Alnoor Ebrahim () (Harvard Business School, General Management Unit) Steve Herz () (Lotus Global Advocacy)
Abstract
Civil society actors have been pushing for greater accountability of the World Bank for at least three decades. This paper outlines the range of accountability mechanisms currently in place at the World Bank along four basic levels: (1) staff, (2) project, (3) policy, and (4) board governance. We argue 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. In other words, although civil society efforts have led to some gains in accountability with respect to Bank policies and projects, the deeper structural features of the institution - the incentives staff face and how the institution is governed- remain largely unchanged.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Harvard Business School in its series Working Papers with number
08-027.