Posturing on the Environment
During the latter part of the Iglesias presidency, the IDB began to rewrite its outdated, 452-word Environment policy, which had served as the standing policy on this vital issue since its adoption in 1979. In March 2004, the IDB Executive Directors approved and disclosed an advanced profile of the Environment and Safeguards Compliance policy for comment, and one month later, the IDB announced a plan for consultation with civil society on the advanced profile of the policy.
Since then, a series of consultation meetings were held on the proposed policy. Then-President Iglesias appointed a Blue Ribbon Panel of prominent environmental advisors to make recommendations on the policy, and then made a variety of commitments in response to the Panel’s report. Under pressure from civil society, the IDB also held three public consultations on a proposal to revise the IIM (now dubbed the Consultation and Compliance Review Mechanism, or CCRM), one in Washington, D.C. and two others in Mexico and Brazil. After moderately successful consultation periods on both the Environment policy and the CCRM proposal, the IDB chose to withhold the draft version of the Environment and Safeguards Compliance policy that was submitted to the IDB’s Policy and Evaluation Committee, despite promises from the Board and Management that this would be shared with civil society. This lack of transparency ultimately undermined the entire consultation process, as it was impossible for civil society organizations (CSOs) to know if their comments and suggestions had been included in the new draft. Eventually, in late October 2005, the IDB Executive Director for Argentina provided CSOs with a copy of the draft Environment policy.
A side-by-side comparison between the draft version of the policy and the one that became official in January 2006 reveals a number of interesting discrepancies that, taken together, call into question the IDB’s commitments to having truly strong and broadly applicable environmental mitigation standards. Read More
All the while, President Iglesias publicly committed to making the IDB an “environmental bank” with policies “as good or better” than the World Bank’s. This gave civil society some hope that the Environment and CCRM policies would be strong and mutually-enforcing. Some within the IDB even expected that President Iglesias, who left the IDB on September 30, 2005 after 17 years at the head of the Bank, would use his accumulated political capital to push the policies through the IDB’s Board before his departure, in order to claim them as part of his legacy. This was not to happen, and although the new IDB president, Luis Alberto Moreno, was in fact in his job only four months when the updated Environment policy was finally approved, he had yet to demonstrate his level of commitment to the principles underlying the policy, or the Bank’s safeguards framework more generally.
For more information on the policy revision process and the outcomes of the consultation process from the IDB’s point of view, see the Environment and Safeguards Compliance Policy page. (IDB website)