Essay About World Bank And Independent Countries

The World Bank on Sustainable Development
Essay title: The World Bank on Sustainable Development
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As a core fundamental and central organization, it is essential to recognize the
World Bank’s unwavering commitment and contribution to international environmental
and developmental programs. As the top funding agency to international organizations,
NGO’s, independent countries, and other societal groups the World Bank plays a
marquee role in international funding in an increasingly industrializing world and
changing market economy. It might be presumptuous to label the World Bank as an
elitist organization because of its nouveau-riche style of economic contributions to the
international community. However, it is critically important to point out that the World
Bank is indeed ‘at the top of their game’ and has considerable influence on environmental
and developmental policies at the international level, and at the community level with
NGO’s and their mainstream approaches to environmental issues. With the ability to
reflect their policies and political agenda to meet the new demands of fluctuating world
markets, the World Bank has made considerable advances towards shifting away from
their traditional model of development towards more ‘greener’ policies of sustainable
development. The ‘greening’ of the World Bank by adopting sustainable development is
a problematic approach towards development in the twenty first century as it has many
complications as a working definition, and has serious negative implications for the
World Bank and how it goes about incorporating sustainable development into its
relationships with other international organizations, and non-governmental organizations,
as well as into its own bureaucratic structure.
As the major international contributor to development and environmental projects
world wide, the World Bank hands out loans and grants totaling $20 billion on an annual
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basis to countries, NGO’s and other independent organizations. The World Bank is the
world’s largest single international funding source for biodiversity projects, with a total
Bank-managed biodiversity portfolio amounting to more than U.S. $2.6 billion since
1998. At the end of the past fiscal year, the World Bank’s active portfolio of
environment and natural resource programs amounted to U.S. $11.2 billion, or 12.2
percent of the Bank’s total active portfolio that year. Pollution management and
environmental health issues accounted for approximately a third of the active
environment portfolio. Having established a strong economic portfolio with
environment and natural resource programs, it should be a relatively easy task for the
World Bank to promote and actively engage in sustainable development programs in the
twenty first century.
However, what is sustainable development and what are the implications for
the World Bank in adapting such ‘greener’ policy options in the twenty first century?
The UN Commission on Economic Development in its landmark 1987 report titled Our
Common Future defines sustainable development as that which “meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future