Foreclosing the Future The World Bank and the Politics of Environmental Destruction

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 de...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Rich, Bruce
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Washington, DC Island Press/Center for Resource Economics 2013, 2013
Edition:1st ed. 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:
Collection: Springer eBooks 2005- - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
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245 0 0 |a Foreclosing the Future  |h Elektronische Ressource  |b The World Bank and the Politics of Environmental Destruction  |c by Bruce Rich 
250 |a 1st ed. 2013 
260 |a Washington, DC  |b Island Press/Center for Resource Economics  |c 2013, 2013 
300 |a XVI, 304 p  |b online resource 
505 0 |a Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Acronyms -- 1. Tiger Talk -- 2. Present at the Creation -- 3. “I Can Change the Approval Culture to an Effectiveness Culture” -- 4. High Risk, High Reward -- 5. The Logic Was Textbook Perfect -- 6. Backwards into the Future -- 7. The Brief, Broken Presidency of Paul Wolfowitz -- 8. The Carbon Caravan -- 9. A Market Like No Other -- 10. Financializing Development -- 11. Dying for Growth -- 12. What Does It Take? -- Notes -- Index 
653 |a Sustainable development 
653 |a Economic Geography 
653 |a Climate Change 
653 |a Sustainable Development 
653 |a Economic geography 
653 |a Climate change 
653 |a Public International Law 
653 |a Environmental law 
653 |a Public international law 
653 |a Environmental policy 
653 |a Environmental Law/Policy/Ecojustice 
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856 4 0 |u https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-184-9?nosfx=y  |x Verlag  |3 Volltext 
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520 |a 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