Individual and societal learning allow globally financed developmental cooperation

What the paper says

The goal of this article is to perceive and understand environment-related activities of international financial institutions (IFIs) as part of a societal learning process, and consequently to describe their 'environmental and social project quality criteria' as an expression of such ongoing societal learning processes. What can our readership, likely to be related to foresight, but also to higher education and lifelong learning, profit from such a comparison? Against the author's initial expectation, IFIs are starting to become efficient at redirecting global funds to climate and environmental projects - and have thus performed a successful 'act of societal learning'. The 'environmental and social project quality criteria' have played a crucial role in convincing economic and administrative actors (i.e., learners in our context) to behave in a climate-compatible manner. Thus, the lesson can be drawn from the domain of 'societal learning' to the domain of 'individual learning' that clear and transparent criteria sets are decisive for a rule-based societal transformation. This case study shows that a criteria-based selection process provides the best results for long-term societal interest; in this case climate protection.