A New Green Order?

Zoe Young

Description

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) is a publicly funded, multi-billion dollar experiment in global resource management. It was set up in 1991 by the World Bank to fund international conventions on climate change and biodiversity.



Investigating the workings of this little known aid fund, Zoe Young takes a critical look at the conflicts involved, focusing on how the GEF's agenda relates to questions of globalisation, knowledge and accountability in the United States and the World Bank.



As our landscapes, fertility, cultures and ecosystems are being destroyed every day, Zoe Young gives a disturbing account of the complex issues that must be addressed before the world's environment can be managed more democratically - and effectively.
1. GREENING THE NEW WORLD ORDER

‘The Future Of The Earth… In Our Hands’

The GEF in Practice

The GEF in Context

2. GLOBAL ENCLOSURES AND THEIR DISCONTENTS

Globalisation and its Institutions

Aid and Development, Enclosing the Commons?

Environmental Movements

Multilateral Environment Agreements

3. CREATION OF A GLOBAL GREEN FUND

A Global Environment Fund is Conceived

The Institutional Arrangement Created

Overview of GEF’s Spending in the Pilot Phase

GEF Climate Project: Spreading Solar Energy in Zimbabwe

Unced and After

Interests in the GEF After Rio

4. GETTING THE NEW FACILITY IN ORDER

Review and Restructuring

The New Governance Structure

The New Operational Structure

The New Issues Emerging

5. PUTTING PLANS INTO PRACTICE

Raising the Money

Sources of ‘GEFable’ projects

Allocating the Money

Distributing the Money

Devolving Finance

6. COMPETITION, CO-OPERATION AND DISTORTED FEEDBACK

Inside GEF

Relations in the GEF Family

Participation and Feedback

Democracy, Science and Knowledge

7. CAN ANYONE SAVE THE WORLD?

Revisiting assessments

Saving Worlds. Within Limits

Possible alternatives to spending on a GEF

References

Index

Sujets

• Environmental Protection
• Environmental Conservation
• Environmental economics
• Environmentalist
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 octobre 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849640732
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A New Green Order?
The World Bank and the Politics
of the Global Environment Facility
Zoe Young
Pluto P Press
LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIAFirst published 2002 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 22883 Quicksilver Drive,
Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Zoe Young 2002
The right of Zoe Young to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1553 4 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 1548 8 paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Young, Zoe.
A new green order? : the World Bank and the politics of the Global
Environment Facility / Zoe Young.
p. cm.
ISBN 0–7453–1553–4 (hb : alk. paper) –– ISBN 0–7453–1548–8 (pb : alk.
paper)
1. Global Environment Facility. 2. Environmental policy––Political
aspects. 3. Environmental policy––International cooperation. 4.
Environmental policy––Evaluation. 5. World Bank. I. Title.
GE170 .Y685 2002
363.7'0526––dc21
2002008632
10987654321
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester
Printed in the European Union by Antony Rowe, Chippenham, EnglandContents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements x
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms xi
1. Greening the New World Order? 1
‘The Future of the Earth … In Our Hands’ 1
The GEF in Context 3
Establishing the GEF 5
The GEF in Practice 8
Understanding the GEF 13
Outline of the Book 16
Conclusions 17
2. Global Enclosures and their Discontents 18
Globalisation and its Institutions 19
Shaping Development from Above 26
Integrating Environment and Development 34
Multilateral Environment Agreements 40
Conclusions 47
3. Creation of a Global Green Fund 48
The GEF’s Initiation 49
The Institutional Arrangement Created 57
UNCED and After 64
Conclusions 78
4. Getting the New Facility in Order 80
Review and Restructuring 82
The New Governance Structure 91
The New Operational Structure 104
The New Issues Emerging 116
Conclusions 127vi A New Green Order?
5. Putting Plans into Practice 128
Summary of GEF Project Work 129
Raising the Money 131
Sources of ‘GEFable’ Projects 139
Allocating the Money 148
Distributing the Money 157
Devolving Finance 165
Risks in the GEF Portfolio 171
Conclusions 173
6. Competition, Cooperation and Distorted Feedback 174
Inside GEF 175
Relations in the GEF Family 185
Participation and Feedback 192
Democracy, Science and Knowledge 200
Conclusions 208
7. Can Anyone Save the World? 209
Revisiting Assessments 210
Sustaining Systems 217
Possible Alternatives to Spending on a GEF 225
Final Thoughts 229
Appendices 232
References 262
Index 278
LIST OF FIGURES
1. Accountability for funds and guidance offered 124
2. Simplified model of money flow through the GEF system 132Preface
In the early 1990s, I was a student and occasional green activist
when international discussions about the risks of climate change
and biodiversity loss finally led to the United Nations agreeing to
set up conventions to protect these aspects of the global
environment. But like most people on Earth I knew nothing of the Global
Environment Facility (GEF), established in the World Bank to pay
the costs of implementing these new environmental Conventions
in the global South. Ten years later, I came to write this book as an
academic researcher employed on a study entitled ‘The Functioning
1of the Global Environment Facility – a Political Analysis’, and
interested in the uses made of power, knowledge and international
institutions in the name of the global public good.
The GEF was charged to protect natural biological and climatic
systems that are complex and self-organising – like the political and
economic milieu into which the new financial institution was
born. Both environmental and social complexities can be
understood as emergent properties from systemic evolution ‘at the
edge of chaos’, and it is at the intersection of these two sets of
complex ecologies that GEF people have been appointed to save
nature for the public good, and I have tried to understand what
they are actually doing.
This book explores how an unprecedented experiment in global
resource management has worked behind its public face, and also
what this experiment has been like to work with. Aiming to
challenge what Rosaldo (quoted in Hertz and Imber, 1995) calls the
‘cultural invisibility’ of the powerful, this book is a report back to
1. In this book I report on findings gathered while working as research
assistant and part-time PhD student in the Department of Geography,
University of Hull, UK, also briefly in the Science Policy Research Unit,
University of Sussex, UK. The research project and subsequent
documentary on the GEF were financed by the UK Economic and Social Research
Council under its Global Environmental Change Programme (grant no.
L320253193). This assistance is gratefully acknowledged. The grant holder
bears no responsibility for the final content of this book.
viiviii A New Green Order?
readers whose taxes probably pay for the GEF, and whose shared
natural environments its experts and investments are supposed
to save.
The text aims to betray no confidences but to convey
understandings developed largely through anonymous, in-depth
2interviews. I visited people in GEF’s constituent governing, advisory
and secretarial bodies; national ministries providing and spending
GEF finances; units of the World Bank, International Finance
Corporation, UN Development Programme and UN Environment
Programme implementing GEF projects; secretariats of the United
Nations Convention on Biodiversity and (to a lesser extent)
Framework Climate Change Convention; interested
non-governmental organisations, consultants, scientists and academics; as well
3as communities affected by a GEF project in India.
Overall, interviewee responses ranged from the heart-opening to
the downright deceptive, with a lot of reserved cooperation in
between. When my questions inevitably ‘ventured into a political
minefield’, some interviewees preferred to offer an ‘institutional
view’, and several declined to respond altogether. More than one
said my questions were hard to answer because, like a marriage,
GEF work is ‘lived everyday and moves forward bit by bit, so it’s
very hard to step back and make a one-off judgement’ (interview,
GEF secretariat, 1997). In fact I found that, like me, nobody
involved is able to be fully objective – to the extent that, for some,
‘it doesn’t matter what actually happened, so much as how you
present it’. Over lunch, this international civil servant suggested
that I could have made a deal: promising the GEF that my research
would not be harmful, in exchange for greater access. But I aimed
to tell the truth as I found it – not as it suited the institution under
investigation.
For reasons of space I assume that if readers are interested in details
of GEF’s own published reports, facts and figures, they can follow
them up elsewhere (see, for example, the GEF’s own extensive website:
<www.gefweb.org>). If I give less space to official versions of events
2. I conducted over 80 interviews mostly in the US in 1997 and India in 1998
and 1999, and have learned from innumerable informal conversations
and e-mails since 1996.
3. Thanks to Ian Bacon for permission to adapt his report of research in
Zimbabwe in 1996 (see Bacon, 1998).Preface ix
than to the difficulties, protests and elevated gossip, it is mostly
because the GEF and the World Bank etc. already publicise the official
story, while the perspectives gathered here might not otherwise reach
an interested audience. Acknowledgements
Thanks –
To nature for being alive; my parents for getting me going; friends,
family, writers and teachers for making me think; Sonja for leading
me to the GEF; Dylan for persuading me into film; everyone at Pluto
for putting me into print; Kazimuddin Ahmed for the title; Ian Bacon,
Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, Mary-Jane Dance, Lucy Ford, Wendy
Gregory, Joyeeta Gupta, Dylan Howitt, Korinna Horta, Andy Jordan,
George Makoni, Simon Mitchell, Sarah Sexton, Neena Singh, Jake
Werksman, Alex Wilks, Elizabeth, Wayland and Louisa Young, and
numerous others for help, advice and encouragement; Flook for the
company; Rustam Vania and the Centre for Science and Environment
for the cartoons; Conscious Cinema for the images; the Global
Environmental Change Programme of the Economic and Social
Research Council for funding the research; the Universities of Sussex
and Hull for hosting it; and last but not least the many kind people
both inside and out of the GEF system for sharing their time,
information and thoughts. Thank you all.
Apologies –
To the friends, family and compadres whom I have been avoiding
to get this book done; to anyone whom at any stage in this research
and writing I have misunderstood, missed out or misled; and to my
readers who deserve clearer social science and story-telling about this
exotic ecological organisation existing on the edge of chaos. Since I
live there too, I accept responsibility for my omissions and mistakes.
This book is dedicated to everybody with respect.
xList of Abbreviations and
Acronyms
CBD UN Convention on Biological Diversity
CEO Chief Executive Officer
CITES Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species
COP Conference of the Parties (to a UN Convention)
CSD UN Commission on Sustainable Development
CSE Centre for Science and Environment (Delhi NGO)
CSERGE Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global
Environment
ECOSOC UN Economic and Social Council
EDF Environmental Defense (US NGO)
FCCC UN Framework Convention on Climate Change
FEU Fundacion Ecologica Universal
FP Focal Point
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GEF Global Environment Facility
GEFOP GEF Operations Committee
GNP Gross National Produc