A New Green Order?
     The World Bank & the Politics of the Global Environment Facility

by Zoe Young

Published by Pluto Press October 2002 - £14.99 paperback

Largely untroubled by critical voices, governments meet this month in
Beijing for the Participants' Assembly of the Global Environment
Facility. Invoking participation and transparency, they will quietly
rubber stamp this little known aid fund's use of billions more
taxpayers' dollars to save 'global' nature. The GEF was set up under the
auspices of the World Bank in 1991, officially to finance implementation
of the UN Conventions on Climate Change and Biodiversity. Investigating
the workings of this unique experiment in global resource management,
Zoe Young takes a critical look at the conflicts involved, and how they
relate to issues of globalisation, knowledge and democracy in the
US-based World Bank. Based on indepth interviews, this is the first book
lenght, fully independent critique of the GEF.

Zoe Young explains why Western governments created the GEF to deflect
protest against the environmental impacts of World Bank projects, while
also controlling the scope of the new treaties. She examines how,
although it was intended to promote institutional reform and cooporation
for conservation, the GEF cannot challenge damaging economic policies
nor powerful interest groups. Instead it has helped to put prices on
nature and open up Southern resources and markets to international
experts and investors. With cultures and ecosystems worldwide at risk
from rampant capital, Zoe Young gives a disturbing account of the
complex issues that must be addressed before our natural enironments can
be managed more democratically -- and effectively

For more info and a sample chapter see www.newgreenorder.info

Zoe Young has researched and writtn on the GEF at the University of
Hull, UK, and makes films with Conscious Cinema, London. These inclued
co-directing the documentary 'Suites and Savages - Why the World Bank
Won't Save the World'.

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A New Green Order?
The World Bank & the Politics of the Global Environment Facility
For review copies
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240 pp pages, 1st November, 2002
Published by Pluto Press - £16.99 paperback