In a recent report, Oxfam International outlined a suggested framework - Open Books for High-Risk Financing - which proposes a set of principles to systematize and enhance disclosure in financial intermediary lending. In this article, Christian Donaldson, one of the report’s authors, discusses the report and its implications for the commercial banking sector. Increasingly, development finance is being delivered via financial intermediaries. The latest data indicate that lending via financial intermediaries accounts for 55.4% of IFC’s…

This week, I traveled more than 4,000 miles from home to meet with major banks and urge them to help protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from destructive oil drilling and exploration. In all the years I’ve worked to defend this place, we’ve been focused on trying to make our voices heard in Congress, and I never thought I’d be sitting in a conference room on the 43rd floor of a bank’s global headquarters in downtown New York City talking about the Arctic Refuge. Times have changed. We have an administration in Washington,…

In August this year the Dutch Banking Sector Agreement on Human Rights (DBSA) released its first annual report together with three other publications. This is the second in a series of articles examining these publications, and focusses on the Increasing Leverage paper. With enough leverage you can move the world, as Archimedes told us. But how much leverage do banks really have to move their clients to avoid or address human rights abuses? In a 2013 paper by the Thun Group, seven European banks argued that, given the competitive market they work…