Foreclosing the Future
The World Bank and the Politics of Environmental Destruction
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- £26.99
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- £26.99
Publisher Description
World Bank President Jim Yong Kim has vowed that his institution will fight poverty and climate change, a claim that World Bank presidents have made for two decades. But if worldwide protests and reams of damning internal reports are any indication, too often it does just the opposite. By funding development projects and programs that warm the planet and destroy critical natural resources on which the poor depend, the Bank has been hurting the very people it claims to serve. What explains this blatant contradiction?
If anyone has the answer, it is arguably Bruce Rich—a lawyer and expert in public international finance who has for the last three decades studied the Bank’s institutional contortions, the real-world consequences of its lending, and the politics of the global environmental crisis. What emerges from the bureaucratic dust is a disturbing and gripping story of corruption, larger-than-life personalities, perverse incentives, and institutional amnesia. The World Bank is the Vatican of development finance, and its dysfunction plays out as a reflection of the political hypocrisies and failures of governance of its 188 member countries.
Foreclosing the Future shows how the Bank’s failure to address the challenges of the 21st Century has implications for everyone in an increasingly interdependent world. Rich depicts how the World Bank is a microcosm of global political and economic trends—powerful forces that threaten both environmental and social ruin. Rich shows how the Bank has reinforced these forces, undercutting the most idealistic attempts at alleviating poverty and sustaining the environment, and damaging the lives of millions. Readers will see global politics on an increasingly crowded planet as they never have before—and come to understand the changes necessary if the World Bank is ever to achieve its mission.
To review the references and notes with links to articles, please click on the “Resources” tab at https://islandpress.org/foreclosing-the-future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his latest book, lawyer Rich (Mortgaging the Earth), a knowledgeable critic, focuses on the World Bank's environmental failures. Typical of the book's horror stories is the example of the Chad-Cameroon project. Although oil extraction would seem incompatible with the goal of combating global warming, the World Bank pledged $350 million in 2001 to the $8 billion project, intending for governments in Chad and Cameroon to use their oil revenue to help the poor in those counties. Instead, Chad's revenue paid for arms and security for corrupt President Idriss Deby. Cameroon, despite producing huge oil profits, failed to fund two new national parks or a plan to assist the indigenous Pygmy population. The undertaking, however, provided Exxon with huge profits in 2006 and 2007. The author documents similar catastrophes environmental, economic, and political elsewhere and chides the organization for its feeble defense: that private-sector funding for economic development would come with fewer safeguards and result in more rapacious policies. The World Bank's current president, Jim Yong Kim, an international health reformer, provides some hope for change, though Rich suggests that he too may succumb to the organization's culture and politics. The World Bank appears to understand only first-world solutions to third-world development problems.