Fuel for Change: World Bank Energy Policy: Rhetoric vs Reality

This work examines the World Bank’s energy policies and seeks to add to the pressure to shift its capital lending and policy advice in favour of sustainable energy. The Bank has traditionally been the leading multilateral financier of energy provision and since 1992 has begun to implement a reform programme based on privatisation of the energy sector The book explains the historical development of the Bank’s energy policies. It outlines promising initiatives within the Bank for sustainable energy and explains why these are having little impact on mainstream energy lending. It describes how and why the Bank’s energy polices have actually led on an increase in fossil fuel power plants in the top-ten low income countries. while not wishing to launch an ideological attack on privatisation, the contributors are concerned with how the Bank has allowed regulatory processes to be highjacked by vested interests and failed to tackle institutional barriers and ingrained attitudes within the Bank itself. It often gives an impression of talking too much and changing its behaviour too little.