City Road Podcast

You might have heard about the 'structural adjustment' program, but what about the Green Structural Adjustment of the World Bank’s Resilient City program? We're talking with Sophie Webber and Patrick Bigger about what they call Green Structural Adjustment. Within environmental and development finance practices, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from rapid urbanisation and climate change. This threatens to further entrench poverty and precarity for millions of people. The cost of achieving urban resilience across the world dwarfs available public finance, however, from both development banks and governments themselves. Meanwhile, vast amounts of money on capital markets are searching for profitable investment opportunities. The World Bank is attempting to channel return-seeking investment into urban infrastructure in response to these challenges. To harness this private finance, though, cities must be reformatted in investment-friendly ways. In a recent a