The institution won’t adopt the World Commission on Dams’s guidelines on resettlement and indigenous peoples
David Le Page
What appears to be a small, undeclared spat between the World Commission on Dams (WCD) and the World Bank could dramatically affect the future of millions of people.
The World Bank is backing down from fully adopting the commission’s final report because doing so would require it to improve the way it deals with people affected by large dam construction.
The commission was established by a workshop run by the World Bank and the World Conservation Union in Gland, Switzerland, in 1997. It worked for two years in Cape Town, drawing on the experience of people and governments around the world to produce a report summarising the world’s experience with large dams and presenting recommendations for deciding what dams are necessary and how their construction should be managed.
The report’s guidelines emphasise the rights of people affected by dam building. “One of the thorns for the bank is the [commission’s] call for prior informed consent from affected communities,” says Dana Clark of the Centre for International Environmental Law at Berkeley, California.
According to the centre and other NGOs, the bank’s “conversion” of its operational guidelines to a new format has actually weakened existing resettlement policies. This means millions of people usually the poor and marginalised are likely to be worse affected by forced removals for dam construction.
The bank flatly denies this. “We’re in no way diluting our safeguard policies on resettlement and indigenous peoples. We’re clarifying them,” said Kristyn Ebro of the World Bank’s external affairs department in Washington on Wednesday.
The “clarified” standards remain outdated as they were written in 1990 before several important international human rights treaties.
A study by the bank in 1994, according to the Centre for International Environmental Law, “found that out of 192 projects involving involuntary resettlement, only one project had satisfactorily compensated and rehabilitated resettled communities”.
Ebro says she is unaware of the 1994 study. Clark laughs at this.
“Everyone knows about that study. I see the changes as making the bank more in line with the borrowing country government and less in line with the needs of affected people. ‘Illegal users of natural resources’ this is new language that doesn’t appear in the old policy.”
Anthropologist Thayer Scudder of the California Institute of Technology said this week: “Leaving aside World Bank reactions to the commission’s report, I consider the World Bank’s past and present resettlement guidelines to be inexcusable and unacceptable for an organisation that claims that its main goal is poverty alleviation.”
But there are substantial vested interests in the dam industry $65-billion a year is spent on new dams. The bank holds only 0,6% of that business. In its own words: “In early 2000 2,6-million individuals and 548?000 households were found to be adversely affected in bank projects under implementation.”
Opportunities for new dam construction in the North countries are shrinking rapidly. In the United States dams are actually being decommissioned. In Europe, countries such as Norway have restricted new dam construction. So the industry looks to the South, where the infatuation with grandiose technology has not faded.
NGOs argue that even if the World Bank’s financing of new dams is limited, many governments and institutions still look to it for guidance. They say the bank’s responsibilities are greater than its share of the new dam business would suggest.
The bank’s lukewarm reception of the commission’s report became clear in Cape Town in February, where the commission held its final forum of world organisations, activists and experts.
“If the commission’s recommendations and guidelines … are to be taken as a checklist of requirements to be ‘complied with’ and ‘conformed to’ then they are strongly opposed by all the governments we have consulted,” said World Bank senior water adviser John Briscoe.
This was not the ringing endorsement NGOs expected from an organisation that “quite likely has had more opportunities for formal and informal inputs into the commission’s process than any other”.
The World Bank’s attitude does seem cautious compared to that of another lender, the African Development Bank, which wrote to the commission: “The criteria, guidelines and standards, provided in the report, would be particularly useful during the planning, design, appraisal, construction, operation, monitoring and decommissioning of dams financed by the bank. We plan to incorporate the criteria and guidelines during the development of [our] technical guidelines.”
The bank protests that it does endorse the process that produced the WCD report. Ebro says the report is “a valuable tool to be used in the right circumstances”.
After the March forum, the commission itself argued that the bank should be given time to digest the report.
“[The bank’s] responses are complex there’s no question of it having rejected the report,” said commission secretary-general Achim Steiner at the time.
NGOs remained appalled at the bank’s stance. On March 20 Swiss NGO the Berne Declaration sent a letter of protest to the bank that drew the support of 85 similar organisations around the world. The Berne Declaration also argued that the bank is actually lobbying its client countries to reject the commission guidelines.
Ebro flatly denies this.
“We reject that statement. [Governments] are clients, so we have to listen to them. We weren’t lobbying.”
Sources close to the commission also now express dissatisfaction with the bank’s response. Their accounts of the action of bank officials, particularly Briscoe, accord with the NGO reports: that the bank appeared in some cases to be lobbying its clients not to support the report.
The bank has responded to the Berne Declaration letter: “We believe that the report is a valuable guide, and we are … working with our partners in implementing the report’s good recommendations.”
But the bank, says Ebro, will not amend its procedures to incorporate the guidelines.
“We’re happy with our own policies and we think they’re enough.”
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