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The World Bank’s Anti-Corruption Programme

  • Chapter
Corruption, Politics and Development

Part of the book series: International Political Economy Series ((IPES))

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Abstract

Previous chapters have built a theoretical and historical context for the Bank’s anti-corruption programme. The complexity of the Bank’s approach also means that one has to have a full understanding of how the Bank works in order to evaluate its anti-corruption programme: its lending programmes and products, its evaluation processes, interactions between regions and sectors and its external relations. However, the size of the project undertaken means I must restrict myself to the Bank’s key four-pronged strategy. As Operations Evaluation Department (OED) points out, ‘the menu of potential actions to curtail corruption is very large so a framework is needed that provides guidance on ordering potential actions’.1 I have used the Bank’s own strategy to guide my evaluation and recommendations, following the logic of Bade Onimode, editor of the 1989 text IMF, the World Bank and the African Debt, who stated, ‘To evaluate the World Bank’s programmes, we should … use their own figures, their own language, to see whether what they set out to do has been done.’2

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Notes

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  37. An evaluation conducted by the Swedish development agency, SIDA, backs this up. It found that projects on capacity building too often assumed incorrectly that ‘the beneficiary is willing and able to develop his/her capacity’. SIDA (2000), The Evaluability of Democracy and Human Rights Projects: a Logframe-related assessment (SIDA Studies in Evaluation — ITAD Ltd./ODI. Gothenburg: SIDA), p. 53 (emphasis in original).

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  40. Since June 1997 fifty-three new procurement staff have been hired (sixteen in Washington and thirty-seven in country offices). The majority of new staff have gone to the ECA and AFR regions. World Bank (2000), The World Bank Procurement Function Annual Report FY99, p. 3.

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  41. ‘The CPAR is intended to be a useful tool to diagnose the health of the existing procurement system in a country and, in the process, generate a dialogue with the government focused on needed reforms. The main purpose of the CPAR is to establish the need for and guide the development of an action plan to improve a country’s system for procuring goods, works and services.’ World Bank (2000), ‘Country Procurement Assessment Reports (CPARs)’, Internet accessed November 2000. Available at http://wwwl.worldbank.org/publicsector/cpar.htm. The CPAR has been used since the early 1980s but was redesigned in 1998. The old CPAR looked into the accountability of national bidding procedures, used when a contract was unlikely to attract foreign competition, to see if they were acceptable. The Bank decided this was not a particularly useful tool. Instead, the CPAR is now used as a diagnostic tool for the Bank and donors in general. They ‘broadened the scope’ from individual Bank projects to an assessment of overall procurement capacity as an element of governance. The CPAR is conducted jointly with the borrower and the Bank, with other donors sometimes involved as well. This self-assessment component is intended to ensure government ownership. Interview with senior World Bank staff member.

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  46. ‘The CFAA is a diagnosis of a country’s private and public financial management systems. Its purpose is twofold: (i) to help the borrower and the Bank assess and manage the risk that public funds will be used other than for agreed purposes (the fiduciary objective), and (ii) to support the borrower in the design and implementation of financial management capacity-building programs (the developmental objective).’ World Bank (2000), ‘Country Financial Accountability Assessment’, Internet accessed November 2000. Available at http://wwwl.worldbank.org/publicsector/cfaa.htm.

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  56. World Bank (2000), Helping Countries Combat Corruption, pp. 18–19. This amendment about whistleblowers is definitely’a response to and part of anti-corruption initiatives’ at the Bank. The senior staff member I interviewed said that it is very difficult to write policy for whistleblowers, but it is vital for improving the workplace atmosphere and for providing an ethical workplace. Staff must have a safe way to raise issues and concerns without fear of repercussions.

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  58. USGAO (2000), ‘World Bank’, pp. 5–7. In 1998, US Senator Mitch McConnell, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee which approves funding levels for the Bank, expressed great concern about alleged corruption at the Bank and called for the GAO report. He accused the Bank of being ‘secretive and rife with “cronyism and deceit”’ and called for the immediate resignation of US Executive Director Jan Piercy ‘for failing “to serve US interests”’. Ms Piercy was defended by her boss, US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who nonetheless expressed concern over the corruption allegations. It is thus in the Bank’s best interest to ensure a transparent and well-publicized investigation process to ward off this type of attack. ‘World Bank President Defends Handling of Corruption Cases’, Bloomberg, 17 July 1999; ‘Rubin Calls Allegations of World Bank Corruption “Serious”’, Bloomberg, 17 July 1999.

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  72. Defined by the report as ‘the actions ot inaiviauais, groups, or nrms both in the public and private sectors to influence the formation of laws, regulations, decrees, and other government policies to their own advantage as a result of the illicit and non-transparent provision of private benefits to public officials’. World Bank (2000), Anticorruption in Transition: a Contribution to the Policy Debate (Washington DC: World Bank), pp. xv, 32 (emphasis in original).

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  111. Even one of the Bank’s biggest partners in anti-corruption expressed concern regarding the potential for increased political conditionality and intervention in a sovereign country’s political affairs. In 1996, TI said, ‘We would not like to see the Bank dictating to governments and understand that it has no intention of doing so. Still less would we want to see elements of conditionality creeping in.’ Transparency International (1996), ‘TI supports World Bank initiative’, The Newsletter. December. However, subsequent publications have called on the Bank do just this: to reduce lending levels for countries that ‘do not have convincing anticorruption reform programmes in place and which do not collaborate with external efforts to promote such programmes’. Transparency International (2000), ‘World Bank Needs to Strengthen its Anti-corrup-tion Work, says Transparency International’, press release, 31 August.

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  115. World Bank (1997), Helping Countries Combat Corruption, p. 44. The Bank’s findings continue to support this. See World Bank (2000), Anticorruption in Transition, p. 79; Huther, J. and Shah, A. (2000), ‘Anti-Corruption Policies & Programs’, pp. 7, 9; Pope, J. and Vogl, F. (2000), ‘Making Anticorruption Agencies More Effective’, Finance & Development, 37 (2), pp. 6–9. These sources and others generally agree that anti-corruption agencies can be effective but require certain conditions: an independent judiciary, for example. These conditions do not exist in many of the countries the Bank lends to and would therefore not provide an effective entry point for an anti-corruption strategy. Interestingly, the Bank does not refer to the rather extensive and important work within political science on the effectiveness of such bodies. See, for example, the contributions by Moran, Theobald and Williams and Williams in Doig, A. and Theobald, R. (2000), Corruption and Democratisation. (London: Frank Cass).

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  121. Kaufmann, D. (1999), ‘New Frontiers in World Bank Programmes’, Democracy Dialogue, June (Washington DC: USAID-CDG), pp. 4–5. There is another apparent divergence in approach between PREM and WBI, and the two may be linked. The PREM strategy document acknowledges criticism about the ‘technocratic’ nature of its work and discusses moves away from this approach; however, in the same document, WBI describes its own approach as technocratic. See World Bank (2000), Reforming Public Institutions & Strengthening Governance, pp. 17, 151. A senior staff member that I interviewed believes that the work done by WBI is very different from the usual sectoral work being done, in that it is much more sensitive and could be accused of being very political (for example, media training, parliaments). Hence, WBI insists on focusing on the empirical and technical side of its work to avoid criticism in this area and must have high-level political support to avoid accusations of political interference.

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  1. International Development Department, University of Birmingham, UK

    Heather Marquette

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Marquette, H. (2003). The World Bank’s Anti-Corruption Programme. In: Corruption, Politics and Development. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403943736_4

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