NGOs boycott AIIB annual meeting, citing a ‘troubling pattern of exclusion’ of impacted communities

The announcement of the boycott comes as the AIIB kicked off its ninth annual forum in Uzbekistan on Wednesday, which the sustainability-focused multilateral bank has championed as the first to provide a dedicated space for civil society groups.

However, NGO Forum on ADB – the network leading the boycott – has accused AIIB for failing to allow for the agenda of planned dialogues to be civil society-led, “in contrast to standard multilateral development bank practice”.

“If you look at the World Bank, it has the Civil Society Policy Forum. In the Asian Development Bank (ADB), we convene our own panels – at least two of them. This time, we were hoping for some improvement in that direction with AIIB. But there was nothing,” said Rayyan Hassan, executive director of the NGO Forum on ADB.

Hassan told Eco-Business that he had sent a letter to AIIB on 30 August requesting for structured civil society panel sessions in this year’s programme and got a formal response in mid-September that the bank would keep its programme unchanged. “They offered bilateral side meetings, which are outside the public eye. What’s the point of that?”

NGO Forum on ADB also alleged that AIIB’s “inadequate visa support for local civil society groups and affected communities” compounded the barriers to participation with key decision-makers. 

For instance, as a Bangladeshi national, Hassan said that he had to submit his passport to the Uzbekistan embassy in Bangladesh to obtain a visa – a lengthy process that is now complicated by national security concerns, following the mass uprising in August that toppled the country’s incumbent government.

He therefore requested for AIIB’s help to obtain an electronic visa, but said he did not get a “clear response” after 15 days. In contrast, Hassan said that ADB had arranged for a special visa on arrival process for all invited participants, regardless of nationality, for its annual meeting in Kazakhstan back in 2017.

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What we’re trying to do with this boycott is remind the bank of its own multilateralism. It is not a China-led bank, as the president keeps on reminding us. So in order to test its multilateralism, it has to act with the spirit of multilateral thinking, which needs critical diverse views, especially from those who are disenfranchised and affected by its operations.

Rayyan Hassan, executive director of the NGO Forum on ADB

AIIB confirmed to Eco-Business that several weeks before the meeting, NGO Forum on ADB and another non-profit Coastal Livelihood and Environmental Action Network (CLEAN) had requested for help with obtaining visas for Bangladeshi NGOs. The bank said that it had followed up with the groups to offer assistance, but did not hear back.

In response to the group’s complaints, AIIB’s director general of communications Jeffrey Hiday told Eco-Business that at least 100 civil society groups have registered to attend the annual meeting, where four civil society dialogues will be taking place. Two of them will be moderated by Hiday, while the other two will be moderated by Marvin Taylor-Dormand, managing director of AIIB’s’ Complaints-resolution, Evaluation and Integrity Unit (CEIU).

Ahead of the formal proceedings, AIIB had also organised a breakfast meeting with around 10 Uzbekistan civil society representatives on their concerns, who “set the agenda as we went,” said Hiday. 

When asked about whether the sessions are open to the public, Hiday said that they are held in a hybrid format to be accessible to all civil society groups and that “links are widely disseminated to ensure maximum participation”.

However, Hassan said that most of the civil society groups in attendance are either from the Global North or the surrounding Central Asian region, with just a few from the Philippines and India representing developing Asia. Meanwhile, apart from Bangladesh, representatives from many Global South countries that AIIB has projects in, like Cambodia, Nepal, Pakistan, Maldives and Sri Lanka, have also faced difficulties in obtaining visas. 

Regarding the breakfast briefing that AIIB referenced, Hassan said that it was announced “as late as the day before yesterday” and so groups had little time to prepare for the agenda. Hassan shared that a Kyrgyzstan representative attending the breakfast meeting told him that he had wanted to raise concerns about a particular project, but was uncertain about whether it was the right time to bring it up.

“So what you’re getting are numbers of meetings with civil society organisations. But if you go deeper and ask AIIB about the design, public accessibility and control of the agenda, you might get a very different answer,” said Hassan.

No faith in AIIB’s accountability mechanism

The network also questioned the effectiveness and independence of AIIB’s accountability mechanism, known as the Project-affected People’s Mechanism (PPM), which was set up in 2019.

In April 2022, NGO Forum on ADB, alongside CLEAN, filed a complaint accusing the multilateral lender of breaching its own social and environmental standards by forcefully displacing over 2,000 families and exacerbating flood risks with the construction of the 220-megawatt Bhola gas power plant in Bangladesh.

AIIB finally rejected the complaint after 10 months – way past its stated indicative timeline of 35 days to process the eligibility of submissions, said Hassan.

The lender said that the complaint was ineligible as the parties “have not made good faith efforts to resolve the issues with the AIIB management”. But it remains unclear to Hassan how AIIB defines “good faith efforts”, since his group had raised concerns about the project multiple times in annual meetings on behalf of the communities.

According to AIIB’s website, only five complaints have been lodged and none have been deemed eligible to date.

While the CEIU – which the PPM function falls under – is supposed to be an independent unit within the bank, Hassan said that its former director general Hamid Sharif used to sit in on investment committee meetings, because all the teams sit in the same office in Beijing.

“How do you separate the powers? There’s no way to say that the director general thought that the complaint would be bad PR and it would affect borrower and bank relations. The borrower was trying to sell off the [Bhola] project, so any bad press would affect those trade deals,” he said. 

In June 2022, a month after the complaint was made, a 49 per cent stake in the Bhola power project was sold to a United Kingdom-based private equity firm for an undisclosed amount.

Responding to Eco-Business queries, AIIB’s Hiday said that the CEIU has “struck a healthy balance between independence and engagement”.

“The managing director of CEIU is not a member or observer of the investment committee and so does not attend those meetings. That said, upon invitation of the president, the managing director of CEIU may join executive committee meeting as an observer,” he said.

Hassan said that understaffing and the high turnover rate of environmental and social specialists within the organisation is another concern. He understands that AIIB only has four specialists looking after the 285 projects it has invested in and they have typically not stayed in the roles for longer than two years. Just this month, AIIB posted a job vacancy for the role of a senior environmental policy specialist.

In comparison, the ADB has over 145 such specialists across its resident missions and headquarters, said Hassan. 

“The bottom line is, I don’t think we have faith in the mechanism as it stands now,” he said.

Testing the bank’s multilateralism

NGO Forum on ADB, which has closely engaged AIIB over the past nine years, said in its press release that it has become “clear that civil society engagement at these annual meetings is nothing more than a PR exercise for the AIIB to showcase its multilateralism”.

“What we’re trying to do with this boycott is remind the bank of its own multilateralism. It is not a China-led bank, as the president keeps on reminding us. So in order to test its multilateralism, it has to act with the spirit of multilateral thinking, which needs critical diverse views, especially from those who are disenfranchised and affected by its operations,” said Hassan. 

“The current space is them trying to sanitise civil society engagement so that they can only limit the conversation to what suits them or is seen as multilateralism. So what we expect is a real conversation to know the impacts of their operations and policies on the ground. In order to do that, they have to relinquish some control and allow us to talk, without fear or persecution, about what’s really happening. We have no other agenda.”