Blogs

There is a big long list of technical jargon attached to the programming documents of the EU funds for the 2014-2020 funding period – enough to fill an entire blog post on its own. But you will be relieved to read that, in the context of Latvia’s ongoing negotiations as to how we will spend our future EU budget money, I will focus on only one of these items. It may be a bit of a mouthful, but it is what it says it is – only in Latvia, as environmental NGOs are discovering, what should be a safeguard for the environment appears to have gone missing.

In case you missed it, the tectonic plates just shifted in the world of international financial institution (IFI) energy lending.

For the last couple of years, we have been calling on the European Investment Bank to drop coal lending. Finally, we’re starting to see some results.

By putting too much trust in its client EPS, the EBRD failed to notice that an important grievance mechanism for villagers near the mine was not in place - for two years. [*]

Despite collecting impressive evidence from 20 years of failed public-private partnerships in central and eastern Europe, an EBRD-financed study by the Economist Intelligence Unit concludes to continue using the controversial financing scheme.

Adequate decision making on energy policies must be based on accurate information and cannot rely on outdated knowledge and misconceptions. A new series of fact sheets explores the myths and facts of Europe’s energy sector.

A thorough check of the European Investment Bank's energy lending data shows that not all is as rosy as the EIB would like to see it. We've paired up with Open Spending to provide an introduction into how to interpret and scrutinise the numbers.

The current review of the European Investment Bank’s mandate for lending outside of the EU brings some of the pitfalls of the bank’s development lending to the fore and offers a chance for improvements.

With today’s approval of the watered down proposals to reform EU Structural Funds in the European Parliament’s committee for regional development (see our press release), EU decision makers have taken a step away from ambitious environmental spending in the future Cohesion Policy. At the same time also national level allocation of the 2014-2020 funds is starting to take shape. But efforts to get the funds working sustainably for, and on behalf of, needy local communities are being thwarted in Slovakia - for a range of all too familiar reasons.

So far the planning for Latvia’s use of the EU funds for the 2014-2020 period has been a reasonably positive experience from a partnership perspective. Yet the process that has, until recently, been notable for its transparency and high level of public participation is now in danger of being derailed.