Enabling remedy strategies for the effective implementation of IFC’s interim Remedial Action Framework
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Article summary
Notes from the Civil Society Policy Forum on 17 April 2026, titled Enabling remedy strategies for the effective implementation of IFC’s interim Remedial Action Framework. IFC released the Interim Approach to Remedial Action (RAF), the first such remedy framework by a major DFI. If implemented well, it will be a key tool in ensuring that harm is remedied. One year in, this panel discussed implementation, shared CSO experiences with remedy, and discussed the way forward for the RAF’s pilot.
Moderator
- Carla Garcia Zendejas, Deputy Director, Bank Information Center
Panelists
- Emmanuel Boulet, Senior Manager of Stakeholder Engagement and Grievance Response, IFC
- Natalie Bugalski, Senior Legal and Policy Director & Co-Founder, Inclusive Development International Panelist
- Anthony Cotton, Senior Advisor on Development Finance Institutions, UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights
- Megan Pearson, Policy Associate, Accountability Counsel
A recording from this session can be found online here.
Carla: First setting context. Remedial action framework (RAF) published last year, a positive and historic thing. Wars, fragility and death and specific moments of vulnerability – this is a moment to reflect. The Bank, IFC and accountability mechanisms are in flux.
Megan: Accountability mechanisms proliferating for 30 years. Even through they offer a process, they don’t produce meaningful remedy. This is what we have known anecdotally but now the Accountability Council has done a study on IAM processes. We found that communities are getting remedies but not enough to deal with the scale of the harm. Funnel down in number to the smallest number the number of complaints that have remedial complaints implemented. This was confirmed through interviews. So remedy gap – lack of predictable, meaningful and consistent remedy for project related harm.
Anthony: There are misconceptions. DFIs have mandates to support development and do no harm but sometimes negative social and environmental impacts occur. Remedies are to address those and figuring pout solutions. Clients have primary responsibility to manage risks, impacts and implement remedy. DFIs have leverage – contractual or financial – to compel clients to act and where the DFI has contributed to harm, it should also contribute to solution. Not about blame or litigation, its about a solution. Examples include restoring people to land, healthcare for survivors of gender based violence, commemorations if a sacred site if destroyed, compensation and commitment to non-repetition. Remedy is not as implemented about fault, not the equivalent of writing a blank cheque, not about bankruptcy or raise moral hazard concerns. Not a zero sum but a win-win. In fact, it has reputational benefits if done right.
Carla: Why then should IFC or corporations contribute?
Natalie: Costs on communities on impacts of IFC projects, and harm without remedy. The research is clear. Failure to address grievances creates more financial risk to projects. It’s going to get worse over the next decade unless there’s a change in approach. The IFC is increasing investments in ming and critical minerals. Fifty per cent of projected mining sites for these minerals overlap with Indigenous land. Is the IFC’s remedy ready and fit for purpose? Community conflict is increasing. IDS found that two-thirds of those conflicts were characterised by protest or blockades and violence, and often led to delays and shutdowns.
This applies to other types of projects, where there’s land-intensive investment projects in energy and infrastructure sectors. But because of the energy transition, a lot of the research is focusing on mining. The IDS analysis is showing that community concerns are not being addressed early, and so they’ve escalated. What could have been addressed by mediation, providing benefits, listening respectfully explode into outright community opposition. So then we get the protests, the blockades, the litigation, the campaigns, and a massive serious material impacts. We see community fears, concerns, frustrations harden overtime when they’re not dealt with respectfully.
So from a financial perspective, the implications are clear. And this comes from a 2014 report that found that serious community conflict can cost large-scale mining developers roughly $20 million per week of delayed production in net present value terms. And increasingly this impact on net present value is leading to stranded assets or the sales of mining licenses with huge losses. I was discussing this with our research director, and he said, “look, I’ve just happened to come across a case that really shows this problem.” This involves an Anglo Gold Ashanti mine in Colombia, the La Cosa mine. And Anglo Gold Ashanti spent more than half a billion dollars trying to develop this mine. But it faced massive community distrust over the years. And it really didn’t deal with those community tensions and suspicions from the get-go. So that opposition hardened and eventually made it unviable for Anglo Gold Ashanti to move past the exploration phase. So just a few weeks ago, it sold its mine for $10 million. It had put in half a billion to develop the mine, and it sold it for $10 million. And that doesn’t count for the money AGA walked away from. Those gold deposits are valued at more than $100 billion. That could have easily been an IFC investment, because we know that IFC is in fact exposed to Anglo Gold Ashanti through a financial intermediary in South Africa. This type of thing is a real financial risk to IFC. And just one more interesting thing about this case is that the mine that bought that Anglo Gold Ashanti concession, Neros, said in its press release around the transaction that its purchase of the mine reflects its responsible well-governed mining and track record of constructive engagement with communities. It knew what was going wrong and what it needs to do.
Clearly a lot of companies and clearly a lot of IFC clients don’t get it. And that’s why IFC needs to be prepared to use its leverage and actively work with its clients to prevent harm in the first place. And when harm does happen, it needs to act quickly to ensure full and effective remedy before that community company conflicts escalates into these sort of blockades of the projects.
I see that commercial banks look to IFC to be on top of those ENS risks, including taking a leadership role on remedy. So they can rely on IFC for their own due diligence and approach. The RAF, although it’s pretty vague, it’s a really important opportunity to look forward at these risks that we’re going to see, including the financial risks, and address them.
Carla: Many of us in this room have brought many of these issues to IFC in the past and in the present. And again, the response with the adoption, the political will, the moment, the stars align for the adoption of the remedial action framework, it exists. But what does it say? What does it do? Again, nothing’s going to be perfect. None of us are perfect. But it exists.
Emmanuel: First, before I answer your question, I need to say two things. The first one is that I need to manage expectations here. You say change is the only thing constant. The SCG doesn’t exist anymore. We have a new organisation.
On the RAF itself, in terms of managing expectations. This framework took us five years, it’s an evolution, it’s not a revolution, a step forward, but it doesn’t resolve every question. I mean, exactly what does it mean when we have real issues? But just to take a step back and say, okay, what, is a RAF? The RAF is a structural approach to addressing harm arising from ENS impact of projects that IFC MIGA support. So, there is harm that is being recognised and the RAF is proposing some form of approach on how to address this harm. It does reflect IFC-MIGA recognition that as a development finance institution, we have a broader responsibility. And when projects we support cause arm, affected communities deserve a meaningful response. Also to clarify, this is an interim approach. This is not a final policy. The board didn’t feel that we are the state where we can have a final policy. We need to have those principles we have in the RAF. We have to see how they work in practice. And then we’ll come back in two or three years with the policy.
The RAF doesn’t change the fundamental principle, which is that IFC-MIGA clients are the party responsible to provide a remedy. Providing remedy is a client’s responsibility. What can IFC-MIGA do to support positive outcomes on the process? I’m just going to focus on two things right now. The RAF draws a distinction between two modes of contribution. One is influence and leverage, and the other is enabling activities. Maybe the innovation of the RAF is more in terms of the second type of contribution we saw, enabling activities. Which are, how IFC-MIGA will help enable remedy when there is harm. The RAF mentions three of them, fact finding, technical assistance, and community development activities. We are currently implementing these three modes in different processes, being dispute resolution, compliance, and direct complaints.
Carla: You’ve mentioned some of the things – leverage – and that the IFC’s already working on it with some DR, dispute resolution, or compliance review cases. So, could you tell us how it’s being implemented? We know that the pilot phase is three years but how’s it going?
Emmanuel: We still need to put our house in order to be able to implement it. The problem is that right now we are doing a big renovation to the house. We’re still working on that. This plan has to be changed because of the changes in the house plans, but we’re still moving forward with what it should look like. The RAF call for a directive. This directive is being worked out. We have a draft. We need to make sure this is going forward with the approval. The RAF calls for key KPIs that we need to define and to submit to the board. We have made a proposal to the board. The board provided some comments. We are reviewing them. What I want to say on this issue of the KPIs is that the key issue is to strike the right balance to inform whether the underlying approach is working. Also what will be very important will be the final independent evaluation at the end of the two years to inform what has been working, what has not been working.
In terms of actual implementation of the enabling activities, we were already implementing some part of the RAF before we had it approved, particularly in the context of the management action plan. I mean, the first community development program we did was in the context of the Bridge case. That was the first time that I have seen moving independently of a client, doing a community development program for good, providing services to communities, for survivors of GBV. There will be lessons learned. In the context of the Selala map river plantation in Liberia, we went pretty wrong. We have not had a client for five years. Our previous client was bought by a new owner who is also a local company, not a national company and the communities are living in the plantation. So to be able to access the communities, to be able to provide GBV services, we need to get to the new owner. But in this context where we don’t have any partner, it’s very challenging and right now, we are trying to find solutions which is not easy.
To come to my second point here, it has been much easier, not in the context of a compliance process, but in the context of a DR process. And the reason why is because there is a structured process with a DR. There are already parties, there is a client, there is a complainant, there is a process. And, in the context of a DR, it has been the party which has been asking us. This is, not necessarily easier to implement, but it’s easier to define. In the context of a DR, it’s not easy, but at least there is a structured process that exists, and on which we can plug it. So that’s happening, because the DR process, or confidential process. We also have failed attempts. In the context of the RCDC case, we attempted at the enabling activity, it didn’t work. It completely failed. I think we need to listen about that. What didn’t work. This enabling activity didn’t enable anything at the end.
Natalie: I’ll just say some things about, about the Bridge case. I know it’s a very difficult case, highly mismanaged case by the IFC and I want to give credit for IFC going in there and establishing a program to offer services to survivors of sexual assaults and rape. That said, I want to make clear that that is not a substitute for remedy. I’m encouraged to see the IFC take the action, and that it has formed this grant agreement with UNFP and UNICEF. But the complainants on this case do not feel that they have received anything. They do not feel that the abuses that they suffered have been remedied in any way. I do think it’s important as we move forward with the implementation of the RAF, it’s fine to be thinking about contribution to remedy through well-tailored community development funds where communities are involved in the design of them and have expressed that they feel good about that outcome. But these are not a substitute for remedy when the victims, the survivors, affected communities are not feeling like the issues are addressed.
On positive cases, I’ll talk about two cases here, both CAO cases, both financial intermediary cases, that went through DR (dispute resolution) at the CAO. So the first is the Anglo Gold Ashanti case, the same company I was talking about before, but this time, this involved a gold mine in Northern Guinea, and this mine led to the violent forced evictions of an artisanal mining community in Northern Guinea, to make way for the expansion of mining. We identified an IFC exposure to this mine through a commercial bank in South Africa, and that allowed the community to file a complaint to the CAO which we helped them to do with partners in Guinea in 2017. The mediations kicked off in 2018 and it lasted for six years, and along the way we reached several agreements on access to water and education and health. In 2024, we reached a final comprehensive agreement with the company, which included a multimillion dollar financial settlement, which was comprised of individual compensation payments to households, and the establishment of a fund for community-led livelihood development projects. What did IFC do in that case to enable that outcome, to enable remedy? Three really important things that IFC did. One was that it was an observer to the dispute resolution process from the beginning, we generally find it to be very helpful that IFC is an observer to mediation processes, as it both places a degree of pressure on the client or the sub-client and it also helps IFC with its supervision of the performance standards applications, which should be aligned with what the community is asking for in mediation and the outcomes of that mediation.
The second thing that happened in this case was that when the parties were at loggerheads, in the mediation about the facts around resettlement and around compensation, we could agree to hire an independent expert to conduct a resettlement audit. So the company in this case did agree to pay for an expert, but we had the problem of ensuring the impartiality and the independence of the expert. So IFC stepped in, and this was very helpful, to provide arm’s length procuring and contracting of the expert. That really helped to move things forward and to build trust. In some cases, the company may refuse to pay for the expert, and the IFC has a role to play there. The expert conducted a very comprehensive study and the recommendations laid the evidentiary basis for reaching that final agreement. The third thing IFC did to help us get to that outcome was to offer at our request to provide the community technical assistance to prepare a feasible livelihood development plan. And that was crucial because the communities needed that support. When we were negotiating that final agreement, the fact that IFC had offered to do this gave the company confidence that it could agree to transfer significant funds with the knowledge that an IFC backed expert would be assessing the projects to make sure to make sure that they were feasible.
The Hegel case, although we haven’t reached a full agreement yet in this case. We are seeing the IFC still being proactive and creative, creative in its use of leverage. So it was an FI case, involving a private equity fund and two commercial banks that IFC was invested in. They provided financing to a Vietnamese agribusiness company that grabbed and destroyed thousands of hectares of Indigenous people’s lands. We filed this complaint back in 2014, and the DR process is still ongoing. So not only has the IFC been an observer to this entire DR process, but it has actively supported the DR process by forming a direct relationship with the subclient and it’s actively tried to persuade the subclient, to settle using a mix of sticks and carrots. That shows what IFC can do if it’s really trying to be proactive in building leverage where it may not have had leverage.
Carla: How are we going to be able to measure and how should the IFC be assessing the effectiveness of the remedial actions that it’s trying to create for these cases?
Megan: I don’t have super granular specific exact KPIs in terms of what those should be but more a perspective on what needs to be measured. Of course effectiveness of the RAF implementation should mean effectiveness from the perspective of the community seeking remedy. Has the implementation of the RAF resulted in improved outcomes for communities? And of course that has to start with improved processes at the IFC. So it absolutely matters that the IFC is doing things differently and that that is measured, but it can’t end there. The IFC can’t just be tracking the things that it is doing. It needs to also measure actual impact on communities and should be seeking their feedback.
Four big questions of what needs to be measured and what would really be helpful for the board at the end of the day to have answers to, to understand whether this pilot has been successful or not. Number one, has the harm stopped? Are the things that we are doing differently actually resulted in a reduction of harm and, number two, have communities received tangible remedy? And that’s remedy that they themselves recognise as being meaningful. Number three, have the remedial measures lasted? So have the things that have been put into place actually prove to be an enduring solution to the problem that was complained about? Number four, have IFC and MIGA and their clients learned from the harm and changed their behaviour?
Anthony: You have a new initiative and it is going to be tracking some unknown unknowns. We don’t know where we’re going to be at the end of three years and we’re not exactly sure what institutional change is going to have occurred, and we don’t actually know what barriers are going to have been in place. So when you’re tracking something new, a new initiative where you’re anticipating change, but you don’t know where it is, there’s this really great methodology. It’s a bit qualitative, called most significant change. An independent evaluator goes around and has conversations with just about anyone who might be in any way related to the implementation of the RAF. That’s going to be staff, that’s going to be CSOs, it’s going to be clients, it’s going to be project effective people and more. And you ask them a pretty basic question, what is the most significant change that has occurred because the RAF existed? And what you’re going to get out of that is some interesting anecdotes, but you’re going to be able to find some themes too. And the reason you have something open ended like that is because you actually at this moment don’t know what you’re tracking. So in addition to the efficiency and the effectiveness, you want to understand what institutional changes occurred. And you also want to ask what barriers existed, what were in place that led the RAF to be maybe less effective than it could have been. So if you do that sort of qualitative assessment at the end and then capture those learnings, that will be able to inform whether, which pieces and whether and how the RAF has extended or changed moving forward.
Carla: I wanted to go back to Emmanuel, is there already some learning that is being documented and being reflected back to the rest of the IFC teams?
Emmanuel: We are still in start-up mode. We’ll have to find a way to track and record, and that’s really what we need to see how we’re going to capture that. But I don’t have the, response to that.
Natalie: I used my time to speak a little bit about some positive cases but I did want to raise a couple other cases where we really need to see IFC learning lessons, where things have gone wrong. And, Emmanuel, you mentioned the RCBC case. This is another financial intermediary case. IFC made five repeat investments, in a major Filipino commercial bank, in this case, RCBC and at one point, it had a 12 per cent equity stake and seat on the board of this commercial bank. There was a lot of leverage. Meanwhile, this bank was becoming a leading financier of the coal boom in the Philippines. And, of course, coal projects were having devastating impacts on the local communities. So, along with Recourse, and PMCJ, we helped communities file a complaint to the CAO, and this one went to compliance. Ultimately, the CAO investigation found that IFC’s due diligence and supervision failures contributed to a situation that led to the harms, because it didn’t ensure RCBC applied performance standards to these very high-risk projects. And it recommended that IFC support RCBC to conduct an independent environmental and social gap analysis regarding each power plant to verify compliance with the IFC’s requirements. And when gaps were identified, it should work with RCBC and its sub-clients to ensure that instances of harm were remediated. The CAO also said, in doing this, IFC should consider ways to maximise its positive influence on the corporate owners and financiers of each power plant, as well as contributing to remedial solutions as appropriate. Now, communities in this case have received nothing, no remedy.
I do want to quickly just address what IFC did and didn’t do to get us to this point where there has been no remedy. IFC started doing the right thing in this case. It was reasonable, it worked with the client to commission a gap analysis by an independent expert. It ended up spending, I think, about $3 million, on that consultancy report. We worked very hard. PMCJ worked very hard. The communities worked very hard to input into that gap analysis but ultimately, it was never disclosed to us, never disclosed publicly. Because it turns out that RCBC and IFC signed a non-disclosure agreement with that consulting firm that prevented the disclosure of that gap analysis to the communities, to us, to the complainants. And we only know from a CAO monitoring report, there are 187, or 186, recommendations to address the issues. But none of that has happened. The IFC, we just learned this week, has divested from RCBC, and is now seeking to close the map. What IFC can still be doing and should have done, including working as a one-World Bank institution, using the one-World Bank approach, to engage with the government and the sub-clients to come up with creative solutions to get funds to the communities and services to the communities.
Emmanuel: The RAF is complicated, please, don’t criticise us because we are trying to do something even if it fails. I don’t like the outcome of the case. But we need to learn how to listen. When your client is a bank and not a project itself, you’re always working through an intermediary. And every action we took depended on the RCBC willingness through this project. And when that cooperation broke down, which it did, our enabling activities could not reach the communities they were meant to serve. I think we still have to explore that. It also raise this question about what are the boundaries of enabling activities. It’s about disclosure. We completed the gap analysis, but we couldn’t share the findings with the complainants. Not because of the NDA, but because of the agreement that was signed between the complainants and the consulting firm. That’s a very difficult outcome.
Questions and answers
Aaron Pedrosa, the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice: We filed that complaint straddling two CAO policies, the old and the new. The RAF references the CAO policy. Our assertion, and I know Emmanuel does not agree, is that the remedial action framework should apply to this case, to the RCBC case. So what CAO policy are we talking about? It’s the 2021 CAO policy. But should that not apply? The same RAF says, and this is where we’ve been urging the IFC to be creative, enabling activities are expected to be the form of IFC MIGA contribution to remedial action in the majority of cases in which IFC opt to supplement remedial action on the part of clients and other parties. However, the RAF does not preclude IFC from considering and proposing other options for remedial action. That is our assertion. Why do you keep on saying it did not work? The policies are there. In your report, you said the maps have been completed. In the CAO report, it says four out of four work streams are ineffective. To us, the affected communities, you do not seem to work in compliance with the policies. Because the policies are clear. How come you make every justification so that it does not work? So we know that the name of the game these days is the One World Bank Group approach. And so just a quick question on whether the RAF will apply every time there’s IFC money in a One World Bank Group project. It was really great to hear from Maninder yesterday that it will apply to the Bhutan project, the DHPP, for example. So just a quick question on that.
Scott Adams with the World Bank Accountability Mechanism Resolution Service: Working on the public sector side these days, are there any aspects of the RAF that could or should apply if you’re looking at leverage and remedy for the IBRD and IDA funded projects? Are there important similarities or differences, things that should take a different approach on the public sector side that can’t borrow or don’t relate on the private sector side?
Greg Berry from Accountability Counsel: The RAF is really an attempt beyond remedy but to encourage and ensure, in fact, the responsible business conduct of IFC clients. The OECD Development Assistance Committee and the Responsible Business Conduct Committee is engaging in an informal working group to discuss ways that development finance institutions can use their leverage to encourage responsible business conduct. The World Bank Group has not been involved, when asked this week why not they said it’s a matter of capacity. Don’t you think that lessons from the RAF could feed into this to facilitate learning and to influence this guidance across the DFI landscape? And can you commit to maybe trying to dedicate some resources to participating in that conversation?
Speaker from dispute resolution team at the CAO: My observation this week has been that there has been a swell in a conversation about whether accountability mechanisms are about accountability or they are actually supposed to provide accountability and remedy. I think accountability without remedy as has been shared in this room really doesn’t make any sense. Since 2018 we’ve been tracking IFC’s involvement in dispute resolution cases and we found I think maybe there have been observers in maybe about 18, 19 cases over the last years. One of our great challenges with the role that they play as observers is that they are not consistently there. Sometimes they are able to attend, other times they are not able to attend. In other situations they agree to be observers but they don’t come at all. And we understand when we speak to the IFC that one of the big challenges is bandwidth. Usually it’s the ENS people who come and they don’t necessarily have bandwidth to attend dispute resolution cases for maybe 14 years for every session that we have. We heard about a reduction of the ENS staff. And so I’m wondering how this is going to work if we have found that IFC’s participation in these processes is so useful and it helps to provide remedies to communities but we are then reducing the ENS staff. I feel it’s going to put a lot more pressure on this process. And I wanted to know what your thoughts are in terms of the reasons why currently we can’t have consistent participation by IFC and what it’s going to look like when we have less people that are working on ENS.
Gabriela Stocks, lead on the compliance function at CAO: On CAO’s advisory function. The establishment of the RAF was a watershed moment. And in my view, it’s because it created a permission structure for IFC and MIGA to engage within the institution with its own management to have a conversation about what remedy may look like through the form of enabling activities. And that’s been a really important context for this conversation to move forward. By the time cases reach compliance, implementing the enabling activities becomes more and more challenging as either the client disappears through exits or as leverage naturally decreases over the life of an investment. So even in the best of circumstances, the establishment of a community development program that will hopefully eventually come to fruition, doesn’t address some of the harms. In CAO’s investigation, the harm that was identified was a remedy gap, a financial gap of several million dollars because of underpayment for rubber trees that were cut down when this plantation was expanded. The community development program is not going to remedy that gap. The only thing that would have created remedy in this situation is avoiding the harm in the first place. And that means having adequate leverage during the life of the investment to compel the client to avoid these types of harms. One of the really critical components of the RAF is this commitment, IFC’s commitment to explore leverage, to explore new forms of contractual leverage, and to see what more can be done in order to compel client action.
Carla: I’m going to emphasise the fact that we had arguments when the first drafts of the remedial action framework were being proposed and there was such an emphasis on prevention and preparedness. Avoiding harm is the best way to avoid these issues. On the issue of leverage about the contractual language and the recommendations that just came out as part of OHCHR’s recent report.
Anthony: A Guide to Contractual Provisions in DFI Financing does explore those questions of how can DFI strengthen their leverage to compel client action through contractual provisions. So in the actual legal contracts between the DFIs and the clients. And it offers 10 drafting considerations as well as actual language that can be copied and pasted or considered for the contract. So a few examples, canceling, suspending, delaying, or conditioning funding and linking it to ENS milestones. That’s one. Requiring prepayment or acceleration of borrower payment obligations. Another is no objection approvals for changes to the project budgets. And also, of course, the incorporation of responsible exit frameworks so we don’t get into a situation where there’s no client to negotiate with at the end. A concept that’s explored is sort of a contingency funding account, or some people call it an escrow account, where there’s access to potential response funds baked into the budget. And that is codified within the contract. So that would only be used for high risk projects. But these are all the sorts of things that can be considered, maybe not for every project, maybe not in every market, maybe not for every type of transaction. But in cases where there’s going to be a high risk project, where maybe a harm could be more likely anticipated, and you want to strengthen your leverage upfront, so that you’re preparing and preventing and not actually having to deal with, the sorts of conversations that we’re having today.
Megan: On could the RAF apply to the public sector side? Great question. It’s one that we have too, and we haven’t done that analysis yet, but I think we’re coming at it from the angle of, why not? And, once we do that analysis, maybe we would find particular places where this doesn’t translate very well or would need to be changed. But in terms of the approach of enabling remedy, this sounds like something really important for any MDB to embrace. And so even if tweaks need to be made, we would certainly hope that as part of a One World Bank approach, that the One World Bank would be actively looking for ways to be able to apply the concepts and the RAF to the public sector side.
Natalie: I’ll just quickly touch on the comments about leverage again, and also your comments about preventative work and preparedness, which we haven’t focused on. We need to see IFC doing a much better job on that. We see, for instance, in even direct investments. For example, the CBG oxide mine in Guinea, where, had the RAF been applied at the time of that loan and we had, for instance, provisions in the financing agreement that, required broad community support or FPIC and documentation of that before IFC approved the loan as a condition for disbursements, we could have been in a much better place than we are now. What we definitely didn’t see in that case, and the RAF really helped with, is that work that IFC does to analyse the capacity of the client to meet the commitments it’s making in the financing agreements on ENS issues. And then building that capacity where it doesn’t have it. It’s important that we see better work from IFC on this. And lastly, remediation of legacy impacts. Often the IFC is coming into a project where there have already been harms on communities and it’s crucial that we start seeing IFC using its leverage at the financing stage to ensure those legacy impacts are addressed as a condition for financing.
Carla: Remedy in the public sector? Yes, absolutely. Even Banga has said yes, there should be remedy on the public and private side. And if he says he didn’t say it, he did. He said it to me personally. On the retroactive issue of can it apply or can it not apply. There are institutions, the Inter-American Development Bank is already doing things and it doesn’t even have a remedy policy. And it goes back to the willingness of the institution. It goes back to, is there something that we should do? These are the incremental things that we have to do. And if the institution is willing to do them, it doesn’t matter if it’s written down or if it isn’t written down on a policy or a piece of paper. It’s about a board member saying to a community member, we’re sorry for what happened to you. And that, that is something that as human beings, we should be moving toward.
Emmanuel: On the public sector side, the only thing I wanted to say is that there is a fundamental difference between public and private sector clients. And one of the questions we have to deal with on the private sector is client change all the time. And even when it’s the same client, it’s very difficult, very complicated. On the public sector side, it’s complicated also. You always have somebody you can speak with. It may not be the same person, but you still have somebody you can speak with and do operations with. And you can try to address whatever went wrong in the previous operation to the next operation. On the private sector, when the client left or disappeared, or went bankrupt, you’re done. And that’s in my view the reason why remedy is such important in the private sector world. On the DR process we need to prioritise what we can do. It’s also as a request of the party – the party needs to request it. We talk a lot about the accountability gap in the next four years. I just want to bring what I call the timing gap. Communities deserve a prompt, effective response, a timely response. We cannot wait five years, six years and that’s what is happening. It’s true for the IFC, it’s true for the World Bank. But we need to make sure the system is actually able to function in a way that addresses communities requests promptly. But the reality, we all know that that’s common sense. When the money is out, you’ve lost a lot of your leverage. We need to think about addressing issues promptly. We cannot continue in a system where we wait five, six, seven years for a map to be developed because we are at the end of the road. It’s a key factor in the accountability gap. And we need to think collectively how we address this timing gap as a system.
