What is the World Bank doing on governance and anticorruption?
The World Bank Group has been working on issues related to governance and anticorruption—in areas such as public sector performance, public financial management, civil service reform, decentralization, transparency and accountability—for well over a decade. Since 2007, the Bank’s new strategy, Strengthening World Bank Group Engagement on Governance and Anticorruption (GAC), has been enabling a more systematic and central approach to making GAC an element of Bank operations across sectors and countries. Commitment and championship of this agenda emanates from the senior levels of the Bank’s management, including the president, managing directors, and the high-level GAC Council.
The strategy identifies governance and anticorruption issues as critical to improving development outcomes, such as better delivery of services in health, education, roads, water, and electricity; better management of natural resource revenues; and more efficient investment in infrastructure. For instance: Support for better and more transparent management of public finances narrows the scope for resource misallocations or leakages; assistance to strengthen local governments enables them to be more responsive to citizen needs; and support for oversight bodies and transparency mechanisms strengthens the accountability of public officials for delivery of services.
How does the World Bank’s governance strategy operate on country level?
Following the GAC strategy, a number of countries—like Cambodia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mongolia, Zambia—have undertaken analysis of political economy constraints to development. These have helped country teams design better programs both across the country portfolio, and in specific sectors such as energy, mining, land, health, education, and local governance. Country work is being expanded with funds from the Governance Partnership Facility, a multi-donor fund with contributions from the UK Department for International Development, the Netherlands, and Norway, in order to strengthen the Bank’s work in this area.
A review of a large sample of the Bank’s operations approved in FY 2008, shows that many projects now integrate governance and anticorruption dimensions as an intrinsic part of project design. These dimensions include: assessing political economy realities and factoring them into project design; building in stronger mechanisms to identify and mitigate risks of corruption in Bank-financed operations; and instituting stronger controls and oversight mechanisms; and emphasizing disclosure and monitoring by civil society and other third parties. Many of these projects also explicitly focus on using country-level procurement, financial management, and audit systems as a mechanism to build capacity within countries in these areas.
In addition to building in greater anti-corruption safeguards in projects, the Bank has intensified attention to detecting, investigating and sanctioning corruption through the Integrity Vice Presidency (INT), including debarring firms that are found to have engaged in corruption from participating in future Bank-financed projects.
What are the World Bank’s longer-term endeavors on governance and anticorruption?
The Bank is increasingly moving towards longer-term, results-based support to various sectors that will enable the building of sustainable institutions, set in place effective safeguards and controls at the sector level in countries, and create processes that enforce accountability for results.
The Bank’s support to core public sector institutions—such as ministries of finance, procurement agencies, and the civil service more broadly—includes support for improving their performance, efficiency, and accountability, and enabling them to better undertake key functions such as budget formulation, implementation, as well as monitoring and oversight, performance management, and procurement reform.
How does the World Bank collaborate with its partners?
The implementation of the GAC strategy has also led to heightened attention to the role of stakeholders outside the executive branch—both civil society, and formal oversight institutions such as parliaments, judiciary, and audit agencies—as well as mechanisms that enable these stakeholders to effectively exercise their oversight role, such as budget transparency, civil society participation, and access to information. Many operations directly build in the involvement of these actors into the project’s process, and the Governance Partnership Facility has also funded many projects in this area. The World Bank Institute also actively engages with stakeholders beyond the government such as parliaments, media, civil society groups, as well as the private sector, as part of its governance-support strategy.
New approaches to governance are emerging at the global level also, where many initiatives include collaborative mechanisms and partnerships among donor agencies, civil society groups, as well as governments for better development outcomes. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) was an early example of a successful partnership on a global scale. Similar initiatives in other sectors—such as construction—have been established. A key global initiative for the Bank has been the Stolen Assets Recovery (StAR) initiative, launched in partnership with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), to deter asset theft and facilitate the recovery of assets stolen through acts of corruption. The program has initiated a range of policy and analytical work on asset recovery, and also helped build capacity in countries for stronger anticorruption and asset recovery mechanisms.
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