ABSTRACT
In the last two decades, or at least since the release of the Brundtland Report (World Commission of Environment and Development 1987), international organizations (IOs) have started considering the importance of environmental concerns in their policies. Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) have tried to embody environmental policies in their lending programs, both through conditionality and through the institutionalization of environmental impact assessment procedures within the project release process. In the early 1990s the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also decided to include environmental considerations in its lending programs, since major environmental problems could affect macroeconomic variables, thereby threatening stability. International organizations have also developed purely environmental facilities – such as the Global Environment Facility (GEF) – making environmental governance and policy an issue of its own in international lending, and not only a side issue to be taken into account among other things.
