Investing against climate change: Why failure remains possible

The intellectual efforts made by the World Bank and its off-spring, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), to become international facilitators of investments in global environmental protection and sustainable development in the energy sector are outlined with reference to the Framework Convention on Climate Change and its troubled Kyoto Protocol. These efforts are interpreted as part of a search for markets by Northern money and expertise. Highly paid professionals trained in a small number of. universities are the immediate beneficiaries of actions to be taken against the emission of specified gases into the atmosphere. Under pressure from environmental lobbies, the Bank and GEF employ a growing number of these environmental experts. Their rationale is threefold: belief in dangerous anthropogenic 'global warming',(1) calculation of monetary 'global environmental benefit', and identification of this benefit with the 'cost-effective decarbonisation' of energy supplies. Without this rationale, transfers of knowledge-intensive technology, capacity building and new forms of governance would forfeit legitimacy as well as many immediate professional gains. Evidence is provided to demonstrate this and it is argued that these efforts support bureaucracies in efforts to develop a global plan for 'ecological modernisation', or 'sustainable development' that will primarily benefit the North.