Extraordinary Failures Exposed by Report into World Bank Financing of Resettlement

An investigative report reveals an extraordinary failure by the Bank to track and monitor the longer-term impacts of resettlement caused by Bank financing. The report, the work of a team of more than 50 reporters working in 21 countries, reveals a stunning total of 3.4 million people have been displaced by projects financed between 2004 and 2013.One of the cases investigated is the Kenya Natural Resource Management Project, a capacity-building project for the Kenya Forest Service (KFS). During the time of the project, the KFS regularly evicted the Sengwer from their lands and burned their ancestral homes to the ground in the Cherangany Hills.

This case led to a complaint filed with the World Bank Inspection Panel, which found the Bank had failed to adequately assess and understand the risks posed by funding a government agency historically complicit in such evictions. The Sengwer are now waiting to see how far the Bank will be willing to support efforts to remedy some of the harms suffered under the project, and the historic land injustices that underpin these harms.

The wider report highlights that these failures are not limited to a few specific cases, but rather reflect a system-wide failure to adequately assess the potential human rights risks of projects. Indigenous peoples’ organisations and civil society from around the world have repeatedly asked for the Bank to adequately assess such risks, at both a project level and at a national planning level. However the draft proposed bank safeguards currently fail to ensure that human rights risks are explicitly addressed. It is hoped that a second draft, due to be released shortly, corrects this shortfall.

Of equal concern, the Strategic Country Diagnostic (the up-stream risk assessment tool now being trialled by the Bank -SCD) does not contain specific requirements for Bank staff to take into account historical patterns of human rights abuses or risks in borrower countries. This is despite specific recommendations made by civil society. The Bank is currently piloting its SCD process in 15 countries, and civil society in these pilot countries are strongly encouraged to bring historic patterns of human rights abuses to the attention of the Bank country offices to ensure that such considerations are not able to be ignored in future country planning.

The report echoes some of the findings of the Bank’s own Involuntary Resettlement Portfolio Review, phase one completed in May 2012 and phase two in June 2014, (finally published in March 5 2015). This internal review highlighted monitoring weaknesses, pointing to “sizeable gaps in information point to significant potential failures in the Bank’s system for dealing with resettlement”, among other serious failings.

Failures pinpointed by the internal review went far further than simply a scarcity of information – as serious as that failing is. It also highlighted a failure to provide the grievance mechanisms, required under Bank policy, to enable projects to respond to community concerns and to avoid harms in the first place. The Bank has responded to this internal review with a brief Action Plan and a pledge to ‘do better’, but the Action Plan does not adequately address the scale of the problems identified.

The issue now facing the Bank, over and above reforming systems and processes, is to provide redress for the harms suffered. Accessing effective and substantial redress for harms is one of the most significant challenges for communities affected by the legacy revealed in the Bank’s review. The Bank has yet to address this and provide funds and expertise to, at least, begin to provide reparation.