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Articles

Green Structural Adjustment in the World Bank’s Resilient City

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Pages 36-51
Received 22 Aug 2019
Accepted 26 Mar 2020
Published online: 02 Jun 2020
 

According to an increasingly prevalent set of discourses and practices within environmental and development finance, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from rapid urbanization and climate change that threatens to further entrench poverty and precarity for millions of people. The cost of achieving urban resilience across the world dwarfs available public finance, however, from both development banks and governments themselves. Meanwhile, vast amounts of money on capital markets are searching for profitable investment opportunities. The World Bank is attempting to channel return-seeking investment into urban infrastructure in response to these challenges. To harness this private finance, though, cities must be reformatted in investment-friendly ways. In this article, we chart the emergence of this discourse and associated practices within the World Bank. We call this rescaled and climate-inflected program of leveraged investments coupled with technical assistance Green Structural Adjustment. Drawing on policy documents, reports, and interviews with key staff, we examine programs that include Green Structural Adjustment to show how it aims to restructure local governments to capture new financial flows. Green Structural Adjustment reduces adaptation to a question of infrastructure finance and government capacity building, reinscribing both causes and effects of uneven development while creating spatial fixes for overaccumulated Northern capital in the Global South.

世界银行弹性城市的绿色结构性调整

环境和开发金融领域内有一套逐渐占主导地位的观点和行动:快速的城市化和气候变化可能会进一步固化数百万人口的贫困和危难, 而发展中国家的城市正面临着基础设施太昂贵的危机。然而, 对于开发银行和政府部门来说, 实现世界范围内城市的弹性化所需的花费远远超过可支配的公共资金。与此同时, 资本市场里海量的货币正在寻找有收益的投资机会。针对这些挑战, 世界银行正尝试着把追求回报的投资引入到城市基础设施建设中。但是, 想要驾驭这些私有资金, 城市必须向投资友好型转变。本文描述了世界银行内部的这种观点和相应的行动。我们把这个结合了杠杆投资和技术支持的气候型计划, 叫做绿色结构性调整。根据政策文献、报告和对关键人士的采访, 我们研究了多个绿色结构性调整计划, 展示了绿色结构性调整如何重组地方政府、获取新的资金流。绿色结构性调整把投资友好型城市的适应过程, 弱化成一个关于城市基础设施财政和政府能力建设的问题。绿色结构性调整可以铭记不均衡发展的前因后果, 为发达国家过度积累的资本提供了位于发展中国家的空间修复。

Según el cada vez más dominante conjunto de discursos y prácticas de las finanzas ambientales y del desarrollo, las ciudades del Sur Global están enfrentando una costosa crisis infraestructural cuyas raíces se ubican en la rápida urbanización y el cambio climático que amenazan con apabullar con más pobreza y precariedad a millones de personas. El costo de alcanzar resiliencia urbana a través del mundo, sin embargo, empequeñece las finanzas públicas disponibles, tanto en los bancos de desarrollo como en los mismos gobiernos. Entre tanto, vastas cantidades de dinero de los mercados del capital están buscando oportunidades de inversión rentable. Como respuestas a tales retos, el Banco Mundial está intentando canalizar la inversión que busca ganancias en infraestructura urbana. No obstante, para aprovechar estas finanzas privadas las ciudades deben ser reformateadas con actitudes acogedoras a la inversión. En este artículo, trazamos la aparición de este discurso y sus prácticas asociadas dentro del Banco Mundial. A este programa, reformulado y modulado por el clima de inversiones apalancadas y reforzado con asistencia técnica, lo denominamos Ajuste Estructural Verde. Basándonos en documentos sobre políticas públicas, informes y entrevistas con funcionarios claves, examinamos los programas que incluyen el Ajuste Estructural Verde para mostrar cómo se busca con eso reestructurar los gobiernos locales para que puedan captar nuevos flujos financieros. El Ajuste Estructural Verde reduce la adaptación a una cuestión de construir infraestructura de finanzas y capacidad gubernamental, reinscribiendo las causas y efectos del desarrollo desigual al tiempo que se crean recetas espaciales para el capital acumulado con exceso del Norte, en el Sur Global.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Gareth Bryant, Ilias Alami, Tad Mutersbaugh, Benjamin Neimark, four deeply engaged reviewers, and the editorial guidance of James McCarthy for helping to clarify and strengthen the argument of this article. We are also grateful to World Bank staff who shared their ideas and practices.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada), the Swedish Research Council, and the American Association of Geographers.

Notes on contributors

Patrick Bigger

PATRICK BIGGER is a Lecturer in Economic Geography in the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Bailrigg LA1 4YQ, UK. E-mail: . His research spans an array of environmental, financial, and political entanglements across world regions, currently focused on infrastructure and adaptation.

Sophie Webber

SOPHIE WEBBER is a Lecturer in Geography in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney, Camperdown 2006, NSW, Australia. E-mail: . Her research interests are in the political economy of climate change adaptation and urban resilience in the Pacific and Southeast Asia regions.
 

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