Environmental partnerships in the World Bank

Partnerships - conceived as co-governance arrangements between diverse public and private actors - have become part of the lexicon of global governance among international organizations. This chapter examines environmental partnerships at the World Bank and traces their genesis alongside the growth of environmental policy within the organization. We contend that partnerships and environmental policy coevolved at the Bank in response to mutually reinforcing external forces. This shaped the nature of the partnerships and environmental policy prescriptions the Bank promoted. Examining these processes of coevolution provides an opportunity to study the promise and pitfalls of partnerships as a tool for the World Bank and global governance more generally. If partnerships are supposed to address democratic deficits, innovative policymaking, and effective delivery of aid or resource mobilization in environmental and other domains, it is necessary to understand the conditions under which they emerged and proliferated, as well as how they perform in practice.