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MADRID,
Spain—An
expert on social development urged the Asian Development
Bank (ADB) and civil-society organization to refocus
their debate on the bank’s safeguard policies to restart
the deadlocked talks.
University of
Arizona
research professor of social development Dr. Ted Downing
said both parties need external help to refocus the
discussion to what mattered most—the future and poverty
alleviation.
“These
are for the unknown and the unborn. There’s enough
ambiguity [in the talks]. The devil is in the
diversion,” Downing said during the CSO-sponsored
seminar titled “Safeguards Protect the Poor: A Panel
Discussion on Why the ADB Must Strengthen Its Safeguard
Policies.”
Downing
said restarting the negotiations must involve terms of
reference (TOR), an operations manual and a budget. He
said there is a need to reexamine the new draft of the
safeguards using a clear TOR.
He also
urged the ADB to prepare a baseline of what has already
been done, particularly on equator principles. Downing
said there is no need to reinvent the talks at this
point.
Downing
also suggested that a third-party expert opinion on
safeguard-policy issues such as those of the
displacement of millions due to ill-fitted projects.
Earlier,
CSOs from different parts of the world have stopped
their on-going consultative talks with the ADB over the
bank’s environment, involuntary resettlement and
indigenous peoples’ (IP) policies.
The
group NGO Forum on ADB asked the ADB to stop its public
consultations and revise the draft document known as the
Safeguards Policy Statement (SPS) released in October
2007 because the SPS is an “unacceptable and unsuitable
basis for public review and consultation.”
“The
coalition of civil-society organizations from Asia,
Europe, Australia and the United States urged ADB to
resume public consultations only after it has issued a
rewritten SPS that no longer promotes ‘weak protective
measures’ for the environment and people affected by its
operations,” the NGO Forum on ADB said in a statement.
The move
to cease discussions builds on actions taken by South
Asian NGOs that boycotted the New Delhi consultation from January 16 to 18. Other NGOs such as Oxfam Australia
also decided not to participate in the Australia/Pacific
consultations on January 30 and 31, stating that the
draft SPS was “too compromised” to represent a valid
basis for discussions.
The NGO
Forum said the SPS ignores a broad range of
internationally agreed-upon principles and commitments
regarding economic and social development and
environmental protection.
This
includes allowing the ADB to support projects including
those that could adversely impact species identified in
the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species, and does not
require project sponsors to reduce greenhouse-gas
emissions or require that they “avoid” emitting
pollutants.
The NGO
Forum said the SPS also does not clearly require social
impacts be assessed as part of project due diligence and
does not sanction borrowers that fail to comply with ADB
safeguards.
The SPS,
the NGO Forum said, removes the 120-day
public-consultation period for environmental impact
assessment and proposes a flawed involuntary
resettlement policy which does not allow for displaced
persons to share in project benefits, nor does it
provide land-based resettlement options for persons
whose livelihoods are land-based.
The
forum added that the SPS downgrades the principle of
“free prior informed consent” of indigenous peoples to
free prior informed consultations with IP communities,
and also introduces the use of country safeguard systems
to govern ADB-funded projects in a rushed manner without
allowing a thorough debate on the advantages and
disadvantages of a governance system. |
