How the World Bank ...

Typically, a community that claims it has been harmed by a bank project can file a complaint that will trigger an investigation by the bank’s Inspection Panel. But when three Badia East residents submitted a complaint, panel staffers held off launching an investigation. Instead, they guided the residents into a new pilot program for handling disputes. The program put the community into direct negotiations with the Lagos state government.

Megan Chapman, then a lawyer for the Social and Economic Rights Action Center and now a co-founder of Justice & Empowerment Initiatives, represented the evicted residents. The Inspection Panel promised Chapman that the Badia East community could demand an investigation at any time if it wasn’t satisfied with the outcome, according to emails reviewed by ICIJ.

Negotiations didn’t go well for the evicted residents. The Lagos government insisted they had been illegal squatters, even though some of them had lived there for decades. It gave the group an ultimatum: Accept a small payment and sign away any legal rights, or get nothing.

Chapman believed that the government’s offer violated the bank’s resettlement policy because it didn’t provide new homes for the displaced or compensation equal to what they’d lost. The payments that Lagos authorities offered for larger demolished structures, for example, were 31 per cent lower than what the World Bank’s own consultants said they were worth.

“It was like David and Goliath. There were these little people fighting against this giant,” Chapman said. The bank “really left vulnerable people on their own.”

The government’s ultimatum divided the community. The leader of Chapman’s organisation said it was the best offer the evicted people were going to get. He said he was satisfied with the deal. Many residents and their advocates — including Chapman — objected. But they had nowhere to turn for help.

Internal emails obtained by ICIJ indicate that by early 2014, the Inspection Panel’s chair, Eimi Watanabe, was already pushing to make sure that the panel would not investigate the World Bank’s role in the case. After hearing that the leader of Chapman’s group was satisfied with the outcome of the negotiations, Watanabe urged her staff to issue a formal notice shutting down the possibility of any investigation before the fragile agreement fell apart, according to internal emails obtained by ICIJ.

“Pl[ease] issue notice soonest before it unravels,” Watanabe wrote on Feb. 6, 2014. Watanabe’s directive didn’t immediately kill the investigation, but over the following months the panel made it clear that it didn’t want to dig deeper into the World Bank’s actions.

In July 2014, two of the three residents who had filed the complaint told the panel they were unhappy with the deal and that they wanted to go forward with an investigation. The panel rejected their request and shut the case down with an official notice that said, as an aside, that the bank had fallen short of its own resettlement standards. Chapman and other advocates say the bank misled them about how the pilot programme would work and abandoned the people of Badia East. Watanabe did not respond to ICIJ’s questions about the Lagos case.

Gonzalo Castro de la Mata, the Inspection Panel’s current chair, said the panel “deliberated carefully at every stage of the case” and did not seek to arbitrari- ly shut down the investigation before it could start. He said that although the Lagos government had agreed to follow World Bank rules for resettlement in Badia East and other neighborhoods, the evictions weren’t done under the official umbrella of the bank’s urban renewal initiative.

Because of this and other factors, he said, the panel determined that “a lengthy process of investigation would not at the end of day necessarily yield better outcomes” for residents who lost their homes. An Uncertain Future

As it enters its eighth decade, the World Bank faces an identity crisis. It is no longer the only lender willing to venture into struggling nations and finance huge projects. It is being challenged by new competition from other development banks that don’t have the same social standards — and are rapidly drawing support from the World Bank’s traditional backers.

China has launched a new development bank and persuaded Britain, Germany and other American allies to join, despite open U.S. opposition. These geopolitical shifts have fueled doubts about whether the World Bank still has the clout — or the desire — to impose strong protections for people living in the way of development.

The bank’s proposed changes to its safeguard rules would grant many borrowers greater authority to police themselves. In the current draft, governments would be allowed to hold off on preparing resettlement plans until after the bank greenlights projects. They would also be permitted to use their own environmental and social policies instead of the bank’s safeguards, as long as the bank determines these policies are consistent with its own.

Some current and former bank officials say these changes would spell disaster for the people living in the growing footprint of the bank’s projects — allowing governments to abide by weaker national standards and decide whether vulnerable populations need protecting after they have already received financing. In December, the World Bank’s biggest patron, the U.S. Congress, approved a measure directing the American representative on the World Bank board to vote against any future project that would be subject to weaker safeguards than the ones currently in place. The bank says that the new rules would strengthen the protections for populations affected by its projects.

Theis, the bank spokesman, said that under the proposed rules, “a rigorous upfront scoping of the project is always required” and borrowers still must prepare plans to address resettlement and other adverse impacts of projects “well in advance of any construction activities.” World Bank officials are now writing a new version of the safeguards that they say will take into account the criticisms of their previous draft. They expect to release the new draft in the late spring or summer. (The above report is available on http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/worldbankevicted-abandoned/?utm_campaign =world_bank_release&utm_source=email&utm_medium=button_top&goal=0_ffd1d0160d -9e77717148100352937&mc_cid=9e77717148&mc_eid=d1 c7b40bc7 ICIJ and The Huffington Post estimate that 3.4 million people have been physically or economically displaced by World Bank-backed projects since 2004).