By Toby McIntosh
The China-dominated, Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has both a transparency deficit and an accountability deficit, according to two new analyses.
“AIIB’s transparency framework looks stronger on paper than it is in practice,” concluded Urgewald, a non-profit environmental and human rights organization in Germany.
Separately, the AIIB’s complaint process is in practice a nullity, according to an article published in The Diplomat. The AIIB “has yet to approve a single complaint involving its projects for dispute resolution or compliance review,” wrote Laure-Anne Courdesse and Arntraud Hartmann, a consultant and a professor respectively, with long experience following development finance institutions (DFIs).
Urgewald Report Finds Disclosure Deficit
Urgewald’s 36-page report combines findings by two other nongovernmental organizations. One, Publish What You Fund’s DFI Transparency Index, assesses the stated policies of DFIs. Another, by AIIB Watch, examines whether these commitments translate into disclosure in practice.
Urgewald pointed out the AIIB’s low scores on the Publish What You Fund index, fifth among the 10 multilateral development banks (MDBs) evaluated in the 2025 report. The AIIB’s non-sovereign portfolio scored 37.1 out of 100 and its sovereign portfolio scored 58.5 out of 100 on the PWYF index.
“AIIB is the only MDB without a published impact management methodology and the only institution that routinely relies on the environmental and social policies of co-financiers and clients rather than consistently applying its own standards,” Urgewald said.
In addition, the AIIB “does not disclose indirect investments (sub-investments) made through financial intermediaries, in contrast to several other MDBs that provide such key information,” Urgewald summarized.
(The 2026 version of the PWYF index is to be released Nov. 4.)
Opaque Practices Described
Turning to “Transparency in Practice,” Urgewald relied on AIIB Watch, a monitoring resource curated by Urgewald with contributions from NGOs worldwide.
The AIIB’s disclosures about resettlement and land acquisition were criticized. “The precise number of people affected by resettlement is frequently not disclosed,” according to the report. It continues, “When data is available, documentation is inconsistent, varies widely in quality, and contains contradictory information about resettlement impacts.”
Urgewald also said that “key environmental and social documents are repeatedly published after project approval.” Prior to approval, the report said that “documentation often does not include a full risk assessment based on field visits.”
When the AIIB relies on financial intermediaries (FIs) to run projects, Urgewald said, “Information on end use of the funds and subprojects remains largely unavailable.” It reported, “Several AIIB FI projects support institutions with substantial exposure to fossil fuel infrastructure subprojects with major human rights concerns.” Some AIIB efforts “that appear to be clean energy finance … are in reality financing fossil fuel infrastructure….”
The Urgewald report includes three key findings:
- The AIIB’s Environmental and Social Framework “allows management to shorten disclosure periods without public accountability.”
- The AIIB’s accounting confuses and likely overstates the Bank’s Climate Policy-Based Financing (CPBF)
- AIIB’s first foray into “nature finance” is based on “non-transparent FI arrangements with no mandatory disclosure of policies, procedures, or subprojects.”
The report concludes with a series of transparency-related recommendations.
AIIB Accountability Found Lacking
In theory, those adversely affected by the AIIB can file complaints with a grievance body, the Project-affected People’s Mechanism (PPM).
But since the mechanism’s creation in 2019, none of the 45 complaints tracked on its website as of Sept. 15, 2026, passed the admissibility stage, according to research by Courdesse and Hartmann.
Even since the AIIB approved a revised policy in 2026, 14 out of 16 complaints have been found inadmissible. (Two are still awaiting an admissibility decision.) The authors highlighted a new complaint, by Indigenous people in Indonesia, alleging that an AIIB project forced them from their homes, took their farming land, cost them their livelihoods and ignored their right to be consulted.
The article explained how the AIBB’s PPM’s entry requirements “are significantly more restrictive than those of its peers,” where mechanisms “regularly take complaints into dispute resolution or compliance review.”
At the AIIB, “Unduly strict restrictions demand substantial work from both complainants and the mechanism before a case can proceed,” the authors wrote. “It is little surprise that no complaint has cleared this hurdle.”
