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After more than 20 years, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) still stands as a massive achievement in the history of codification efforts in international law. This chapter examines the role of the World Bank (WB) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the fund for which it acts both as trustee and as one of the three implementing agencies. The implementation role the LOSC itself seems to envisage for the WB, and the way this has been supplemented by the 1995 UN Fish Stocks Agreement (UNFSA), are discussed. The role and financing capability of the WB itself are also considered, along with the establishment, restructuring, and evolution of the GEF, and the role of international organisations in developing and implementing the LOSC. The chapter concludes by looking at a representative spread of the growing portfolio of projects of both the WB and GEF in the law of the sea area, including marine pollution control and fisheries management.

Created one year before the 1992 Rio summit, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) is mandated to fund projects designed to promote global environmental protection. In 1994, it was restructured in response to strong criticism from nongovernmental organizations and developing countries, and today, has a unique institutional structure that includes a small secretariat headquartered in Washington, DC. This chapter examines the autonomous influence of the GEF secretariat as a bureaucracy and the factors underlying such influence. After providing an overview of the GEF secretariat’s organizational structure and activities, the chapter analyzes its cognitive, normative, and executive influences. It also discusses the secretariat’s resources, competences, and embeddedness, along with its organizational expertise, organizational culture, and organizational leadership.

This chapter examines why states decided to delegate key monitoring tasks to private actors in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. It first provides an overview of the origins of the CDM before discussing the involvement of the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in the CDM. It also presents three reasons behind delegated authority in the CDM, and specifically why private actors were selected to serve as the “atmospheric police” of the CDM. First, the private sector had relatively long-standing experience in the intricacies of measuring carbon offsets. Second, powerful states agreed that this market mechanism should be part of the Protocol, and that a third-party verifier was needed to monitor the quality of offset projects. Finally, there was a focal institution, the CDM Executive Board, to screen and oversee agents.

Biodiversity, a property of natural areas, provides a range of benefits to the economy including bio-prospecting rents, knowledge and insurance, ecotourism fees, and ecosystem services. Many of these values can be broken out in the System of National Accounts (SNA), leading to better estimates of the economic losses when natural areas are degraded or destroyed. Developing countries harbour the great majority of biodiversity, and this diversity provides benefits, including knowledge and carbon sequestration, to the whole world. However, protecting biodiversity is particularly costly for developing countries: the opportunity cost of forgoing development of natural areas exceeds 1% of GDP in fifty-eight developing countries, versus only four OECD countries. The Global Environment Facility (GEF) can offset these costs through grant finance, but annual GEF finance and co-finance averages only 8% of the opportunity costs faced by low-income countries.

This chapter tries to illustrate the remarkably large number of strategies and specific instruments that can accomplish the changes in farsighted and shortsighted actions. Since one can address both the early and later costs and benefits of the farsighted and shortsighted actions, there are many points of leverage. Several examples show that governments can promote savings by providing higher-than-market savings interest rates. The Global Environment Facility is a vehicle for transferring funds from developed countries to developing countries to preserve or enhance the global environment. The prospects and benefits of the governmentally funded improvements would increase motivation for self-help efforts even if the government outlay is relatively modest. The limitation of strategies involving welfare values is that the benefits to be created or rescheduled are typically more financially costly than other strategies, and the creation or rescheduling of costs is more politically costly.