The World Bank is a powerful public institution with multiple roles in policy-making and finance across the developing world. For many years NGOs have worked to influence the Bank, both directly and via their government representatives who have formal power via its board. This is done to improve the Bank’s policies, practices and impacts, and to tackle the Bank’s broader influence on development thinking and funding.
There are diverse points of view about how much civil society groups have managed to influence the World Bank. The Bank has opened up many processes and much information, but consultation and transparency do not necessarily mean influence. Ten years ago The Economist magazine claimed “from environmental policy to debt relief, NGOs are at the center of World Bank policy. Often they determine it”. However US-based academic Robert Kelly, who has studied World Bank NGO interaction, concluded differently: “The Bank and Fund have not actually moved much in response to NGO pressure. The Fund has entertained NGO engagement generally as a defensive exercise designed to ‘inform’, if not co-opt, NGO critics”.
Alnoor Ebrahim, associate professor at Harvard Business School, distinguishes helpfully between different levels of accountability: (1) staff, (2) project, (3) policy, and (4) board governance. He finds that “civil society organizations have been influential in pushing for greater accountability at the project and policy levels, particularly through the establishment and enforcement of social and environmental safeguards and complaint and response mechanisms. But they have been much less successful in changing staff incentives for accountability to affected communities, or in improving board accountability through greater transparency in decision making, more representative vote allocation, or better parliamentary scrutiny”.
This study focuses on the level of board governance, aiming to understand more about whether and how richer country governments report to and are held to account by their citizens, parliamentarians and NGOs. These governments have forced the Bank to make a series of changes on poverty, the environment and human rights, changes which then make it easier to generate change at levels 1 through 3.
This study – based on document reviews and interviews – analyses how different Northern CSOs have been working on World Bank accountability and what impact they have had on their governments. It looks at procedures and practices that have been put in place, and the quality of reporting that the government is providing to parliament and the public. The basic premise of this work is that more public accountability mechanisms are likely to lead to policies and practices that do more to achieve the policy and practical outcomes on poverty and environment that are the focus of NGOs’ mandates and international agreements.
The World Bank is primarily funded and controlled by governments from the world’s richest countries. Civil society groups in these countries have therefore introduced strategies to work in solidarity with Southern NGOs to hold their government representatives to account for the policies they pursue via the Bank. NGOs intervene on specific Bank decisions, ahead of key international meetings, and also when governments are planning to allocate further finance to the Bank. Some officials in richer country governments are receptive to reform proposals. However others continue to press the Bank to promote their own national agenda – one government is for example currently trying to get the Bank to promote nuclear power as a solution to the climate crisis.
Citizens’ organisations have introduced diverse strategies and approaches to their work of addressing relevant decision-makers, and have also exchanged on these via networks such as Eurodad and the Euro IFI network. External challenges coordinated by CSOs from many countries have forced the Bank to stop or change certain Bank projects, and in forcing the Bank to slim down the numbers of conditions that it attaches to its loans. Yet the institution still frequently backs unsustainable projects and inequitable market-led policies.4
This analysis assesses which strategies have been used to influence Northern governments’ positions on the World Bank, and suggests ways to improve accountability and impact. The study mainly focuses on insider advocacy work rather than outsider mobilisation through protests and campaigns. The study will be used to add comparative analysis and recommendations into a report on World Bank accountability in Belgium, and as a basis for strategising by the EuroIFI network.
Public control for the public interest: assessing World Bank accountability in richer countries : Kb
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