The catalogued work is Bruce Rich’s Mortgaging the Earth, not The Mortgage by Zoran Đinđić. The overview below follows the verified catalogued book.
Mortgaging the Earth is a critical study of the World Bank and of the environmental and social costs of the development model it has financed. Its central argument is that much postwar development lending has effectively mortgaged the Earth: it pledges natural resources, ecosystems, and the livelihoods of affected communities against the promise of future economic growth, while the costs are often displaced onto the poor and onto later generations. The book combines institutional analysis of the World Bank with case-based critique of large infrastructure, agricultural colonization, dam building, and policy-based lending.
The book examines the Bank’s mandate and internal culture: its role as a multilateral lender, its relationship with borrower governments and donor shareholders, and the bureaucratic and financial pressures that favor approving and disbursing loans. Rich argues that the Bank’s project cycle, appraisal methods, and economic assumptions have often treated environmental damage as an “externality” and have marginalized affected people from decisions that reshape their lands and livelihoods. He is especially concerned with the way cost-benefit analysis, discounting, and narrow definitions of productivity can make long-term ecological loss appear economically rational in the short term.
A major part of the book is devoted to the environmental record of Bank-supported projects. Rich discusses cases involving tropical forest colonization and frontier development, in which road building and settlement programs opened previously inaccessible forest areas to clearing, speculation, and conflict over land. He also examines large dam and irrigation schemes, where the benefits of hydropower or water supply were promoted while resettlement, loss of fisheries, watershed degradation, and impacts on indigenous and rural communities were understated or ignored. These cases are used not simply as examples of bad projects but as illustrations of systemic problems in how development is planned, financed, and evaluated.
The book traces the Bank’s response to environmental criticism. It describes how external pressure from nongovernmental organizations, transnational advocacy campaigns, Northern governments, legislators, and the media forced environmental issues onto the Bank’s agenda. It discusses the creation of environmental units, environmental assessment procedures, policy statements, and internal reforms, and it asks how far these changes altered actual lending. Rich’s assessment is skeptical: reforms could be real and important, but they often remained procedural, underfunded, or subordinate to the institution’s lending imperatives. “Greening” the Bank, in his account, did not necessarily change the underlying development model.
The book also situates the Bank within broader debates about debt, structural adjustment, and the global economy. It argues that policy-based lending and adjustment programs could encourage export-oriented resource extraction, weaken environmental regulation, and intensify pressure on poor communities, even when the stated goal was macroeconomic stabilization and growth. Rich connects environmental impoverishment to questions of poverty, inequality, and political power: the people who bear environmental costs frequently have the least voice in project design and the least access to the benefits.
A recurring theme is accountability. Rich criticizes the secrecy of loan negotiations and the limited participation of affected communities. He examines the tension between the Bank’s formal respect for national sovereignty and its substantial influence over borrower policy, arguing that the institution has often been more accountable to donor governments and financial ministries than to the people affected by its projects. The book assesses experiments in accountability and environmental review while insisting that they fall short without deeper democratic control, transparency, and participation.
The book’s conclusion is less a single reform blueprint than a critique of the development paradigm itself. Rich calls for a rethinking of development as ecological and social sustainability rather than aggregate growth alone, and for institutional changes that make multilateral finance answerable to affected people and to long-term environmental limits. Mortgaging the Earth is thus both an institutional critique of the World Bank and a wider argument about the crisis of a development model that treats the earth’s natural capital as something to be borrowed against, spent, and too often exhausted.
Rich is especially attentive to how the Bank’s institutional incentives shape what counts as relevant knowledge. Project appraisal, cost-benefit analysis, and lending targets can make environmental and social costs appear as externalities or as risks to be managed rather than as reasons to reject or redesign a project. The book shows how technical and economic expertise, though presented as neutral, carries assumptions about growth, time horizons, and whose interests matter in decision-making. This is why Rich treats environmental reform as inseparable from reform of the Bank’s mandate and internal culture, not merely its safeguard paperwork.
The book also presents the Bank as an active shaper of borrower policy and standards, not just a passive financier. Its leverage means that project categories, conditionalities, and appraisal practices can lock in particular models of energy, agriculture, and infrastructure. Rich uses this to explain why incremental environmental safeguards may be overwhelmed by the scale and direction of lending, and why critics focused on transparency, participation, and accountability as levers for changing institutional behavior.
A further theme is the gap between the Bank’s public language of sustainable development and the operational reality of its loan portfolio. Rich treats “sustainable development” as contested language that can legitimize business-as-usual as well as open space for critique. The book’s significance lies in connecting a detailed institutional history to a broader argument that multilateral finance is a central, not peripheral, site of environmental politics.
