20 September 2007 | Washington, DC
Civil society groups monitoring the Asian Development Bank's "safeguard" policies find that the ADB needs to make substantial improvements to catch up with international standards and peer institutions.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) initiated a review of its three safeguard policies in 2005. These policies guide ADB staff and clients to "avoid, minimize or mitigate adverse environmental impacts, social costs to third parties or marginalization of vulnerable groups that may result from development projects."
The ongoing Safeguard Policy Update (SPU) offers the ADB a critical opportunity to enhance its policies on environmental assessment, involuntary resettlement and indigenous peoples in accordance with international standards. The SPU should serve as a process through which the ADB incorporates lessons from past failures and successes, and establishes dramatically improved policies and fully funded systems for safeguard implementation and accountability.
With this objective in mind, three NGOs that are part of the wider effort aimed at monitoring the ADB's SPU process, prepared comparisons of ADB policies with international standards and policies of peer institutions. The analysis was done by Environmental Defense, International Accountability Project, and the Forest Peoples Programme in the hope that the ADB will uphold its responsibility to ensure rigorous social and environmental protections to local people across Asia.
Resources
Comparative matrices:
Websites: