The emergence of global conservation funds over the last 20 years has been driven by donor governments’ priorities. These priorities include pacifying Western green and scientific lobbies, expanding economic growth through big business as- usual, and the rebranding of old public institutions like the World Bank to chime with new agendas – particularly climate change and biodiversity conservation. Without an accompanying strategic framework to drive global trade and investment into more ecologically and socio-culturally sensitive developments, billions of dollars and any number of excellent projects – and quite a few less than excellent – have not created the substantive ‘global environmental benefits’ promised through innovations like the Global Environment Facility (GEF; Young 2002). While exploring the allocation of GEF’s billion or so US dollars a year, often as a ‘sweetener’ to ‘green’ development finance, I also found that research that did not treat marketisation of nature as given – but rather explored the roots, flaws and impacts of this ‘new green order’ – was not particularly welcome in donor and allied circles.
One of the first projects GEF funded in the Bank was a Programme for measuring the Incremental Costs of the Environment (PRINCE).PRINCE offered a framework for setting economic terms on global environmental value, to facilitate donor treasuries’ restriction of GEF to protecting only ‘globally’ beneficial nature. This theoretical approach enables economic consultants to justify others’ geo-political and business decisions on what to fund. It also set the stage for ‘offsetting’ the costs of protection against continued environmental destruction elsewhere.
Some of the more effective and credible critics of the GEF were offered medium sized projects of their own, as well as some small policy concessions, and thus transformed into an ‘official opposition’ that worked within the framework of the GEF. In this emerging ‘win-win-win’ scenario for bankers, donors, conservation big NGOs (BINGOs), project ‘beneficiaries’ and an ‘evaluation community’ (whose terms of reference leave out almost as much as they include), serious questions of cultural difference, human rights, or the effectiveness of conservation projects per se were
effectively sidelined. For if even one ‘economic actor’ rates a river, a lake, a tree, a flower, a frog, a fish, a view or a sacred grove as ‘priceless’, then all sums in an honest economic assessment would be reduced to zero. And by the same token, if any one theoretical gram of carbon (or methane, or methyl bromide…) could be ‘the one’ that takes our atmosphere past a climatic tipping point, who can price our coastal cities and so much threatened more? Through the GEF and related programmes like the EU’S Clean Development Mechanism, the complex reality of our socio-biosphere has been squeezed into small economic ‘black boxes’… where it clearly does not fit; and the attempt has not done much for global conservation goals.
Researching the GEF
Our findings came through extensive desk study, questionnaires, interviews, participant observation and analysis. I found that professionals working with the GEF operate within numerous political, ideological and bureaucratic restrictions, with large gaps between aspiration and reality also attributable to the social, cultural, economic and spiritual distance between the people making funding decisions and those experiencing their impacts. Lacking the necessary time, transparency and accountability to enable effective feedback from the ground, GEF’s promises of ‘public participation’ were often reduced to the directive that ‘you participate in my project’ (Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment, at the 1998 GEF-NGO consultation in New Delhi). I found that unrealistic targets and the desire to placate diverse constituencies led officials to focus on smooth presentation of progress peppered with promises to adapt and improve in response to regular critical evaluations. Neither was it in GEF’s remit to share out effective control of development finance to some of the world’s most marginalised people, nor to engage substantively with the findings of critical research into the donor-led approach to supporting conservation.
Eco-Development
Our detailed case study was the India Eco-Development project at Nagarhole in Karnataka, South India, visited in 1997 and 1998. This aimed to combine traditional tiger reserve management with ‘ecological’ village level development – bribing locals to stay outside national park boundaries (Young, Makoni and Boehmer- Christiansen 2001; Mathews 2005). I was the guest of the Forest Department for a tour of the park’s newly funded roads, jeeps, watchtowers and fences, plus water pumps and biogas plants in surrounding villages. These officials seemed to be allied to local
representatives of the WCS and WWF; some were openly racist towards adivasi forest dwellers and could not conceive of their playing a meaningful part in conservation on their own terms of the forests they called home. I also visited the people who traditionally lived inside the forest now designated as national park. For the most part they seemed unhappy with the project and its backers, who they felt were more interested in depriving them of land and access to sustainable natural resources, than in understanding the complex forest community and challenging the socially dominant people most involved in smuggling and encroachment. Working with local development NGOs, some adivasis had put together a ‘Peoples’ Plan’ for the park, focused on removing roads and concrete buildings, providing water holes for wildlife and inviting tourists to stay in mud and straw settlements and walk among the wildlife. This proposal was apparently ignored in the Eco-Development process. According to the World Bank’s internal project assessment in 2002, of “twelve biological research studies… awarded under the project… none have yet been completed. A socioeconomic study is generally anecdotal; this report could be improved with more quantitative data on forest dependence.” So even four years after the project started, it lacked the baseline scientific data for effective action.
In 1998 a complaint about India Eco-Development at Nagarhole was submitted by adivasis to the World Bank’s independent Inspection Panel, which found it to be justified, but (lacking consistent BINGO pressure on the issue in Washington) the process fizzled out. I later found that the damning IP report was not translated into the local Kannada language; it was not available in the Bank’s India office even in English. By 2004 however, the Nagarhole project had been discontinued anyway, and some forest officials arrested for corruption. In 2005, Forest Park Press concluded a survey of GEF-funded projects in India with the claim that Eco-Development failed to address the actual causes of deforestation; alienated indigenous communities from their traditional habitats and cultures; promoted ‘unsustainable, unwanted and culturally inappropriate alternative livelihood activities’; and comprised ‘a huge wastage of funds’ that created ‘social conflict’.
Filming the GEF
While undertaking the research I found that very few people knew what GEF was doing, or why. In this context I joined Dylan Howitt to make a documentary about the GEF, making complex conservation finance issues accessible by showing the human side of stories usually confined to dry reports or promotional gloss. Our film, ‘Suits and Savages – Why the World Bank Won’t Save the World’ was made on a shoestring budget from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council’s (then) Global Environmental Change Programme. It takes a long zoom – and a ‘video letter’ – from Indian forest dwellers to the World Bank in Washington DC, via a heated GEF-NGO consultation about Eco-Development in New Delhi.
The then GEF CEO Mohamed El-Ashry had promised full co-operation with our work. So after we filmed the consultation, I was surprised when, without warning, I was bundled out of the Governing Council meeting for discreetly filming the proceedings. GEF Secretariat staff told me ‘Council members need confidentiality an had agreed not to allow filming in the chamber’. Yet three Council members independently said they had no objection to being filmed, and suggested that any ban came from the Secretariat. The following year we arranged numerous on camera interviews with GEF officials in Washington DC, and planned to film a screening of a ‘video letter’ that we had brought to the World Bank from some of the adivasis at Nagarhole forest. But after we arrived, our interviews gradually dried up. Officials’ children were suddenly sick, a Bank vice-president claimed we had ‘never mentioned anything about a camera’ when we came to film him as arranged. When I sought clearance to film a GEF reception in the lobby of the World Bank’s main building, the GEF Secretariat’s CEO, Mohamed El-Ashry asked me to check with Bank security; they gave permission, so we started shooting. A member of the GEF Secretariat then stopped us, claiming we were going ‘against instructions’. When I went to speak to El-Ashry again, he waved me away, refusing to communicate further. (A few days later we filmed another social event in the same grand atrium which appears in the film).
Eventually we learned indirectly that El-Ashry had disliked an article I had written on the GEF’s relationship with NGOs (I sent him a draft for comment the year before – and received no reply. This was later published as Young 1999). In the end, only a couple of the more confident (and, interestingly, fellow British) staff of the World Bank would appear in the film. One said he had retorted to those who would lean on him that ‘it is better to be upfront about what we are trying to do than to invite suspicion by hiding away’.
Screening the Film
I sent the completed film to all those who were interviewed, and arranged various screenings internationally. When translated and dubbed, we screened the film to acclaim at adivasi settlements in and around Nagarhole forest. Forest officials set up road blocks on our route, but we took detours, brought journalists and gathered friendly crowds. Officials also threatened to arrest me if I showed the film at their offices. They claimed this was because we had filmed inside the park ‘illegally’ – even though the film shows them escorting us in the park and granting interviews in their own offices. The UK representative on the GEF’s governing Council in the 1990s was a civil servant in the Department for International Development who had officially supported my colleague’s funding application for research on the GEF, and expressed interest in using our outputs. However, his successor in the post declined to participate in any screening or discussions once the research and the film were completed. Invitations to the World Bank went unanswered, but some years later I learned – off the record – that Bank staff had been making their own copies (without our copyright consent) for internal training on responding to NGO critics. GEF is still presented to the world as a source of innovation in transparent, accountable, effective environmental finance and the World Bank has been given many more environmental funds to run. Our research showed that while some kind of learning was certainly going on, the natural forests of India, the ever scarcer tigers, and the human cultures that have dwelled there for centuries without the desire to buy and sell the earth for private gain, were not the ones benefiting from those lessons.
References:
‘Suits and Savages – Why the World Bank Won’t Save the World’; A Conscious Cinema production by Dylan Howitt and Zoe Young is available on DVD in English, Spanish and Kannada; extras include ‘5 Years On’ a short film. An excerpt can be viewed online at https://www.ifiwatch.tv/en/video/2010/01/suits-and-savageswhy-world-bank-wont-save-tiger.
Griffiths, T. 2005. Indigenous Peoples and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Indigenous Peoples’ experiences of GEF-funded Biodiversity Conservation. Forest Park Press.
Mathews, S. 2005. Imperial Imperatives: Ecodevelopment and the Resistance of Adivasis of Nagarhole National Park, India. Law, Justice and
Global Development.
World Bank. 2002. Supervision mission India Eco-development Project (credit 2916-in/gef tfo 28479-in)
Young, Z. 2002. A New Green Order? The World Bank and the Politics of the Global Environment Facility. London: Pluto Press.
Young, Z., G. Makoni and S. Boehmer- Christiansen. 2001. Green Aid in India and Zimbabwe – Conserving Whose Community? Geoforum 32: 299-318.
Young, Z. 1999. Friendly Foes: GEF and the NGOs. In: Social Movements: Local, National and Global (ed. Chris Rootes). London: Frank Cass.
Peoples’ Plan for Preservation of Adivasi and Nagarhole Forests in Karnataka. 1998. Mimeo. Nagarhole Hadi, Karnataka, India.
