The World Bank and Negotiating the Red Sea and Dead Sea Water Conveyance Project

Neda Zawahri and Erika Weinthal
Additional contact information
Neda Zawahri: Cleveland State University
Erika Weinthal: Duke University

Global Environmental Politics, 2014, vol. 14, issue 4, 55-74

Abstract: In the 1990s, the World Bank underwent a “greening” process to make it more environmentally conscious, inclusive, transparent, and accountable. Consequently, the Bank has become preoccupied with compliance with its procedures during negotiations while neglecting the role of politics. Through a focus on process, the Bank discounted its role as a mediator, creating incentives for a stakeholder to assume the role. The stakeholder’s own vested interests in outcomes can throw into question the integrity of the process. To demonstrate this argument we examine the World Bank’s efforts to implement a feasibility study for Red Sea and Dead Sea Water Conveyance Project between Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. The Bank’s focus on process and neglect of its traditional mediation function led to protracted negotiations over the feasibility study that were mired in politics and left the weakest stakeholder with only symbolic depictions of environmental cooperation rather than actual peace dividends.

Keywords: environmental politics; World Bank (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GLEP_a_00257 link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
Access to PDF 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:tpr:glenvp:v:14:y:2014:i:4:p:55-74

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1526-3800

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is currently edited by Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().