Civil Society Relations

Unlike the 1984 movie “Blame it on Rio”, which attributed a bawdy affair between a middle-aged man (played by Michael Cain) and a teenager on the tropical vibes of the stunningly beautiful city, the recent hosting of the Rio +20 Conference served to showcase a different face of the Rio ambience -- its global environmental leadership role.  The city not only maintains the world’s two largest urban forests, Pedra Branca and Tijuca (see photo), but has just completed a state of the art waste treatment center which will allow for a 8% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and are installing 300 kilometers of bicycle lanes.  For the World Bank, the city has been the setting for the improbable significant improvement in relations between the Bank and environmental CSOs over the past 20 years.

When Rio hosted the original UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, the Bank participated with a small staff delegation and its modest publications booth at the parallel NGO “Global Forum” held on Flamengo Beach was set on fire by environmental activists.  They were protesting the Bank’s financing of the Narmada Dam project in India, which threatened to displace hundreds of thousands of small farmers without a fair and sustainable resettlement plan in place.  Some were expressing disapproval of the Polonoroeste project funded by the Bank in Brazil where the paving of a highway linking two Amazonian state capitals led to widespread deforestation in the 1980s.  

The World Bank has been engaging a wide variety of policy advocacy CSOs on the issues of access, rights, and financing of urban water and sanitation programs over the past five years. Of particular concern to CSOs have been the issues of water privatization, cost-recovery approaches, and lack of affordable water services for low income populations in Bank-financed water and sanitation projects. For its part, the Bank has welcomed this dialogue because it clearly shares with civil society the goal of extending universal coverage to the poor in developing countries and improving delivery effectiveness. Within this context, the Bank has undertaken a watershed process of meetings and joint research with leading NGOs, trade unions, and research centers. The Bank’s most significant civil society interlocutor to emerge during this period has been the Freshwater Action Network (FAN), which is an international coalition of several hundred CSOs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America who work on water and sanitation issues.