World Bank Group Interactions With Environmentalists: Changing International Organisation Identities by Susan Park

Author:Susan Park [Park, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International, Intergovernmental Organizations, Political Economy, Political Science, Business & Economics, General
ISBN: 9780719079474
Google: RWW5DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 7665556
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2010-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

IFC’s environmental safeguard and information disclosure policies

Until recently, IFC escaped public scrutiny because of its relative anonymity as a multilateral development lender and investor. This changed when IFC was exposed for its inability to meet World Bank environmental rules in relation to the Pangue project (Lee 2001: 475, n 20). This section details how TEANs used direct and indirect socialisation to influence IFC to establish its own environmental and transparency rules via persuasion, social influence and coercion. This led to broader organisational changes including the expansion of its environment department. IFC already had an Environment Division with one environmental advisor in 1989. The division introduced environmental classifications for its projects, mimicking the Category A, B and C projects of the World Bank.31 Yet in 1990, only seven of 160 projects reviewed were deemed to have potentially significant environmental impacts. Now even IFC agrees that the volume of projects to review was beyond the capacity of one permanent staff member (IFC 2002b: 30).

TEANs were able to continue the socialisation process of the WBG because they engaged in persuasion, social influence and coercion to convince IFC to adopt the World Bank’s recently strengthened environmental and social safeguard and transparency policies. The lessons so harshly learnt by the World Bank thus served as an example and a template. Prior to Pangue there was a vague assumption that IFC would adhere to World Bank environmental and social standards, and while there had been no official adoption of policies, IFC used Bank staff to assess its projects.32 During 1993, at the height of the Pangue campaign, IFC began to revise its use of World Bank environmental safeguards. IFC began to realise that more specific private sector policies were needed rather than the ad hoc use of World Bank policies that had been tentatively in place since 1988 (IFC 2002b: 31). The 1993 environmental policy and 1994 information disclosure policy signalled the introduction of environmental rules purely for IFC.

Direct socialisation was used to shame IFC to strengthen its safeguards. It was the social influence of the TEAN Pangue campaign that convinced IFC of the need for a complete review of its approach to environmental and social issues (Crawford 1997; Morgera 2007: 155). TEAN’s Inspection Panel claim over the Pangue project in 1995 was an attempt by TEANs to apply strict interpretations of all of the World Bank’s environmental rules to IFC projects, which required a more detailed policy application than IFC had given in relation to Pangue. Carol Lee, an IFC staff member, states that environmentalists were right to question IFC because the 1993 policy did not expound precisely which of the Bank’s safeguards applied (2001: 477). This was compounded by the 1997 Hair report recommendations on improving IFC’s environmental policies, which came in response to the rejected Panel claim. Both informed the wide-scale review and comprehensive upgrading of IFC’s environmental and social safeguard policies in 1998 (IFC 2002b: 31). Direct socialisation as a result of the Pangue campaign and Inspection Panel claim therefore influenced IFC’s decision to take up environmental safeguards.

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