The Impact of World Bank Policy and Programmes on the Built Environment in Egypt

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Mar 29, 2013 Egypt
The Impact of World Bank Policy and Programmes on the Built Environment in Egypt

The Impact of World Bank Policy and Programmes on the Built Environment in Egypt

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was issued by the Egyptian Iniative for Personal Rights on 20 March 2013.] 

Despite billions of Egyptian pounds in infrastructure investment both from national and international sources, Egypt`s cities, towns and villages continue to grow and function in much the same way they have over the last three decades, namely through self-reliance. There are varying degrees of deprivation such as shortages in housing, municipal services and transport--the three main ingredients of functioning communities-- while on the other hand, a minority is very well served. It is no surprise then that the main call of the January 25thRevolution was “Bread! Freedom! Social justice!”

One significant partner  the Government of Egypt has had in the development of Egypt`s built environment has been the World Bank, which has invested heavily in infrastructure projects such as electricity, waste water and natural gas, as well as in transportation and affordable housing. These investments come along with the Bank’s policy recommendations and technical assistance which have included championing private sector involvement and phasing out government subsidies, while taking the stance that government should be an “enabler” rather than a “provider” of such services.

The Bank’s current portfolio (July 2012) of built environment-related projects is $3,180 million, roughly 81 percent of the total $3,945 million portfolio of active WB projects in Egypt . This long-term interest in Egypt puts the World Bank in a position to shoulder some of the responsibility for the state of the built environment in Egypt.

Why has the large amount of foreign and national funding not succeeded in solving or substantially addressing the many built environment challenges faced by Egypt`s citizens? Have the Bank’s efforts played a positive role in promoting pro-citizen built environment policies and projects? This study explores answers to these questions through an overview of the World Bank’s strategy toward Egypt, the Egypt 2006-2009 Country Assistance Strategy (CAS), which was extended until May 2012. The strategy`s main objectives were; facilitating private sector development, enhancing the provision of selected public goods, and promoting equity. The CAS is also analysed in light of the Bank`s investments in policy programs and development projects during the same period.

Selected Findings

While the state seems to be the sole owner and regulator of most of the elements that shape the built environment, in reality ownership is divided between the state, the informal private sector and the formal private sector.  Besides the infrastructure services, such as energy, water and waste-water, the other three components of the built environment: housing, transport and solid waste collection, are already for the most part liberalized, though this has not meant that they have performed any better than the public sector services.  

On developing the private sector and in using the PPP model

While the 2006-2009 CAS finds that the “GoE is conscious of the need to ensure resulting [privatisation] arrangements do not create private monopolies and that they are embedded within a regulatory and supervisory framework that protects the public interest, ”it is clear from the way the solid waste management sector has performed since it has been formalised that there is a need for greater focus on regulation.

On regional disparities

Only a comprehensive built environment policy, along with representative local government, will balance regional disparities and promote the equitable distribution of services and investments, something that the 2006-2009 CAS largely failed to achieve and where investment remained highly centralized in the Greater Cairo region. 

On stakeholder consultation

The lack of true representation and consultation of stakeholders was another area in which the 2006-2009 CAS was weak. “Stakeholder participation” in the CAS was largely limited to central government and private sector affiliates, rather than including a broader range of affected stakeholders.  In order for a comprehensive built environment policy to be formulated, local community participation must be mainstreamed into both the policy development and project development frameworks.

On promoting equity and the poor

Just less than a quarter of the WB portfolio of investments was themed as "urban services for the poor", and even then the "poor" were not well defined. For example the Affordable Housing Mortgage programme`s target was middle and lower middle income groups – between the 75th to 45th percentiles - and not the low income groups.

On involuntary resettlement

Half of the 14 built environment-related projects, totalling 63 per cent of the built environment portfolio by investment value, triggered the Bank’s involuntary resettlement safeguard policy, indicating that there was a risk of people being displaced from their lands, homes, or livelihoods as a direct or indirect result of the project. Because involuntary resettlement has enormous impacts on families and communities, it is especially important that the Bank and the government weigh the costs with the stated public benefit of the project, and give serious consideration to alternatives, when resettlement or economic displacement is a possibility.

The home-grown systems that have kept the Egyptian built environment humming over the last half of a century have gradually been replaced by supposedly more “efficient,” “economic,” or “cost effective” ones. However, the newly-introduced systems, most of them part of privatization programs, are suffering, along with the citizens they are meant to be serving.  

Taking an in-depth look at the 2006-2009 CAS has demonstrated several areas in which the World Bank in coordination with the GoE failed to address the true needs of Egypt’s citizens in the built environment. In the coming 18 months of the Bank’s new interim strategy, there is a great opportunity for the World Bank and the Government to work with citizens and all stakeholders to develop a comprehensive plan for the built environment. This will in turn help to guide the Bank, GoE, and stakeholders in the development of a new, post-revolution CAS that will reflect the needs of the built environment and the Egyptian citizens who have kept it running for the past several decades.

[Click here to download a draft version of the report.] 
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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412