Green Structural Adjustment in the World Bank’s Resilient City

Patrick Bigger and Sophie Webber

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2021, vol. 111, issue 1, 36-51

Abstract: According to an increasingly prevalent set of discourses and practices within environmental and development finance, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from rapid urbanization and climate change that threatens to further entrench poverty and precarity for millions of people. The cost of achieving urban resilience across the world dwarfs available public finance, however, from both development banks and governments themselves. Meanwhile, vast amounts of money on capital markets are searching for profitable investment opportunities. The World Bank is attempting to channel return-seeking investment into urban infrastructure in response to these challenges. To harness this private finance, though, cities must be reformatted in investment-friendly ways. In this article, we chart the emergence of this discourse and associated practices within the World Bank. We call this rescaled and climate-inflected program of leveraged investments coupled with technical assistance Green Structural Adjustment. Drawing on policy documents, reports, and interviews with key staff, we examine programs that include Green Structural Adjustment to show how it aims to restructure local governments to capture new financial flows. Green Structural Adjustment reduces adaptation to a question of infrastructure finance and government capacity building, reinscribing both causes and effects of uneven development while creating spatial fixes for overaccumulated Northern capital in the Global South.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24694452.2020.1749023 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:111:y:2021:i:1:p:36-51

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1749023

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().