Accountability and remedy in public finance
Too often, development finance can end up causing harm to communities or the environment, ignoring people’s rights and evading accountability. Supporting affected communities is critical at a time when civil society space is closing and repression against human rights defenders is on the rise in many parts of the world.
Development banks should respect the rights of those whom their investments impact and should be fully accountable – both to affected communities and to tax-paying publics – for their actions.
Promoting a race to the top in accountability
Recourse works to hold international financial institutions (IFIs) to account: to help prevent harm from occurring, to remedy harms, and to ensure IFIs learn lessons and avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Pressuring IFIs to change the way they address project impacts raises the profile of environmental and social (E&S) risks within the institution, leading to better protections for people and the planet. Strengthening E&S protections and improving disclosure in turn helps to prevent future harms, closing the feedback loop on accountability.
For the first time in over a decade, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) is updating its globally influential safeguards.
Recourse and allies are working together to demand that this important process results in stronger protections for people and the planet.
Environmental and social safeguards are only useful if banks can be held accountable to them publicly. Recourse also campaigns to strengthen the IFIs’ accountability mechanisms themselves, benchmarking them against one another to create a race to the top.
We promote a rights-based development vision: where women and girls fully realise their potential, where communities can claim and exercise their rights to drive the development process, and where the rights of marginalised and vulnerable communities are protected and promoted.
Supporting communities to claim remedy and rights
A core part of our work is to support the struggles of communities affected by damaging projects, to hold financial institutions accountable for the harms suffered.
This might involve working with local communities and organisations to prevent a harmful road, dam or power plant being constructed, helping to expose the role of development finance institutions in these damaging projects, or supporting communities’ claims for remedy.
For example, Recourse has:
- Helped to amplify local concerns about expansion of an AIIB-backed cement plant and construction of a public-private-partnership gas power plant in Myanmar
- Supported communities opposing the construction of gas plants in Bangladesh
- Called for the human rights of indigenous peoples to be respected in an IFC-funded hydropower dam project in Guatemala
- Stood in solidarity with affected communities in India against public funding for dirty coal projects, risky financial intermediaries and infrastructure investment trusts.
Recourse works with partner organisations in different countries, in some cases supporting communities to take formal complaints to independent accountability mechanisms (IAMs) when they have suffered harm from an IFI-backed project. Given the inaccessible and complex nature of many IAMs, the backing of international and local civil society organisations is vital: research shows the complaints with civil society support are nearly three times as likely to result in remedial commitments than those brought by communities alone.
Recourse and partners are currently supporting community complaints about harms wrought by coal expansion in the Philippines and Indonesia, fossil gas in Bangladesh, and infrastructure projects in Nepal, among others.
Browse below for news and resources related to Recourse’s campaigns for accountability and remedy from public financiers.
