Green Structural Adjustment in the World Bank’s Resilient City

Abstract

According to an increasingly prevalent set of discourses and practices within environmental and development finance, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from rapid urbanization and climate change that threatens to further entrench poverty and precarity for millions of people. But the cost of achieving urban resilience across the world dwarfs available public finance, both from development banks and governments themselves. Meanwhile, vast amounts of money on capital markets are searching for profitable investment opportunities. The World Bank is attempting to channel return-seeking investment into urban infrastructure in response to these challenges. But in order to harness this private finance, cities must be reformatted in investment friendly ways. In this paper, we chart the emergence of this discourse and associated practices within the World Bank. We call this rescaled and climateinflicted program of leveraged investments coupled with technical assistance Green Structural Adjustment. Drawing on policy documents, reports, and interviews with key staff, we examine programs that comprise Green Structural Adjustment to show how it aims to restructure local governments to capture new financial flows. Green Structural Adjustment reduces adaptation to a question of infrastructure finance and government capacity building, reinscribing both causes and effects of uneven development while creating spatial fixes for overaccumulated Northern capital in the Global South.

The Wall Street Consensus in pandemic times: what does it mean for climate-aligned development?

“…For the next five years, this plan includes support for 36 gigawatts of renewable energy infrastructure, the promotion of projects that will lead to energy savings of 1.5 million gigawatt-hours and the provision of help to 100 cities for lowcarbon urban planning. The plan also comprises a large number of adaptation projects which, in line with the World Bank Group's Action Plan on Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience (see World Bank Group 2019) and the City Resilience Programme (see Bigger and Webber 2021), focus on disaster risk management, coastal resilience and water security. One of the key priorities of the plan is to increase the leverage of private finance (US$67 billion from the World Bank Group) and create "markets for climate business" (World Bank 2020a, 32).…”

“…In common with the Washington Consensus, the WSC emphasises fiscal discipline, central bank independence and privatisation. The distinguishing feature of the WSC is the introduction of mechanisms that allow global institutional investors to become critical actors in international development (see also Bigger and Webber 2021).…”

Crisis Capitalism and Climate Finance: The Framing, Monetizing, and Orchestration of Resilience-Amidst-Crisis

“…(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2012, p. 3) Some scholars have noted that, over the past decade, resilience has become a 'global urban policy project' widely adopted by international organizations, think tanks, and practitioners throughout the climate development sector (Webber, Leitner, & Sheppard, 2020, p. 1). Its malleability has allowed various actors to appropriate it as an organizing principle, a developmental road map with flexible measures of assessment, and most importantly for this article: a useful vocabulary to frame neoliberal strategies of risk management (Bigger & Webber, 2020;Webber et al, 2020). And while the basic concept of resilience is by no means fundamentally problematic, its appropriation and employment in climate finance is worrisome, as it normalizes the climate crisis as a mode of creative destruction in need of perpetual innovations, investment, and rebuilding.…”

“…The framing of crisis as unprecedented and urgent justifies policies that react to the present causes of the situation, thereby allowing the historical and structural causes of crisis to be obfuscated (Whyte, in press). At the same time, employing a resilience-amidst-crisis discourse romanticizes the survival capacity of disaster victims and fetishizes the resiliency of marginalized communities, thereby facilitating a disconnect that makes it easier to rationalize austere modes of governance and debt-bondage (Bigger & Webber, 2020;Perry, 2020;Serrano-García, 2020).…”

The Wall Street Consensus

“…The new development mantra, spelled out in the Billions to Trillions agenda, the World Bigger and Webber, 2020). While these micro-level accounts emphasize the role of MDBs or donor agencies, the state's macro-financial policies and the growing importance of institutional investors' demand for development asset classes is largely ignored (see Musthaq, 2020 for an exception).…”