as with potential funding recipients. This could include documented experiences, as well as virtual meetings.

Management response and commitment

The WTRP agrees with this recommendation.

In principle, the WTRP is fully supportive of further efforts to increase the effectiveness of its implementing partners, including through the formalized sharing of best practices between partners and across projects. This is already done in certain cases, such as the WTRP conceived and funded Global Partnership Countering WMD Disinformation Initiative, through which the WTRP assembled a coalition of four distinct implementing partners to deliver a single project, thereby leveraging different capabilities and harnessing lessons learned. However, the practical reality is that many of the WTRP’s partners coexist and compete in the same ecosystem for a limited pool of donor funding, and consequently may be reluctant to share lessons learned and best practices with potential competitors.

Such a process would have greater (albeit still limited) utility when sharing experiences across different sectors (i.e. where partners are not in direct competition with one another); for example, lessons learned from working to advance nuclear regulatory infrastructure in Africa could be usefully shared to support efforts to increase universalization of the Arms Trade Treaty (e.g. where the commonality is based on the beneficiary interlocuters rather than the thematic content).

The WTRP identifies a sizable proportion of its programing activities through the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction. As part of its regular Global Partnership Working Group (GPWG) process, there is a formalized “matchmaking” process to submit, identify and develop project opportunities; as part of those discussions, there may be an opportunity to develop a guidance document for project proponents on overall best practices and lessons learned based on the donor community’s years of experience in delivering WMD-focussed threat reduction programming globally.

Recommendation 3

The WTRP should continue its advocacy with international partners for Gender Equality (GE) and its integration into projects. The WTRP should further explore opportunities for GE-rated projects in its programming, particularly in the chemical security portfolio. There are opportunities to build upon the existing work done by WTRP-funded partners and others regarding best practices in integrating GE into chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) work.

Management response and commitment

The WTRP agrees with this recommendation.

The WTRP will continue its advocacy for Gender Equality and its integration into project outputs and outcomes, and continue to explore opportunities for GE-relevant access points in its programming. Identifying such opportunities has proved challenging outside the program’s conventional weapons portfolio (weapons of mass destruction are notoriously gender-blind) and are typically limited to increasing women’s participation in CBRN-relevant fields such as nuclear regulation, chemical inspection, biosafety and biosecurity. However, these fields are highly technical and require advanced, specialized training; due to a chronic underrepresentation of women in STEM fields, particularly in many low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) where the WTRP operates, there is often a very limited pool of qualified female candidates available for programming partners to engage with. (NB: Increasing women’s entry into STEM fields at the secondary and post-secondary levels is well beyond the WTRP’s programming mandate.) Indeed, implementing partners have occasionally expressed a lack of comfort in their own their ability to deliver GE outcomes proposed by the program.

The WTRP will seek to develop more impactful GE-rated projects in the chemical security portfolio, their absence from which is somewhat anomalous. While there is nothing specific to chemical security that would prevent accessing the same GE access points used by the biological, nuclear and radiological security portfolios, the programmatic opportunities identified by and proposed to the WTRP in recent years have not presented meaningful GE opportunities. The program will continue to press the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and other key stakeholders in this domain to identify appropriate GE components in programming activities.

Fundamentally, the WTRP is a security-focussed program that is expected and required to align its activities with Canada’s national interest priorities – this is an overriding directive from Cabinet that cannot be made subordinate to Gender Equality considerations. Where opportunities to advance GE can be identified within the context of the WTRP’s programming activities, they will be incorporated; however, this will necessarily remain subordinate to the overall security-driven priorities of the program.