Susan Park

Owning development : creating policy norms in the IMF and the World Bank

Part I. Introduction: 1. Owning development: creating policy norms in the IMF and the World Bank Susan Park and Antje Vetterlein Part II. Norm Emergence: 2. Internal or external norm champions: the IMF and multilateral debt relief Bessma Momani 3. From three to five: the World Banks pension reform policy norm Veronika Wodsak and Martin Koch 4. The strategic social construction of the World Banks gender and development policy norm Catherine Weaver Part III. Norm Stabilization: 5. Lacking ownership: the IMF and its engagement with social development as a policy norm Antje Vetterlein 6. Stabilizing global monetary norms: the IMF and current account convertibility Andre Broome 7. Bitter pills to swallow: legitimacy gaps and social recognition of the IMF tax policy norm in East Asia Leonard Seabrooke Part IV. Norm Subsiding: 8. The IMF and capital account liberalization: a case of failed norm institutionalization Ralf J. Leiteritz and Manuela Moschella 9. The World Banks global safeguard policy norm? Susan Park 10. The new public management policy norm on the ground: a comparative analysis of the World Banks experience in Chile and Argentina Martin Lardone Part V. Conclusion: 11. Do policy norms reconstitute global development? Susan Park and Antje Vetterlein.

World Bank Group interactions with environmentalists : changing international organisation identities

List of figures and tables Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. Changing IOs: identity and socialisation 3. The World Bank and new norms of development 4. IFC and norms of sustainable finance 5. MIGA and green political risk? 6. Conclusion: lending, investing and guaranteeing sustainable development References Index

Accountability in Global Environmental Governance: A Meaningful Tool for Action?

Global environmental governance (GEG) is characterized by fragmentation, duplication, dispersed authority, and weak regulations. The gap between the need for action and existing responses has led to demands for accountability. This has created a paradox: accountability mechanisms to improve GEG have proliferated while the environment deteriorates. We offer a two-tier explanation for this paradox. First, actors establishing GEG are not held to account for the design of their environmental interventions. Biases in public, private, voluntary, and hybrid institutions, which shape goals and determine what to account for and to whom, remain unexamined. Second, efforts to establish accountability focus on functional requirements like monitoring and compliance, leading accountability to be viewed as an end in itself. Thus, complying with accountability may not mitigate negative environmental impacts. The utility of accountability hinges on improving governance at both tiers. Turning the accountability lens to the goals of those designing environmental institutions can overcome the focus of justifying institutions over environmental problems.

Designing accountability, international economic organisations and the World Bank's Inspection Panel

Over the last two decades, demands for greater international economic organisation (IEO) accountability have been both prominent and vitriolic. This article demonstrates how an influential IEO, the World Bank, took up concerns of its lack of accountability through creating the Inspection Panel in 1993, in response to civil society pressures and member state demands. Drawing loosely on John Campbells argument that ideas operating in the ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ influence policy decisions, it traces how the idea of external accountability gained strength, leading to the Inspection Panels emergence. This contrasts with competing rational design explanations that derive 16 conjectures to explain why states design the institutions they do. The article proceeds in four parts: first, the basis for examining IEO and World Bank accountability is outlined, before detailing how a rational design argument would apply to the establishment of the Inspection Panel. A constructivist account of how ideas of accountability emerged and shaped the policy formation process is then provided, which establishes a comprehensive explanation of how and why the Inspection Panel was created the way it was and not otherwise. The conclusion then reflects on the importance of the formation of external accountability mechanisms for IEOs and of ideas in shaping international institutions.

Institutional isomorphism and the Asian Development Bank's accountability mechanism: something old, something new; something borrowed, something blue?

Abstract In the 1990s Multilateral Development Banks created accountability mechanisms (AMs) that allowed people affected by development projects redress. Currently undertheorized, this paper examines how and why the Asian Development Bank (ADB) created an AM, and whether the AM serves its purpose to hold the ADB to account and to provide ‘fair hearing of the views of the affected group’. This article argues that the ADB created a new AM because of institutional isomorphism, borrowing the idea of the AM from the World Bank as a result of coercive and mimetic isomorphic processes. Further, that the ADB introduced a mechanism ill-suited to the pre-existing (old) organizational culture of the ADB, which is based on consensus and hierarchical rule-following in the context of ADB operations to further economic growth while upholding state sovereignty. Despite its restructure and recent review, the mechanisms weakness was revealed through a stand-off between China and the AM over an investigation begun in 2009 (creating something ‘blue’). The paper concludes that the AMs ability to serve its purpose will remain hampered as long as ADB maintains consensus around economic growth and state sovereignty over providing recourse to affected people.

Bankers Governing the Environment? Private Authority, Power Diffusion and the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative

Over the last decade there has been an increasing recognition that non-state actors can be bearers of authority (Clapp, 1998; Cutler, 2003; Cutler et al., 1999; Hall and Biersteker, 2002; Hanson and Salskov-Iversen, 2008; Higgott et al., 2000; Ronit and Schneider, 1999). Conceived of here as legitimized power (Cutler et al., 1999, p. 362; Hall and Biersteker, 2002, p. 3; Hurd, 1999, pp. 381–382), the basis for this authority varies. States delegate authority to Intergovernmental Organizations (IOs) (see Hawkins et al., 2006) but they have also implicitly or explicitly opened spaces for the (re)acquisition of authority by transnational players such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and market actors (Aykens, 2002; Cutler, 2003; Lipschutz and Fogel, 2002).1

The Asian Development Bank as a Global Risk Regulator in Myanmar

Abstract The Asian Development Bank (adb) is engaged in development projects throughout the Greater Mekong Subregion, although for most of the past two decades it has boycotted Myanmar (Burma) because of donor government sanctions. Despite being criticised for its neoliberal focus and its lack of transparency and accountability, the adb’s operations compare favourably to those of the Myanmar government and many transnational corporations constructing and financing projects there. This article engages with the concept of risk, which increasingly frames how development in fragile states like Myanmar is understood, to critically analyse the adb’s nascent re-engagement in Myanmar according to the risks this poses for five constituencies: the adb itself; donor states; the Myanmar government and military; private capital; and marginalised communities. While deeper engagement in Myanmar poses different risks for each group, critical analysis suggests that the adb must increase the genuine participation of civil society actors in its activities to address the most significant risks of all, those facing marginalised communities.

Accountability as justice for the Multilateral Development Banks? Borrower opposition and bank avoidance to US power and influence

ABSTRACT In 1993, the World Bank created its Inspection Panel, unprecedently opening itself up to being held to account by people negatively affected by its development projects. Within a decade, the other Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) – the Asian, African, Inter-American Development Banks, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the rest of the World Bank Group would too. The creation of these accountability mechanisms embodies a norm of ‘accountability as justice’ that provides recourse for damaging behaviour through a formal sanctioning process. This article makes two arguments: first, the United States built on its history of using ‘accountability as control’ to advocate using accountability for justice for the MDBs during debates over maintaining their efficiency and effectiveness. As the predominant MDB shareholder, the United States used its power (of the purse) and influence (through its voice and vote) to garner support for the norm despite opposition from borrowers and the Banks. Second, the United States had to resort to these same levers to demand the MDBs reformulate the mechanisms when borrower resistance and Bank avoidance hindered their effectiveness. The United States successfully created the norm but Bank recalcitrance meant the United States had to use the same levers to ensure its effectiveness. The article concludes that change within the Banks is evident but incremental: the spread of the norm amongst the MDBs has changed their governance to include recourse for project affected people with structures in place to strengthen them over time.

Ask the experts? The World Bank and international development lending in the twenty-first century

William Easterly (2006) The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. New York: Penguin Press, US

Owning Development: Norm emergence

27,95 (hardcover), ISBN 1594200378. David Ellerman (2005) Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, US