Monitoring the moneylenders: institutional accountability and environmental governance at the World Bank’s inspection panel

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, collaborative 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

The state of globalization: legal plurality, overlapping sovereignties and ambiguous alliances between civil society and the cunning state in India

The successful global diffusion of formal democracy has gone hand in hand with the hollowing out of its substance. Ever more realms of domestic public policy are removed from the purview of national legislative deliberation and insulated from popular scrutiny. Rhetoric of accountability has accompanied the increasing unaccountability of international financial and trade organizations, transnational corporations as well as of states and NGOs. The new architecture of global governance characterized by legal plurality and overlapping sovereignties has facilitated a game of ‘passing the blame’ among these four actors. There is a curious ambivalence in current debates on globalization about the role of the state, which is conceived of as both central and marginal. Globalization is seen to be marked by the decline of both the external and the internal sovereignty of the state. Contrary to such a view, it will be argued here that the state is both an agent and an object of globalization. Although inadequate, the state remains indispensable as its laws and policies play a key role in transposing neo-liberal agendas to the national and local levels. If in the age of globalization and of economic Empire, political violence has been replaced by legal violence, resistance to it is also articulated in the language of law. This paper focuses on the dynamic of legal politics against impoverishment and dispossession caused by the new global designs of intellectual property protection, biodiversity conservation and privatization of the commons in India. The case studies in this paper point to the emergence of intertwined structures of rule, overlapping sovereignties and complex processes of legal transnationalization that have reconfigured the relations between law, state, and territoriality. If welfare states were concerned with the redistribution of risk and resources, cunning states seek to redistribute responsibility. Sensitivity to the history of colonialism would be an important corrective to the presentism and Westerncentrism of analyses of (legal) globalization