At a Glance · Support to countries to improve their governance systems—building institutions, processes, and mechanisms for better performance, and greater transparency and accountability—is a significant element of World Bank assistance. · The Bank adopted a new Governance and Anticorruption Strategy in 2007, giving greater attention to governance and anticorruption in countries, as well as in its own operations as an important condition for faster and more effective development. · The Bank is a leading global development agency providing support to building the performance and accountability of core public sector institutions—with lending in public sector governance comprising approximately US$4.7 billion in FY 2008 and US$5.8 billion in FY09. · Enhanced mechanisms on corruption risk assessment, disclosure, oversight, and monitoring, help the Bank ensure that development funds are used for their intended purpose. Overview 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 more than a decade. Since 2007, the Bank’s new strategy, Strengthening World Bank Group Engagement on Governance and Anticorruption (GAC), is 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. Supporting Governance and Anticorruption in Country Work 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 United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, the Netherlands, and Norway, in order to strengthen the Bank’s work in this area. Incorporating GAC in the Bank’s Own Operations A review of a large sample of the Bank’s operations approved in FY08, shows that many projects now integrate governance and anticorruption dimensions as an intrinsic part of project design. These dimensions include assessing political economy realities—formal institutions and informal rules, and stakeholder interests—and factoring them into project design; incorporating stronger mechanisms to identify and mitigate risks of corruption in Bank-financed operations; and instituting stronger controls and oversight mechanisms, including an emphasis on disclosure and on 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 on 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. Scaling up and Innovating New Approaches The Bank is also increasingly moving towards longer-term, results-based support to the various sectors, which 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. The implementation of the GAC strategy has also led to heightened attention on 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 incorporate 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 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, 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 has also helped build capacity in countries for stronger anticorruption and asset recovery mechanisms. Measuring Results As part of the effort to ensure that its work on governance and anticorruption yields real effects on the ground, the Bank is developing new, and scaling up the use of existing, measurement tools to enable measurement of the impact on governance improvements, and at the same time be “actionable”—allowing scope for interventions in weak areas. Media Contacts: Media Contact: Alejandra Viveros, (202) 473-4306, aviveros@worldbank.org Updated September 2009 |
RSS