INTRODUCTION

Since the early 1990s, pressure from environmental and human rights groups has pushed international financial institutions (IFIs) to address the sustainable development impacts of the projects they finance. As part of their response, IFIs have increasingly adopted environmental and social policies that require them, among other things, to take environmental and social concerns into account. Some of these policies specifically include impacts associated with climate change. IFIs that have adopted environmental and social policies to guide their lending include multilateral development banks (MDBs) such as the World Bank Group, the Asian Development Bank, and other regional development banks; export credit and insurance agencies, such as the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the United Kingdom's Export Credits Guarantee Department; and private commercial banks, such as Citibank, HSBC, and ABN Amro.

Concern over the implementation of these policies led the same environmental and human rights groups to advocate for the establishment of citizen-driven accountability mechanisms in the IFIs. Beginning with the creation of the World Bank Inspection Panel, nine accountability mechanisms have been established. Although they all differ in terms of their independence and effectiveness, each provides an opportunity for project-affected people to raise concerns about the compliance of IFI-financed projects. This chapter reviews these mechanisms' potential use in filing claims relating to climate impacts. Unlike the litigation approaches explored by most of the chapters in this book, a pure climate change–related claim has yet to be filed with any of the IFI accountability mechanisms.