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. [*]