Contribution
Role: Interview
- Glen Wright, a senior researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, was following the EIA negotiations closely. “There were often two very clear ideological options, ” he explained, “to pick column A or column B for most things: ambitious or not.” From one IGC to the next, the text drifted inexorably toward column B, the more lax formulation. “I was really hopeful that this could be a way to properly institutionalize impact assessments, to really do it right, ” Wright said. “It looks like a lot of states have just sort of dropped interest in that.” The final EIA text wasn’t what a lot of conservation-minded observers wanted, but it was better than nothing. Countries would do their own assessments, and feedback from the global community was nonbinding, but the transparency, perhaps, would engender some degree of accountability.