tailieunhanh - Accountability in Complex Organizations: World Bank Responses to Civil Society

Several main observations are developed in the discussion below. First, while geographic availability of depository services to areas not served by private banks was always a prime justification of postal savings – in the United States as well as in Japan and Europe – it has not proved to be the major source of demand for postal savings, even if it was important to a few rural customers. From the start, the . clientele of postal savings was concentrated in urban areas among immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, a group that had most reason to seek the safety of postal savings after their experience with unreliable. | 08-027 Accountability in Complex Organizations World Bank Responses to Civil Society Alnoor Ebrahim Steve Herz Copyright 2007 by Alnoor Ebrahim and Steve Herz Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author. 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. Please direct inquiries to Alnoor Ebrahim Wyss Visiting Scholar Harvard Business School. Email aebrahim@. Ebrahim and Herz October 2007 2 INTRODUCTION1 Among institutions of global governance the World Bank is one of the most visible and most frequently targeted by civil society organizations CSOs located in both the global North and South. The critiques vary widely. On one hand are those who see the Bank as the fount of a neoliberal globalizing agenda responsible for increasing poverty and .