Bank’s future loan to improve the highway include conditions that link disbursements to progress in the mitigation of the project’s environmental impact.”66 Thus, as in both the earlier Darién and nearly simultaneous Acre Sustainable Development Projects, the Bank’s intention was clearly to sequence the implementation of critical environmental and social protection and road investments along the Santa Cruz-Puerto Suárez corridor in such a way that the former were essentially in place before the latter were initiated. Rather than containing these measures in one operation financed by a single loan, however, they were housed in two parallel projects funded by separate Bank loans, with crossconditionality in their respective legal agreements. When the two parallel operations are considered together, at least conceptually, they formed part of a single sustainable development type program, largely equivalent to those the Bank was supporting at the same time in Panama and western Brazil, although with the added feature of dividing both the road improvement investments and some of the associated required environmental and social protection activities into two distinct phases. To add to this already very ambitious and complex design and also differently from the Bank-financed projects in Darién and Acre, multiple donors were involved in the road improvement parts of the Bolivia program, all of which were on somewhat different schedules, which would also further complicate Borrower implementation and Bank supervision of the parallel environmental and social management activities that were designed to cover the entire 571 kilometer corridor (see the section on project implementation and results below). Project design also incorporated other innovative features. The LP recognized, appropriately, for example, that some of the indirect environmental and social impacts of the road improvement project would only be felt over the longer term, well beyond the construction phase, such that that “some mitigation programs must be continued in order to achieve balanced development in the area of influence.” Arguing that institutional and financial mechanisms should be established to permit continuation of required mitigation activities, it concluded that three subprograms would need a longer implementation period than the first construction phase, with the former being estimated at ten years, specifically: (i) the Subprogram for Indigenous Organizational Development, which would seek to strengthen “indigenous coalitions so that they can defend the interests of indigenous peoples and participate in the development process of the 66
IDB, Bolivia: Environmental and Social Protection in the Santa Cruz-Puerto Suárez Corridor, op. cit., pp. 10-11. My emphasis.
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