WB unmanageable

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxx>]

[Good to know how the "other side" thinks]

< http://www.foreignaffairs.org/articles/Einhorn0901.html >
The World Bank's Mission Creep
By Jessica Einhorn

Jessica Einhorn is former Managing Director of the World Bank and is
now a consultant at Clark & Weinstock.
LESS IS MORE

The World Bank and the global community have learned a lot about
development in the past 50 years. The bank is justly proud of its
commitment to being a knowledge-based institution and has consistently
responded to development setbacks with thoughtful analysis followed by
new areas of lending. At the same time, critics have repeatedly
faulted the bank for overlooking certain issues and constituencies,
from environmental concerns in the 1980s to civil society in the
1990s. Along the way, the bank has added new tasks to its mandate. In
recent years, it has been called on for emergency lending in the wake
of the Asian financial crisis, for economic management as part of
Middle East peacekeeping efforts, for postwar Balkan reconstruction,
and for loans to combat the aids tragedy in Africa.

By now, its mission has become so complex that it strains credulity to
portray the bank as a manageable organization. The bank takes on
challenges that lie far beyond any institution's operational
capabilities. The calls for greater focus through reform seem to
produce little beyond conferences and consternation, since every
program has a dedicated constituency resisting change. To counter
these problems, the countries that own the bank -- its shareholders --
need to elaborate a worthwhile and suitably modest agenda. The views
of emerging-market countries, which have shared in the bank's
successes as well as its failures, should count a great deal; they are
the ones who have lived the lessons of the past decades. Policymakers
should consider a broad array of options, including devolving some of
the bank's functions to new institutions or redistributing them to
existing ones. But whatever the remedy, it is time to redefine the
bank's unwieldy mission.
[snip]