'Establishing the Global Environment Facility'

Yet while UNEP and the UN Development Programme (UNDP) were brought in to help the World Bank implement GEF projects, the Bank remains institutional parent and trustee of GEF funds. Even publishing a ‘GEF glossary’, it literally defined the terms under which experimental global environmental aid was made available in the 1990s. Through its effective control of the GEF the World Bank has been able to bring its economistic vision of development into previously UN territory of global environmental protection.

6 The Sierra Club is among several green US NGOs who called off campaigns that challenged the White House agenda in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001.

7 For example, despite numerous marine and conservation treaties, fisheries continue to be over-exploited for international markets.

8 Except, most famously, the US, also a few others.

9 The World Bank and IMF are controlled on the basis of 'one dollar, one vote', giving effective control to Northern governments' treasuries, particularly that of the largest shareholder, the US. By contrast UN agencies are governed on the basis of one country, one vote, giving influence to the more numerous governments of the South.

10 NGO has become a generic name for non-profit bodies since it was first used in the UN Charter of 1946 to designate the groups allowed access to Ecosoc.

11 Korinna Korta, Environmental Defense Fund.