Human Rights Online Philippines

Photos by PMCJ

Ahead of the ADB’s Annual Meeting next month, civil society groups are firmly calling on the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to go back to the drawing board and overhaul the draft Environmental and Social Framework (ESF) as written in its current form. To demonstrate their grave concerns that the policy provisions will undermine project-affected people and their allies abilities to hold ADB to account when social and environmental harms and damages occur, they intend to deliver a statement to the ADB Headquarters in Manila this morning.

The draft ESF, aimed at updating ADB’s safeguards policies, is being met with opposition from civil society groups due to a wide range of critical shortcomings, including:

1. Lack of Clear Lines of Accountability – in particular in relation to ensuring nuanced safeguards delivery for both sovereign and non-sovereign operations, as there is a glaring lack of provisions on how affected communities can access remedies without fear of reprisals when grievances arise.
2. Lack of Clarity Related to the Stakeholder Engagement – To date, there has been a lack of transparency regarding how civil society inputs are influencing and being integrated into the draft policy. In terms of the stakeholder engagement guidelines in the ESF, there is also no obligation integrated into the current text providing concrete measures to prevent reprisals and to ensure an enabling environment for public participation.
3. Lack of Human Rights Approach – The proposed draft fails to be underpinned by standards which would align with International Human Rights and International Labour Organization Conventions. At the very least, standards as per conventions to which member states have widely ratified, should be more clearly embedded in the document.
4. Weakened Environmental and Social Protections – The proposed draft fails to maintain the robustness of the existing safeguards, particularly in terms of identifying impacts, ensuring compensation for losses, and protecting systematically marginalised groups such as informal workers and Indigenous Peoples.
5. Gender Consideration Dilution – The ESF significantly dilutes gender considerations compared to the previous Safeguard Policy Statement (SPS), raising concerns about the protection of women and gender-sensitive approaches in ADB operations.
6. Climate Change standards that fail to stand up to climate science – The provisions should apply to all projects and financing, including technical assistance and trade finance, and should take a lifecycle approach. As it stands, this is not the case, instead only likely being applicable in practice to a narrow selection of infrastructure-related projects.
7. Opaque Financial Intermediary Lending – Transparency issues plague financial intermediary (FI) lending, meaning that it will remain difficult if not impossible for affected communities to trace connections back to the ADB, leaving them without knowledge of the options to seek remedy through the ADB’s accountability mechanism.

In light of these grave concerns, civil society groups urge the ADB to overhaul the draft ESF, revising the language to instead reflect a set of forward-looking safeguards applicable to its entire portfolio, grounded in international human rights and environmental standards.