ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
9.3 The Global Environment Facility (GEF)The GEF was established in 1991 as a joint
programme between the UNDP, the UNEP and
the World Bank. The GEF provides funding to
help less developed countries implement
measures to protect the global environment.
The GEF has six priority areas:
biological diversity
climate change
international waters
ozone layer
land degradation
persistent organic pollutants (POPs)Projects financed by GEF include alternative
energy programmes, conservation measures
and grassroots/community NGOs.
There was some distrust of the GEF because
it was located in the World Bank, which is
treated with enormous suspicion by developing
nations as it is dominated by industrialised
countries, acts as standard-bearer of neo-liberal
ideologies and has been historically insensitive
to environmental concerns. The GEF has beencriticised for the lack of transparency in
decision-making, the absence of participation
by NGOs and local communities and its pursuit
of a Northern agenda (e.g. a small GEF-funded
biodiversity project in the Congo provided a
green veneer for a much larger World Bank
loan for road-building and industrial logging).
However, the South has won some important
concessions in the way GEF operates,
including some reform of GEF decision-making
structures, and it is now regarded as one of the
most transparent international organisations
(Elliott 2004 : 101–2). The GEF has dispensed
around $4.5 billion in grants and generated
$14.5 billion in co-financing schemes that have
funded some 1,300 projects in 140 countries. It
was pledged a budget for 2002–6 of $3 billion.
Although this budget is small in global terms,
the GEF does represent an important step in
addressing the issue of intragenerational
equity.
See GEF (http://www.gefweb.org/) and UNEP
(http://www.unep.org/gef/).Hague (COP-6) in 2000, and the following year the newly elected President
Bush renounced the Kyoto Protocol. As the USA was responsible for around
25 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions this decision prompted a
major crisis because the Kyoto Protocol could not come into force until it
had been ratified by (a) fifty-five countries, which (b) represented at least
55 per cent of the GHG emissions of the Annex 1 countries. Frenzied diplo-
matic activity amongst the other developed countries resulted in the Bonn
agreement in July 2001, where Japan and Russia were persuaded to sign a
binding agreement, but it was not until November 2004 that Russia, after
winning several concessions through hard bargaining, finally ratified the
agreement. Yet, as the Kyoto Protocol came into force, attention had already
switched to what happens next, with the dialogue about a post-Kyoto agree-
ment after 2012 being launched at the Montreal COP-11 in 2005.
Two fundamental tensions have dogged the climate regime bargaining
process, neither of which has yet been satisfactorily resolved. First, there
are divisions among developed countries regarding their willingness to
make firm commitments. Resistance has coalesced around the resistance