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'The
GEF in context'
As banks, corporations and their allied
professional classes try once more to pacify popular ecological
concerns and separate them from resistance to the capitalist
system itself, what further institutional reforms – and difficulties
- are likely? Will available funds, expertise, attention and
political initiative be used more effectively for environmental
protection in future? If governments were unable to come up
with an effective solution when there was mass popular interest
in conservation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, what hope
is there for less compromised solutions now that international
attention has largely moved on to focus more on hunger, trade
and war?
With US military ambitions for ‘full spectrum dominance’ of
the globe and the bleeding of a so-called ‘war on terror’
into something like a war on dissent, most of the biggest
and especially Washington-based environmental NGOs are working
with the World Bank and/or GEF, and are politically wary of
seeming to attack what now passes for the US government’s
‘national interest’. Whatever their aspirations, hopes and
promises, can real world solutions to widely distributed environmental
problems really all be channeled through a largely Washington-based
community of environmental professionals whose jobs depend,
in the final analysis, on the surplus and favour of the US’
and Western Europe’s globalising corporate empires?
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