Development and mega-infrastructure projects are often designed without appropriate consideration of their impacts on the environment and communities, and frequently lack meaningful public consultation and robust environmental and social due diligence prior to fund allocation.
As the world races to implement large-scale infrastructure investments that have few known benefits for those most in need, we observe how, in many cases, regulations that govern access to information, public procurement and environmental and social impact assessments are circumvented or deliberately undermined.
We examine how withholding essential investment information can lead to large-scale infrastructure investments becoming swamps of corruption and mountains of debt, with few or no positive outcomes for communities in need.