Boulevard to broken dreams, Part 2: Implementation of the Polonoroeste road project in the Brazilian Amazon, and the World Bank's response to the gathering storm

Abstract

This is the second part of the essay on the circumstances that led the World Bank to embrace norms and operational policies for environmental and indigenous people's protection in the late 1980s, as traced through the turbulent history of the Polonoroeste road project in the Brazilian Amazon. Polonoroeste became the spearhead with which environmental NGOs made their first attack on the Bank for participating in large-scale environmental and indigenous peoples' destruction.

Locating Discourses and Narratives for Intervention

“…As explained earlier in this chapter's section on the sustainable development paradigm, significant socio-environmental impacts, the consequence of a decade of rapid development lending in large infrastructure projects by McNamara's World Bank, led, during the 1980s and1990s, to the creation of formal safeguards. Often resultant from conflicts between development banks and civil society (See, for example, Rich, 2013;Wade, 1997Wade, , 2016Dwyer, 2020), these safeguards' main objective was the mitigation of development risk, effectively institutionalizing assessment and planning methods that would "more adequately anticipate the impact zones and their associated effects before projects were actually approved" (Dwyer, 2020, p. 3). Acknowledging that safeguards are intrinsically political and spatial, with each infrastructure sector having unique impacts, geographer Dwyer argues that formal safeguards turbocharge the "politics of valuation at multiple scales" (p. 3).…”

Lost in translation: The World Bank and the Paris Declaration

“…To that extent, the Bank's CPF priorities exhibit the "continuity bias" to which public bureaucracies are notoriously prone (Hennessy, 1989). This may be compounded by the well-recognized lending imperative which is inherent in the Bank's business model, and which results in Bank country staff having incentives to lend which can override both the Bank's global priorities and countries' own priorities (Bebbington, Lewis, Batterbury, Olson, & Shameem Siddiqi, 2007;Wade, 2016). Moreover, while giving primacy to economic issues (Pillar 1) reflects the Bank's comparative advantage among the international development agencies, it also reflects the professional orientation of its economic and financial technocracy, which is discussed later in this article.…”