Environmental accountability

The EBRD’s formal grievance mechanism for local communities is the Independent Recourse Mechanism. It allows for local concerns about projects to be reviewed independently from investment operations.

Formal and informal dialogue between the EBRD and non-governmental organisations/local communities is facilitated by the Outreach unit.

Independent Recourse Mechanism
Outreach unit

Internal checks and balances

Internally, EBRD operations are scrutinised by the Internal Audit Department (IAD) and the Evaluation Department (EvD). These departments review project files, liaise with staff and visit project facilities.

IAD determines if procedures stemming from the Environmental Policy have been followed, and can make recommendations to improve the working process.

EvD reviews environmental and social project performance, assesses whether projects continue to meet the standards. It also evaluates policy implementation at project, sector, and country levels. EvD rates the environmental dimension of projects and aggregated these to assess the Bank’s performance as a whole.

Evaluation department