The World Bank’s strategy on governance and anticorruption - a civil society perspective

This document criticises the World Bank’s strategy on governance and anticorruption and offers suggestions on improving the Bank’s promotion and assessment of good governance in developing countries. The paper argues that while the Bank has taken a broad strategy for promoting good governance and working against corruption, it suffers from a lack of legitimacy and credibility when dealing with governance. According to the paper, the World Bank lacks legitimacy because of the lack of transparency and accountability in the Bank’s own governance structures and in the way it does business, its emphasis on economic liberalisation, and the level of corruption that exists in its projects. Furthermore, the World Bank focuses solely on the economic aspects of good governance, ignoring the social and political structures that also influence governance. The article suggests that the Bank can overcome some of these problems by involving local stakeholders in the process of assessment of good governance and the World Bank’s projects themselves, rather than basing their policies solely on external analysis done by the Bank itself.

Recommendations include:

• the World Bank must recognise the political nature of governance, but limit its own interventions to a few specific areas of its competence
• the World Bank needs to significantly step up their response to the supply side of corruption, in particular where Northern corporations and banks are complicit in the illicit draining of resources from Southern countries
• corruption should be seen as part of a complex set of governance challenges and not only a threat to Bank resources and reputation
• the process and results of governance assessments, and their impact on Bank policy and programming, should be subject to wide stakeholder scrutiny and should be make public
• the World Bank should not put externally imposed conditions on its loans and instead focus on mutually acceptable agreements between the Bank and Government on each party’s obligations to ensure that resources are transferred and used in a transparent and accountable manner
• the World Bank should address corruption within its own projects
• the World Bank should promote strict anti-corruption initiatives, even those that relate to the Bank’s work.