This briefing outlines a number of aspects that - if improved - would enhance the European Commission’s proposal on the future EU budget and maximize benefits for the regions delivered by the future Cohesion Policy while contributing to reach the 2020 climate, energy and biodiversity targets and creating green jobs.

Issue 51 of our quarterly newsletter with campaign updates and analyses of international development finance issues.

No sooner had rumours started circulating in January that Robert Zoellick would be stepping down as president of the World Bank than our friends at the Bretton Woods Project fished out their administrator passwords and fired up the World Bank President website once again.

Early in the new year Bankwatch and partner groups lodged two complaints with the EBRD's Public Complaint Mechanism (PCM): one concerning the loan agreement for the Rivne-Kyiv High Voltage Line project in Ukraine, the other concerning the EBRD's Šoštanj lignite thermal power plant loan in Slovenia.

There is more or less consensus among various stakeholders that developing decentralised renewable energy sources (RES) to feed local energy demand is the only way to build a long-term, truly sustainable, effective and fair way to satisfy Europe’s energy needs.

It is coming up for three years since the EBRD's 2009 Annual Evaluation Overview Report “alerted Management to develop a new Operation Policy to cover all forms of non-energy related extraction of natural resources (mining policy)”. The EBRD does not appear to have been in any great rush with the preparation of this policy, and one has to wonder how long the bank will allow for the new policy to be consulted with the interested public. More importantly, how influential will public input be in setting the policy objectives and requirements?

For a bank tasked to contribute to the 'balanced and steady' development of the internal market in the interest of the EU, the EIB's figures for its financing operations in 2011 (released last month at its annual press conference) induced a certain amount of head-scratching here at Bankwatch Mail.

The 'Counter Balance: Challenging the EIB' coalition has written to Werner Hoyer, the new president of the EIB, welcoming him to his new post. Hoyer, formerly state secretary in Germany's foreign office and a member of the Free Democrats, the junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel's government, becomes the EIB's seventh president, succeeding Philippe Maystadt.

'Carbon Rising', a new study from Bankwatch, catalogues the EIB's energy lending for the period 2007-2010 during which time the bank loaned EUR 40 billion to energy projects across the EU and EUR 8 billion outside the EU. This lending was guided by the EIB’s first energy policy 'Clean Energy for Europe: A Reinforced EIB Contribution', adopted by the bank in 2007.