Books

Forgotten Values: The World Bank and Environmental Partnerships

Multi-stakeholder partnerships have become an increasingly common form of global governance. Partnerships, usually between international organizations (IOs) or state agencies and such private actors as NGOs, businesses, and academic institutions, have even been promoted as the gold standard of good governance—participatory, innovative, and well-funded. And yet these partnerships often fail to live up to the values that motivated their establishment. In this book, Teresa Kramarz examines this gap between promise and performance by analyzing partnerships in biodiversity conservation initiatives launched by the World Bank.

Kramarz reviews World Bank biodiversity partnerships over a twenty-year period, with in-depth studies of two: the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund and the Global Invasive Species Program. She finds that partnerships fall short when established in the shadow of a large, mature bureaucracy. Bureaucrats have trouble relinquishing control, and they distrust partners who do not abide by set policies and procedures. The partnership's potential contribution to biodiversity conservation succumbs to the goals of bureaucratic efficiency. Kramarz develops a theoretical framework to explain the gap between values and practice, combining rationalist and constructivist approaches. Viewing World Bank biodiversity partnerships through this theoretical lens, she shows how the World Bank's risk aversion, hierarchy, focus on rules and procedures, and division of labor have a significant influence on partnership outcomes.

Global Environmental Governance and the Accountability Trap

The rapid development of global environmental governance has been accompanied by questions of accountability. Efforts to address what has been called “a culture of unaccountability” include greater transparency, public justification for governance decisions, and the establishment of monitoring and enforcement procedures. And yet, as this volume shows, these can lead to an “accountability trap”—a focus on accountability measures rather than improved environmental outcomes. Through analyses and case studies, the contributors consider how accountability is being used within global environmental governance and if the proliferation of accountability tools enables governance to better address global environmental deterioration. Examining public, private, voluntary, and hybrid types of global environmental governance, the volume shows that the different governance goals of the various actors shape the accompanying accountability processes. These goals—from serving constituents to reaping economic benefits—determine to whom and for what the actors must account. 

After laying out a theoretical framework for its analyses, the book addresses governance in the key areas of climate change, biodiversity, fisheries, and trade and global value chains. The contributors find that normative biases shape accountability processes, and they explore the potential of feedback mechanisms between institutions and accountability rules for enabling better governance and better environmental outcomes.

Contributors Graeme Auld, Harro van Asselt, Cristina Balboa, Lieke Brouwer, Lorraine Elliott, Lars H. Gulbrandsen, Aarti Gupta, Teresa Kramarz, Susan Park, Philipp Pattberg, William H. Schaedla, Hamish van der Ven, Oscar Widerberg