This post is from Bank Information Center - Amplifying Local Voices to Democratize Development.
By Debbie Pierce, Forest Associate
The World Bank introduced its first safeguard policies over thirty years ago, in response to outrage over harmful impacts of its development projects, including widespread forest destruction and eviction of indigenous peoples. The safeguards were designed to ensure that these impacts would be assessed before the project was implemented, and to prevent or mitigate adverse impacts on people and the environment. The new safeguards, approved on August 4, 2016, are the result of four years of negotiations. The process of the safeguards review and the resulting new safeguards policy is a product of political compromise, and will have ramifications for forests and indigenous people for years to come.
The World Bank stated in its press release that compared to current safeguards, the new safeguards are a streamlined approach that will help to build the capacity of borrowing governments and will improve protections for the world’s most vulnerable people and the environment. Many others including human rights and environmental groups have called the safeguards a “dangerous setback” in ensuring that World Bank lending does not have irreversible and damaging effects on people and the environment, specifically indigenous rights and forest protection.
Indigenous People
Indigenous communities have been proven time and again to be the best stewards of forests, with a growing body of evidence showing lower deforestation rates on indigenous lands than land adjacent to indigenous lands. The securing of indigenous land through tenure rights is essential for ensuring the long term viability of both forests and indigenous livelihoods.
Non-governmental organizations from World Bank borrowing countries, including indigenous rights groups are concerned with the outcome of the safeguards review process. Prabindra Shakya, with Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact stated that their concerns have not been addressed in the process or in the outcome of the safeguards review. Sukhgerel Dugersuren of OT Watch Mongolia said that the changes in the safeguards leave communities unprotected in World Bank financed projects. Adrien Sinafasi, from First Peoples Worldwide, said “The World Bank’s intention to allow our governments, which have marginalized our communities for decades, to decide whether we are indigenous or not would severely undermine our fundamental human rights and weaken the limited protections we currently have.” Brazilian media highlighted safeguard criticisms relating to indigenous rights.
Why are the safeguards such a dangerous setback for indigenous people? In 2007, the nations of the world agreed to (or the UN approved) the historic UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which other protections requires that States consult and cooperate with indigenous peoples through their chosen representatives to obtain their Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) for projects affecting them. In its wake, many actors – including the World Bank Group’s own IFC and many private sector actors – have adopted FPIC as standard practice. Unfortunately when the World Bank included FPIC in their new standards they undermined its utility as a protective measure by restricting the situations in which fpic is required. Additionally, rather than requiring agreement by indigenous peoples through their own decisionmaking processes and structures, the Bank defined fpic as mere “collective support”, increasing the potential for abuse and manipulation.
Borrower country governments differ in the treatment of vulnerable communities within their borders; for example, officials in Kenya stated that participatory consultation should be favored over consent because of the occasional need to forcibly remove indigenous forest peoples to make way for development projects. These decisions can be justified by explaining that the development project is for the “greater good” of the country, but this justification falls short in light of evidence that indigenous people have time and again been disadvantaged by these projects, and in many cases have seen their livelihoods destroyed (see here and here).
The new safeguards allow for the increased responsibility for management of projects by financial intermediaries (FIs), which have no legal incentive to protect indigenous and vulnerable people unless it is in their financial interest. Experience with the Bank’s private sector arm’s lending to FIs has shown that they often lack the capacity or will to spot and manage risks to communities, resulting in projects beset by human rights abuses.
The new safeguard policy on indigenous people includes an “opt-out” loophole that may allow countries to opt-out of applying the standard to development projects. The United Nations has called this “tantamount to the denial of the existence and rights of…indigenous peoples”. More importantly, the new safeguard policy has proposed to replace planning requirements with ‘community development plans’ which are more vague and may result in the weakening of indigenous peoples’ participation in the planning process.
Forests
The current safeguard policy has three sections which are pertinent to forests; these include Operational Policy (OP) 4.04 Natural Habitats, and OP 4.36 Forests. In the current policy, which includes a separate OP on forests, forests are treated as an ecosystem that is important enough to be distinguished from other types of natural habitats. In the new safeguard policy, which only includes an ‘Environmental and Social Standard’ on natural habitats, forests are mentioned sparingly, and mostly in terms of forest plantations. In the current policy, the link between maintaining forest ecosystems and reducing poverty is made several times throughout, and is even included in the scope of the policy. Critical forest habitat is treated as a no-go area, with the current policy stating “The Bank does not finance projects that, in its opinion, would involve significant conversion or degradation of critical forest areas or related critical natural habitats”, whereas the new policy states “In areas of critical habitat, the Borrower will not implement any project activities that have potential adverse impacts unless all of the following conditions are met” and then follows with a long list of vague requirements.
The new safeguard policy on natural habitats is a serious dilution of current requirements in that it has the potential to expand deforestation and degradation into areas that were previously no-go areas. See the Bank Information Center press release here. The current safeguards protect the rights of forest dependent communities by recognizing the role forests play in poverty alleviation. They include OPs on both natural habitats and on forests. The new policy, however, is much more narrowly focused on biodiversity, and has introduced dangerous flexibility around development in protected areas, including critical habitats and salvage logging in primary tropical forests. Furthermore, it is doubtful that the new safeguards language on ecosystem services, which implicitly link forest benefits to forest community benefits, will be binding or implemented in a meaningful way.
Comparison with other MDBs
Other Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) with similar safeguard policies include the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the African Development Bank (AfDB), and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The World Bank has historically influenced the policies at these MDBs, and this influence is still apparent today.
For example, the AfDB safeguard policies include an operational safeguard on biodiversity and ecosystem services, and endeavors to “sustain the availability of ecosystem services for the affected communities”, which is absent in the new World Bank safeguards. The ADB safeguards include cumulative and induced impacts from projects on physical, biological, socioeconomic, and physical cultural resources. The IDB includes cost benefit language in its safeguard policy whereas the World Bank version is much more vague (see a comprehensive comparison here). IDB safeguards include no-go language with regard to critical habitats and a link between natural habitats and indigenous people that is stronger than that of the new World Bank policy.
Most of these safeguard policies were drafted prior to the new World bank safeguard review, and are therefore more closely aligned with the current World Bank safeguards. However, one difference between the scope of safeguards at some of the other MDBs and the World Bank is that safeguards apply to all public lending at other MDBs, while World Bank safeguards do not apply to certain types of lending like development policy lending (DPL) and program for results (PforR) – despite the fact that these two forms of lending have demonstrated impacts on forests.
A missed opportunity
The new World Bank safeguards do not reflect recent global agreements, such as last year’s climate summit that resulted in binding climate change commitments, or the sustainable development goals of 2015. Furthermore, the link between land use and climate change receives little attention in the new safeguards. The substantial evidence supporting the protection of forests for mitigating climate change and for the numerous ecosystem and cultural services provided to forest communities, as well as the important role forest communities play in protecting their forests continues to accumulate, but is disregarded by the new World Bank safeguards. Given its failure to upgrade to current best practice standards, or to align with global agreements, it is not clear how the Bank’s new policy will achieve the Bank’s own stated goals of reducing extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity.
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This article by Debbie Pierce originally appeared on bicusa.org on August 26, 2016 at 09:50PM
