IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hbs/wpaper/08-027.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Accountability in Complex Organizations: World Bank Responses to Civil Society

Author

Listed:
  • 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.

Suggested Citation

  • Alnoor Ebrahim & Steve Herz, 2007. "Accountability in Complex Organizations: World Bank Responses to Civil Society," Harvard Business School Working Papers 08-027, Harvard Business School.
    • Handle: RePEc:hbs:wpaper:08-027
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-027.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Eastwood Lauren E, 2011. "Resisting Dispossession: Indigenous Peoples, the World Bank and the Contested Terrain of Policy," New Global Studies, De Gruyter, vol. 5(1), pages 1-33, April.
    2. Shuching Chou & Fengyi Lin, 2011. "Bank's risk-taking and ownership structure - evidence for economics in transition stage," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 43(12), pages 1551-1564.
    3. Arjan de Haan & Ward Warmerdam, 2012. "The politics of aid revisited: a review of evidence on state capacity and elite commitment," Global Development Institute Working Paper Series esid-007-12, GDI, The University of Manchester.
    4. Shuching Chou & Tze-Yu Yen & Yen-Hui Kuo, 2011. "Internet Information Relevance of Financial Institutions: Evidence from Taiwan," Review of Pacific Basin Financial Markets and Policies (RPBFMP), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 14(04), pages 647-670.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hbs:wpaper:08-027. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: HBS (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/harbsus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.