COMMENT: Amid shrinking civic space, will the EBRD still uphold its democratic mandate?
bne Intellinews | June 6, 2025As the EBRD expands its operations into new regions, including sub-Saharan Africa and Iraq, will it stay true to its founding mission, and place democracy and civic participation at the heart of its approach?
Zero Waste Europe: Despite EU waste management budget, CEE states struggle to catch up
Packaging Insights | March 17, 2025Report co-authors Fidanka Bacheva-McGrath, strategic area leader at CEE Bankwatch Network, and Evgenia Tasheva from the Za Zemiata Zero Waste team, tell us that: “EU funding has disbursed significant amounts to much-needed investments in CEE since 2021, at least EUR 584 million went to waste incineration, and only EUR 228 million to biomass plants, mainly in the fund’s largest beneficiaries, such as Czechia, Poland, and Romania.”
Czechia wants to phase out coal. But is natural gas the solution?
Euronews | March 10, 2025According to calculations by CEE Bankwatch, the Czech plants near Vrato and Opatovice alone are getting a total of almost 350 million euros in subsidies from the EU Modernisation Fund.
Greening the EU budget: why climate mainstreaming needs reform
Bruegel | February 26, 2025CEE Bankwatch Network (2024) analysed the practical implementation of the DNSH principle in the RRF using six case studies. In some cases, the simplified procedure relied solely on uncritically accepting the countries’ declarations.
Why China is Building a New Road to Russia
The B1M | February 26, 2025“The Khada Valley is a very small valley. It’s located very close to the capital [Tbilisi] and it’s unique in terms of its cultural heritage,” said Manana Kochladze, the human rights and democratisation lead at Bankwatch.
EIB fears ‘reputational disaster’ over revised EU green reporting
Financial Times | January 7, 2025Anna Roggenbuck, policy officer at the campaign group CEE Bankwatch, said the EIB “is not transparent in how it calculates a project’s carbon emissions including all the scope of emissions, and because this is not public, there is no outside scrutiny”.
Is crypto keeping Tajikistan’s Rogun Dam project afloat?
Eurasianet | December 23, 2024In a letter sent earlier this year to Bankwatch, World Bank officials defended Rogun as a potentially “transformative clean energy project that will improve domestic and regional welfare and contribute to the decarbonization of regional power grids in Central Asia, provided it is managed under sound macro-economic, commercial, and social and environmental sustainability frameworks.”
The World Bank should reconsider its mega dam project in Tajikistan
Al Jazeera | December 16, 2024Providing funding to a repressive regime to construct the ‘highest dam in the world’ is a recipe for disaster.
Bank of scandals: toxic culture of favouritism exposed at the European Investment Bank
Follow the money | December 11, 2024“Compared to other financial institutions, the EIB is run with a high level of internal secrecy,” said Anna Roggenbuck, who has been following the EIB for over 15 years for Bankwatch, a civil society organisation that monitors publicly financed projects.
The European Investment Bank has a chronic ‘revolving doors’ problem
EUobserver | December 5, 2024Instead of the EIB shrugging its shoulders at yet another revolving door case, it must understand these new revelations as a wake-up call to drive the necessary changes that will enable it, as a key EU institution, to retain public legitimacy.
