A second draft framework of the World Bank, for environmental and social safeguards policies, is said to “vastly weaken protections for affected communities and the environment at the same time as the bank intends to finance more high-risk projects,” and it could have a serious impact in India, which is the multilateral agency’s largest borrower.
Although the first draft of its safeguards framework, released in July 2014, came under fire from a wide swathe of human rights groups, and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim then committed to ensure that the Bank’s new rules would not “dilute” existing mandatory safeguards, a group of 19 organisations said this week that the second draft also “pointedly contradicts” Mr. Kim’s promise and calls into question the extent to which the bank has responded to public input.
Further, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), one among the 19 organisations, the proposed new framework would not cover substantial sections of the World Bank‘s portfolio, including rapidly disbursing policy-based lending for environmentally and socially sensitive sectors.
HRW said that despite repeated requests the Bank had also failed to make public a detailed budget for the implementation of its proposed plan.
The criticism of the Bank’s second draft framework came scarcely a month after HRW issued a scathing report alleging that Indian government and company officials engaged in widespread use of intimidation, including threats of physical violence and death, against outspoken members of communities that stand to be displaced or otherwise affected by World Bank-financed projects.
It also came weeks after the Bank’s own Inspection Panel hinted at “serious abuses in a World Bank-funded transmission line project in central Nepal,” for which the ultimate users of electricity were based in India.
In 2014, >The Hindu>reported that the Bank was fending off allegations that it was “watering down” these safeguards after a leaked report of a draft safeguards framework was described by Bank on Human Rights (BHR), a coalition for human rights in development finance, as moving “from one based on compliance with set processes and standards, to one of vague and open-ended guidance, threatens to render… technical improvements meaningless.”
At the time BHR’s coordinator, Gretchen Gordon, shared with The Hindu its rigorous analysis of the before-versus-after comparison of the Bank’s wording on safeguards, highlighting the new proposals’ inclusion of an “opt-out” clause from protections for indigenous communities, of a definition of “discrimination” that was not consistent with international law and no rigorous framework for enforcing human rights.
Additionally on involuntary resettlements and land acquisitions, BHR supplied a matrix of evidence showing the how the policy would get weakened over, for example, the issue of whether communities displaced by Bank-funded projects would merely get compensation or whether, as in the past, they would also benefit from sustained development programmes.
This may have particular significance for India given the current salience of the debate over the Land Acquisition Bill.
Similarly on environmental and social assessments, BHR provided another matrix showing that the new wording proposed would result in dilution in terms of the use of “borrower systems,” by focusing on the project level, with “little detail on eligibility for use, gap analysis or disclosure.”
Conceding that this may represent the shifting of some of the burden of safeguards onto borrower nations, Mark King, Chief Environmental and Social Standards Officer at the Bank, said to media at the time, “Borrowers go into agreement [with the Bank] with eyes wide open” and if there are unforeseen impacts on the environment or local communities the Bank has “various remedies” to deal with those.
However, critics of the Bank’s draft framework point out that should there ever be political fallout of Bank lending that adversely affects certain communities in borrower nations; the Bank possibly now has the ability to manoeuvre to avoid any liability owing to the greater reliance on borrower safeguards.
