Outline of the book

Chapter five leaves the narrative framework to explore how tranches GEF money were raised, administered, allocated and spent, mostly in the Operational phase of GEF, 1995-8; leading to critical questions of interest, efficiency, accountability and risk. After a detailed case study of a ‘cutting edge’ GEF-assisted conservation and development project - India Ecodevelopment at Nagarhole -

Chapter six considers what the operational GEF has meant - less for the ‘global environment’ than for the people, institutions and interests embroiled in its official conservation. It seems that over-centralisation, turf wars and culture clashes have helped to sustain incommensurable distances between implicated institutions, policy and practice, professionalism and participation, decisions and their impacts. The resulting feedback failures seem to undermine GEF’s limited official missions as well as its implied greater promise.

Finally, chapter seven steps back to look at our Global Environment Facility in the light of recent global politics, asking questions about ‘sustainable development’ and whose values, initiatives and lifestyles GEF can sustain. Touching on other possible ways to achieve the goals lately entrusted to this fund so far obscure, I conclude that if only it was better known and understood, GEF might yet be of value in generating lessons for others trying to reign in neo-liberal ‘development’ for the sake of a living environment for all.