Bangladesh has made important progress in a number of areas relating to environmental management but this has not matched the progress with the growth and poverty reduction agenda. Importantly Bangladesh is yet to adopt formally a “green growth strategy” that fully reconciles the development agenda with the protection of the environment. In the absence of the green growth strategy and associated regulations, policies and institutions, the costs of environmental degradation have grown over time. Additionally, the adverse effects of climate change are mounting and creating substantial downside risks and vulnerabilities. Against the backdrop of this, the government’s preparation of Vision 2041 under which Bangladesh is envisaged to reach World Bank-defined high income threshold by FY2041 and eliminate absolute poverty provides an important opportunity to take a fresh look at the environmental degradation and climate change risks.
Bangladesh has made tremendous progress with development since independence reflected in rising income, sharp reduction in poverty and improvements with human development. Evidence, however, suggests that along with these positive outcomes there has been a substantial deterioration in the natural environment. Fortunately, there is now a growing recognition of the environmental damage of continuing with the business-as-usual development strategy and the risks it poses to the sustainability of development. In response, the government has adopted a large array of strategies, laws, rules and regulations, and adaptation and mitigation programmes and projects. But the results on the ground suggest that the implementation of these policies has been weak. Inadequate strategic thinking along with financial and institutional constraints has limited the implementation effectiveness of the government’s environmental protection strategy.
Bangladesh’s Ready-Made Garments (RMG) industry remains the backbone of its industrial growth in the coming decades. This paper sought to examine its environmental compliance landscape in terms of the incentives and barriers RMG entrepreneurs face. The paper in particular looked at the high achievers in greening, which includes some of the factories who have the most eco-friendly RMG factories, as certified by the US Green Building Council (USGBC); and some of the factories that partnered with the International Finance Corporation’s Partnership for Cleaner Textiles (PACT) project, which is the world’s largest initiative for resource efficient apparel manufacturing (Daily Star 2017 a). This approach was taken to demonstrate three things: is cost recovery possible in the medium to long term for investments that go beyond mandatory government and basic buyer requirements; what kind of barriers did the high achievers face and what lessons are there for other RMG companies who may benefit from greening; and what kind of policy and institutional changes are needed to spread greening from the high achievers to the rest of the industry. The key points of the paper are given below.