Elegantes Telefax - JAV der TUB - TU Berlin

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tor on the Board (Le Prestre 1989). The various changes of the rules/reorganizations
of the World Bank to avoid and/or mitigate the negative environmental impact are to
a large extent the result of actions of the principals, mainly in the US, reacting towards
pressure of environmental lobby organizations which were successful in leveraging
the US Congress on several occasions during the period of authorizing IDA
replenishments:
• The establishment of a central environmental department and of the four regional
environmental divisions by President Barber Conable in 1987 was a reaction to a
NGO campaign which had started four years earlier in 1983, based on a small
number of environmentally damaging projects supported by the World Bank, 7 and
it was ultimately designed and timed to avoid a negative vote of the US Congress
on IDA-8 and, as a rare occasion, on an increase in the US contribution to the
World Bank’s capital base. The capital increase had become necessary to implement
the Baker-Plan formulated in 1985 which was designed to give the World
Bank a larger role in lending to debt-ridden borrowing countries. The US Treasury
changed its course towards pressing the World Bank for an environmental reform
in 1986 when it realized the threat the environmental problems posed to the vote
of Congress (Wade 1997, 667f.).
• The Environmental Assessment procedures of the World Bank were made more
specific than the 1984 Directive, based on Bank’s staff, but during the negotiations
to replenish IDA-9 in 1988, US Congress demanded systematic environmental
assessment procedures from the World Bank (Gutner 2002, 57; Wade
1997, 681).
• The Inspection Panel, as a three member commission to investigate complaints
against the World Bank, is not an environmental institutional device per se, but it
was intended to improve the accountability of the World Bank the lack of which
was seen by NGOs as a major hindrance towards environmental improvement.
But its establishment was linked to the appropriation of IDA-10 in 1993 (Gutner
2002).
The US principals and other countries are credited with supporting the Bank with
further measures, namely the creation of the Global Environmental Facility in 1989
and of the Montreal Protocol’s Multilateral Fund (Gutner 2002).
The literature identifies major reorganizations which were relevant for the inclusion
of environmental rules and their implementation which were mostly credited to the
7 These were most prominently the Polonoroeste project in Brazil, the Transmigration Program in Indonesia,
a livestock project in Botswana and the irrigation and hydropower projects on India’s Narmada
river (for the campaign strategy cf. Wade 1997, 656f.).