Publications

Local development and investments in resource extraction rarely go together hand in hand. Bankwatch’s Media coordinator David Hoffman reports back on a recent visit to the EBRD sponsored Patos Marinza oil field in Albania. The case provides valuable lessons for the current r…

Pljevlja’s 210 MW lignite power plant, operating since 1982 in northern Montenegro, has caused controversy since the beginning of its lifetime. Even back in late ’70s Yugoslavia when the project was being planned, residents succeeded in pressing for the chimney to be taller…

While governments in south-east Europe have been talking about building new lignite power plants for years, the only one under construction to date is Energy Financing Team’s (EFT) 300 MW Stanari plant in the Republika Srpska entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Rather than ser…

Ideas about the construction of a new lignite power plant in Kosovo have existed since the end of the 1980s, and even the current Kosova e Re proposal – scaled down to 600 MW from the original 2100 MW – has been around since 2009. It is being touted by the Kosovo government,…

The European NGO coalition Counter Balance has recently published a short overview of the new energy policies now in place at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the European Investment Bank (EIB). Both banks’ new policies were finalised towards t…

A new report published on March 10 by a team of researchers from the University of Oxford, based on the largest ever study of large hydroelectric dams (245 in 65 countries) has found that in most cases large dams are economically not viable and few, if any, will realise thei…

Issue 58 of Bankwatch Mail, published as stakeholders meet in the European Parliament to discuss the future of the ‘Energy Community’. Comprising the countries of the western Balkans, Moldova and Ukraine, the Energy Community aims primarily to extend EU internal energy polic…

At the peak of EU funds’ programming, experiences from CEE countries reveal deficiencies in the application of the Code of Conduct and a flawed implementation of the partnership principle. This undermines the credibility of the programming process and leaves benefits of a co…

Civil society organisations have noticed that a number of basic partnership principles are not met by member states during the ongoing programming of Cohesion Policy for the 2014-2020 period. (Read more in this briefing).

This report, prepared by Environmental Watch on North Caucasus (EWNC) gives account of the extensive environmental damage resulting from the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.

92 organisations prepared and submitted this joint statement on the opportunities for financing in Macedonia from the EU pre-accession instrument. The assessment was done for all sectors included in the Country Strategy Paper for Macedonia.

The EBRD’s Project Complaint Mechanism’s Rules of Procedure (PCM) are part of the bank’s good governance policies which are all being revised in the beginning of 2014. In addition to these comments on the PCM here, Bankwatch has prepared comments to the good governance polic…