World Bank Partnerships and the Promise of Democratic Governance

Abstract

The World Bank promotes public–private partnerships as vehicles for democratizing environmental governance. This article presents an overview of their constitution in the World Bank, including what the Bank as an organization identified as their promise, and investigates what its partnerships for biodiversity conservation achieved. The article focuses on the institutional design of partnerships’ governance structures, and assesses their democratic quality based on their potential to enable inclusion and empowerment of stakeholders. It examines nine global biodiversity partnerships between the World Bank and non‐state actors from 1992 to 2008 and analyses the extent to which they have fulfilled the principled expectations expressed by the Bank. I find that partnerships have been organized through institutional arrangements that fail to promote inclusiveness and empowerment, which are minimum normative inputs for democratic decision‐making in natural resource management. This suggests that World Bank partnerships are not sufficiently well poised to fulfil the democratic promise. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Environmental Recourse at the Multilateral Development Banks

“…It has considered the growing prominence of 'private' governance (e.g. CSR, self-regulation, certification; aUld, renCkens and Cashoreet, 2015; van der ven, 2015), the role of partnerships between state and non-state actors (kramarz, 2016;PattBerG, 2010;PattBerG and WiderBerG, 2016;szUleCki, PattBerG and Biermann, 2011), and implications for the legitimacy of global governance systems (BäCkstrand and kylsäter, 2014;karlsson-vinkhUyzen and mCGee, 2013). More recently, scholars have turned to considering how to respond to fragmentation, including ways of managing fragmented governance systems (van asselt and zelli, 2014), particularly through attention to interactions between different regimes within and beyond the environmental domain (jinnah, 2014; jinnah and lindsay, 2016; van asselt, 2014).…”

Transnational Institutions and Networks

“…Individuals, such as Bill and Melinda Gates as heads of their foundation (Partzsch 2017) as well as some celebrities and social entrepreneurs, also increasingly influence global governance (Partzsch 2014(Partzsch , 2018. As a result, some scholars raise concerns that private actors are eroding state sovereignty and bypassing regulation based on democratic decision-making, even in their countries of origin (Quark 2013;Kramarz 2016). Simultaneously, others argue that private actors are democratizing global governance particularly through the involvement of civil society organizations and citizen initiatives providing a space for previously marginalized voices (Kuyper 2014).…”

Accountability in the Governance of Global Change

“…Actors may also be driven by internal logics of accountability (oriented towards those within the system or direct stakeholders) or by external logics (oriented to those actors outside the system or external stakeholders) (Keohane 2003;Bäckstrand 2008). It is notable that these rationales implicitly or explicitly link accountability with legitimacy, inclusiveness (Dingwerth 2005), democracy, democratic legitimacy (Fuchs, Kalfagianni, and Havinga 2011) and representativeness, impartiality, empowerment, deliberativeness, lawfulness (Leach 2013, Leach 2006, human rights (Obani and Gupta 2016), distributive justice (Okereke and Coventry 2016) and transparency (Kramarz 2016, Gupta 2010. Not all of these links are clear, however, with the strength and direction of effects both subject to ongoing debate (Jamali 2010, Few, Brown & Tompkins 2011, Papadopoulos 2014).…”

“…Notwithstanding the limited number and success of methods to promote accountability, the literature suggests that improvements risk becoming counterproductive, and that accountability should not necessarily be an end in itself for agents of earth system governance. Often efforts to improve accountability focus on performance and compliance monitoring that may lead actors to lose sight of the environmental problems they were designed to redress (Kramarz andPark 2016, Fuchs, Kalfagianni, andHavinga 2011), or to apply accountability only in the latter part of the policy cycle, leaving policy formation and institutional design cycles without crucial inputs from stakeholders (Chan and Pattberg 2008) (Gulbrandsen 2008). This has been a feature of conservation programs that have led to the displacement of resource-dependent communities, for example (Mac Chapin 2004).…”