ABSTRACT
Barber Conable's promises to green the World Bank aroused great hopes. For the first time the Bank began to finance a number of so-called free-standing environmental loans*: a $ll7-million national environmental protection and research project to strengthen Brazil's environmental agencies, for example, and an $i8-million national environmental management project for Poland.3 Indeed, by 1989 Conable could claim that more than a third of the Bank's projects had "significant environmental components," a proportion that Bank literature asserted jumped to 50 percent the following year.4
