Environmental Safeguards and the Equator Principles

Abstract

Large-scale investment projects in the developing world, in particular in the infrastructure, energy and extractive sectors are often highly controversial. Some doubt principally whether ‘prestige projects’, such as hydroelectric dams or cross-continental highways, serve any developmental purposes at all. Others criticize specific projects for their negative environmental and social impacts. Since the 1980s, strong transnational protest movements have opposed many such projects, have halted some of them, and have often generated policy and institutional innovations as a result. The creation of the World Commission on Dams, of the World Bank’s Extractive Industries Review, or of the recent Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil all are examples of this dynamic. Protest movements often targeted their pressure at the financiers of such projects, and financiers as a result were the first who attempted to control negative project impacts by means of regulation. The first international institution to adopt ‘safeguards’, meaning standards requiring project financiers to assess and mitigate environmental and social impacts of proposed projects, was the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development or the World Bank (hereinafter referred to simply as ‘the Bank’). From the Bank, the standards proliferated to other multilateral development banks (MDBs), to many national development and export finance institutions and even to commercial banks that, in recent years, increasingly took over the business branch of project finance from public lenders.KeywordsCommercial BankCivil Society ActorEquator PrincipleInternational Finance CorporationSocial Impact AssessmentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.