Boulevard to broken dreams, part 1: the Polonoroeste road project in the Brazilian Amazon, and the World Bank’senvironmental and indigenous peoples’ norms

Robert H. Wade

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Before the mid 1980s the World Bank conceived “nature” as something to be “conquered” and “environment” as a source of resources for “development”. By the late 1980s the Bank incorporated norms of environmental sustainability and indigenous peoples’ protection into its mandate, and other development-oriented IOs followed. This two-part paper describes how a fight over the Polonoroeste road project in the Brazilian Amazon inside the Bank, between the Bank and NGOs supported by the US Congress, and between the Bank and the government of Brazil helped to generate the far-reaching change of policy norms. The first part describes how the project was designed as an innovation in sustainable development in rainforests; and how it provoked a firestorm inside the Bank as it moved towards project approval

Keywords: policy norms; rainforests; indigenous peoples; World Bank; environmental NGO's; government of Brazil; US Congress (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I3 O13 Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-01-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, 1, January, 2016, 36(1), pp. 214-230. ISSN: 1809-4538

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