Articles - 'Green Energy Facilitated'

1 Introduction: What and Why

The GEF is presented as a major new step towards protecting the global environment while at the same time experimenting with new ‘innovations’ in technology and in the governance of international institutions. GEF’s practical potential to impose environmentally sounder governance structures on the global energy sector is limited, however, not only by resource availability but also by political strictures and the strategic requirements of its founders and clients. The GEF, insofar as it behaves like its parent the World Bank and by underwriting approved investments supports selected interests, serves a set of political functions, even if this is denied by the Bank’s claims to operate on a strictly economic (not political) level. To guide and to some extent to hide the actual approval of investments, donor governments, international NGOs, the global science enterprise and environmentally attracted big business, mediated by international bureaucracy, have created a complex network for negotiation of best practice in ‘environmental finance’.

2 GEF’s History and Governance

Institutional Structure.

The GEF collects and disburses the allegedly ‘new and additional’ aid promised by donors at the UNCED ‘Earth Summit’ in 1992, in return for ECCs’ signing up to new environmental agreements. Subject to ‘guidance’ by the relevant Conference of the Parties (CoPs) of the Conventions (in this case the FCCC), GEF has a ‘tripartite’ institutional structure: Participants’ Assembly, Council and Secretariat, but no independent legal existence as an international body. It is an innovative arrangement between three existing international bodies,