Since 1992, the Bank Information Center (BIC) has worked with communities affected by the policies and projects of multilateral development banks in Latin America. Along with the World Bank and several other institutions, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has long been a focus of the Bank Information Center’s monitoring activities.
As a public multilateral bank, the IDB is a key political interlocutor in strategies and negotiations concerning development in Latin America. Nevertheless, the IDB’s social and environmental policies and mechanisms for public consultation and inspection—fundamental instruments to establish financial norms in the region—are still below international standards. Currently, with the rush for banks to finance a new wave of mega-infrastructure projects, many sectors within the IFIs and governments view these standards as obstacles to development. They try to weaken them just when it would be best to harmonize upward these same standards within all the international financial institutions (IFIs)
The Initiative for Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (BIC website) -- known by its Spanish acronym IIRSA -- is a striking example of the renewed emphasis on infrastructure by the IDB and its partners. IIRSA proposes a series of large-scale, high-risk and debt-heavy mega-projects that would result in extensive alterations to landscapes and livelihoods in the region. In this development framework, mountains, forests, and wetlands are seen as barriers to economic development and rivers become the means for extracting natural resources. Read More on the objectives and likely impacts of this controversial initiative.
In response to IIRSA, BIC has created a project called Building Informed Civic Engagement for Conservation in the Andes-Amazon (BICECA). This project aims to support CSOs that want to analyze and influence economic integration projects and policies in the Andes-Amazon in order to help protect the biological and cultural diversity of the region. More information is available on BIC’s new BICECA website.
BIC’s Latin America (LAC) Program focuses on documentation and analysis of IFI projects and policies; fostering dialogue between and among local communities, CSOs, and decision makers; and capacity building around the institutional mechanisms and policies for public consultations, the monitoring of projects, and overall public engagement with the IFIs.
While the LAC Program concerns itself with monitoring the work of all the development banks that are active in Latin America, the main focus of the program will continue to be the IDB, because of its role as the coordinator of development-related policy dialogue and investment among the IFIs, private companies, and governments. The IDB is undergoing significant changes under its new president, Luis Alberto Moreno.