Connecting South America at what cost? Civil society raises concerns over the IDB’s South Connection Program

In September 2025, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) launched South Connection Regional Program, its flagship initiative to strengthen connectivity and regional integration across South America. Framed as a vehicle to enhance competitiveness, streamline logistics and trade, and strengthen regulatory and institutional capacity, South Connection signals a renewed push for large-scale infrastructure and corridor-based development. 

Regional integration is important. However, as currently designed, South Connection risks repeating past infrastructure-led approaches that generated uneven benefits while contributing to environmental harm, social conflict, and weak governance. BIC and partners have identified key design and oversight gaps that warrant attention before implementation advances. 

Issues and Risks

While framed as a regional integration initiative, South Connection prioritizes global competitiveness, logistics efficiency, large-scale transport corridors, ports, energy transmission, regulatory harmonization, and private sector participation, largely justified by strengthening regional and global value chains.

Intra-regional connectivity is necessary, but infrastructure alone does not deliver inclusive development or advance the Sustainable Development Goals. Without strategies to strengthen local economies, diversify production, promote higher value-added activities, robust upstream planning, and strong stakeholder engagement, new corridors risk reinforcing commodity dependence and extractive models. Corridor planning should be grounded in a territorial approach to development that links infrastructure to locally anchored economic opportunities.

Past IDB-supported initiatives, such as the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), illustrate that corridor-based approaches fall short when territorial development, access to services, governance, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability are not embedded from the outset. This gap is closely linked to broader weaknesses in environmental and social risk management. South Connection’s environmental and social considerations are treated largely as downstream safeguards rather than core criteria shaping corridor selection, project eligibility, and sequencing.

Although strategic environmental and social assessments are referenced, it remains unclear whether they will address cumulative and regional impacts, including deforestation, land grabbing, illegal mining, organized crime, and gender-based violence, which are frequently associated with infrastructure expansion. South Connection does not clearly provide for early alternatives analysis, participatory upstream planning, or measures to strengthen territorial governance, including recognition of Indigenous and traditional land rights before investment. The absence of explicit integration of tools such as the Sustainable Infrastructure Framework, combined with a results framework focused mainly on outputs rather than long-term outcomes, raises concerns about the capacity to manage cumulative risks and deliver sustainable development benefits at scale.

Governance and transparency gaps compound these concerns. The design process has been largely top-down, with limited meaningful participation by Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant communities, civil society, and affected populations. At the same time, South Connection provides little clarity on how projects will be selected, prioritized, or screened for regional value added and environmental and social thresholds. Weak coordination with related initiatives, alongside a strong emphasis on public-private partnerships (PPPs) and private capital mobilization without clear accountability mechanisms, heightens risks of duplication, unmanaged cumulative impacts, and inequitable allocation of risks and benefits.

Recommendations 

To address these concerns, BIC and partner organizations propose reforms to strengthen the South Connection’s design, governance, and risk management framework.

1. Review and update the South Connection Program Document to reflect the observations and concerns raised. 
2. Update, integrate, and apply the IDB’s Sustainable Infrastructure Framework. 
3. Establish an independent Advisory Panel.
4. Define and publicly disclose project selection criteria before approving additional operations. 
5. Develop and implement a meaningful stakeholder engagement plan.
6. Apply robust requirements and participatory methodologies in the Strategic Environmental and Social Assessments (SESA). 
7. Make diversification and smart specialization explicit program objectives. 
8. Integrate clear “no-go” criteria and ecological thresholds into program eligibility and corridor planning requirements. 
9. Integrate criminal risk prevention and governance safeguards into corridor planning.
10. Adopt a PPP risk framework before expanding PPP use. 
11. Develop a sector-specific approach to PPPs. 
12. Align South Connection with the Amazon Forever Program. 
13. Provide information about the fund for integrating biodiversity into infrastructure planning.
14. Integrate a risk-based approach to gender-based violence (GBV). 
15. Strengthen the results framework and develop outcome-oriented indicators. 

Adopting these measures now would realign South Connection with sustainable, inclusive territorial development rather than narrow connectivity goals. Without them, it risks entrenching extractive patterns and social and environmental harm under the banner of regional integration.

Read BIC and partners’ full analysis of South Connection here.