Shared Responsibility or Institutional Accountability? Continuing Conceptual and Enforcement Issues for Grievance Mechanisms of Public and Private International Finance Institutions (original) (raw)
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This article discusses how Independent Accountability Mechanisms (IAMs) such as an Inspection Panel have the potential to improve both the legitimacy and environmental governance of multilateral financial institutions such as the World Bank. The World Bank provides loans and credit to developing countries to stimulate social and economic development in an attempt to alleviate poverty, often investing in infrastructure projects such as pipelines, power plants, and oil and gas fields. With billions in annual lending, the World Bank is the largest international financial institution in the world. Between 1994, when it started operations, and June 2015, the World Bank Inspection Panel received 103 requests for inspection across more than 50 countries that resulted in 34 approved investigations. Based on a qualitative case study methodology, the study finds that institutional accountability has inherent value in improving the internal governance of an institution-in this case the World Bank-and its ability to achieve development and sustainability goals. Yet to be effective, such governance needs steered by committed and independent leaders on all sides, and there are limits to what IAMs such as the IP can accomplish. Understanding the internal dynamics, processes, and accountability mechanisms of the World Bank offers a rare chance to test the efficacy of institutional accountability in practice. Moreover, this study shows how attributes reflecting independence, impartiality, transparency, professionalism, accessibility, and responsiveness are crucial to improving governance outcomes and more equitable decision-making processes-themes highly relevant to public policy and development studies as well as environmental governance and the extractive industries.
Legal accountability of multilateral development banks under international law
2020
Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) play a leading role in the context of sustainable development, which has evolved through time in light of the emergence of new models of global governance, rooted in principles of multilateral cooperation and the conventional framework of international law. In this setting, the quest for effective mechanisms of accountability of MDBs towards people affected by projects they finance, entrenched in principles of accessibility, efficiency, fairness and transparency became critical. As a response to the growing complexities, MDBs developed independent accountability mechanisms (IAMs); through their quasi-judicial oversight function, IAMs represent an important instrument for the development of international normative standards and the protection of individuals' rights. The present study examines to what extent the established mechanisms of legal accountability in MDBs achieved the protection of rights of individuals affected by their projects. T...
The World Bank's Understanding of the Rule of Law and the New Environmental and Social Framework
2019
The World Bank's assessment and application of the rule of law can be analysed in macro and micro levels. At the macro level, it is difficult to say the World Bank's assessment and application of the concept is comprehensive and consistent. The main reason for the lack of the first quality is the limited interest shown in the RoL in international organisations and particularly in its own decision-making structure, while the reason for the latter is the Bank's selective approach in dealing with governments of developing countries. At the micro level or in other words, in funding development projects, the Bank has recently installed the new Environmental and Social Framework, in order to ensure projects to be conducted in an environmentally sound and socially inclusive manner. Despite the inconsistency in its adherence to the RoL at the macro level, the new ESF and the role of the Inspection Panel as a complaints procedure, promises certain gains in the name of governance and accountability, although not completely free from some institutional setbacks.
Accountability in public international development finance
Amidst an explosion of new global governance practices during the last quarter century, one of the most striking developments has been the rise of new norms and institutions of accountability. The world of development finance has been a central site in which this new politics of accountability has unfolded. Under scrutiny and pressure from civil society groups and key countries, prominent international development financing institutions have increasingly acknowledged the need for them to answer for their decisions to an expanding array of 'stakeholders' outside their own organisations, increase transparency, strengthen dialogue with external stakeholders, promote adherence to internal policies, and in some cases also provide access to grievance procedures for people affected by development finance activities. As " moral or institutional relation[s] in which one agent (or group of agents) is accorded entitlements to question, direct, sanction or constrain the actions of another " (Macdonald, 2014, p.428) accountability systems play an important role in shaping the claims that development actors are empowered to place on one another, as they contest development policy-making in accordance with their values and interests. It is not surprising then that political controversies concerning the design of accountability institutions often centre on normative disagreements about who owes obligations of responsiveness to whom. Yet such debates are not wholly or even primarily normative in character. Rather, debate surrounding the practical design of accountability institutions is usually underpinned also by empirical questions about what institutional qualities enable or constrain accountability mechanisms to promote desired normative purposes. Scholars and practitioners engaging such debates have combined normative and empirical analysis in varying ways. The collection of papers presented here brings together three empirical studies of public accountability mechanisms that currently govern both bilateral and multilateral public development finance. The questions addressed by contributors are animated in important ways by normative concerns about the responsiveness of public institutions to their stakeholders. Yet the main contribution of the papers is to enrich empirical understanding of the practical functioning of accountability institutions. Each contributor examines how the accountability mechanisms they have studied play out 'on the ground', and how accountability practices are shaped by the wider political and cultural environments in which accountability institutions emerge, operate and evolve. The analytical goals of the collection are thus partly evaluative: to assess the implications of varying accountability arrangements for contested development outcomes and processes—and, in particular, implications for project affected people. The goals are also interpretive and explanatory: to identify significant currents of change in accountability practices across varying contexts, and generate insights into the underlying causal mechanisms and processes that drive institutional change—shaping and constraining the capacity of accountability mechanisms to achieve their intended normative purposes. Reflecting this central interest in how accountability mechanisms work in practice in specific political and institutional contexts, each paper grounds its analysis in empirical qualitative case studies of particular accountability institutions, and in some cases, particular disputes. Qualitative case-based methods provide insight into the complex, dynamic processes that characterize the practical
Time for a new approach to environmental and social protection at multilateral development banks
Overseas Development Institute, 2016
Multilateral development banks and other development financers will lose relevance if they are unable to find a way to make the legitimate aspirations of developing countries compatible with environmental and social sustainability. The safeguard system as currently designed is not achieving the best development results, and this is increasingly a reason for countries to avoid MDBs entirely for projects that may trigger safeguards. It is time for MDBs to find a new approach, one that focuses on strengthening the national laws and regulations of developing countries rather than protecting themselves against criticism. Such an approach implies a major shift in policies and operations at MDBs, but most importantly it requires a shift in thinking about how to achieve the best development results for the good of our planet.
Under the paradigm of sustainable development, contemporary international law has not been able to shape an effective, nor an equitable, answer to the global ecological crisis. There is widespread consensus that environmental governance requires a major overhaul if humankind wishes to meet that challenge. Our main point is that global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange will not be corrected just by minor adaptations of existing international regimes. Nor will change come through the formal enactment of a given set of principles. Rather, correction will require a profound reconceptualisation of global governance that is able to integrate counter-hegemonic claims for environmental justice. This report has four parts. The first one is a conceptual introduction that puts in context concepts emerging from the academic or social movements, such as ecological and climate debt, against the backdrop of the legal narratives that underpin the hegemonic model of development. The second p...
2017
With the intensification of their participation in the foreign investment regime, Latin American States are finding it difficult to implement measures beneficial to protecting their environments due to their obligations to third States. This governance deficit is further compounded by the regime’s neoliberal predisposition in favour of property protection, which has penetrated the system and implicated the system of investment treaty arbitration, the regime's primary dispute settlement mechanism. The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) has also been implicated. This is seen in the momentous diversity in investor-State disputes resolved by various ICSID tribunals, which concern attempts by Latin American States to protect their physical environments such the protection of wildlife or other matters such as the regulation of hazardous waste landfills and ensuring that citizens have access to clean water. Tribunals have approached such disputes primarily from a commercial standpoint, ignoring non-market alternatives such as environmental considerations.