The World Bank and Emerging Powers: Beyond the Multipolarity–Multilateralism Conundrum

ABSTRACT

The discrepancy between the increasingly multipolar world economy of the recent decades and the stubbornly limited representativeness of the organisations mandated with its governance causes much strain in global politics. Some scholars suggest that this chronic mismatch will undermine existing multilateral bodies, while others expect the present architecture to persist. This article contends that the outcomes of this challenge are institution-specific. In settings where significant operational realignments are possible within existing mandates and governance structures, the multipolarity–multilateralism conundrum could be partly mitigated. The argument is based on a thematic analysis of all IBRD-IDA loan commitments between 2002 and 2015 in the World Bank’s seven all-time top borrowers: Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey (collectively, the Big Seven). The key finding is that while these emerging countries remain the Bank’s biggest clients, the terms of their engagement have shifted precisely along the lines where they had already differed from the rest of the Bank’s clientele: away from politically onerous governance and institutional reforms, and towards developing physical and market infrastructure while attaining social sustainability. This implicit realignment is facilitated by the Bank’s diverse policy repertoire, which allows considerable inter-regional and intra-regional variation in lending patterns to accommodate member preferences.

KEYWORDS:

• World Bank
• emerging powers
• multipolarity
• multilateralism
• international organisations
• development policy

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Dermot Hodson, Deborah Mabbett, Ziya Öniş, Richard Sandbrook, and three anonymous referees of this journal for valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ali Burak Güven is Lecturer in International Relations and International Political Economy in the Department of Politics at Birkbeck, University of London, where he directs the MSc programme in Global Governance and Emerging Powers. He has published widely on comparative and international political economy, international organisations and global governance, and Turkish political economy. He is also the co-editor, with Richard Sandbrook, of Civilizing Globalization: A Survival Guide, Revised and Expanded Edition (SUNY 2014).

Notes

1 All project data in this article are taken from the World Bank’s project database, available at http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/PROJECTS/0,,menuPK:51563∼pagePK:95873∼piPK:95910∼theSitePK:40941,00.html (permanent URL: http://go.worldbank.org/KPMUDAVVT0).

2 For instance, if the theme ‘regulation and competition policy’ is given a 20 per cent weight in a $400m DPL, we should understand that $80 million of the total commitment for this project is earmarked for this theme, which is classified under the major theme ‘financial and private sector development.’ This thematic weight is usually calculated at the Washington headquarters and may in some cases appear problematic, but it still offers a good comparative basis provided that aggregate observations are checked against individual projects (as in the Chinese portfolio discussed later).

3 A clarification on the four major themes that are not examined here: ‘Economic management’, rural development’, ‘trade and integration’ and ‘urban development’ are excluded only because each consists a rather heterodox range of themes difficult to subsume under just one of our three theme clusters. For example, ‘rural development’ includes themes that relate to not just PMI (‘rural services and infrastructure’), but also social sustainability (‘rural non-farm income generation’) and governance (‘rural policies and institutions’). Conversely, each of the seven major themes analysed here comprises themes that could be fairly directly associated with a single family of development ideas.

4 Since 2012, every project has to include a GAC analysis and recommended measures for dealing with GAC issues. One danger is the reduction of this analysis into ‘something of a tick-box exercise’, especially in strong, strategic clients where country officials would not welcome exposure of potential irregularities by a major international organisation (Interview with anonymous World Bank governance specialist, 9 June 2016).

5 This also distinguishes the Bank from its sister organisation. The IMF exists in an operational environment where rupture and continuity in policy norms are often clearly identifiable, as different norms tend to have mutually exclusive prescriptive implications, for example, countercyclical versus procyclical fiscal policy, the acceptable scope of capital controls, and so on; for a recent assessment, see Ban and Gallagher (2015).

6 Such accommodations on the ground do not mean that there can be open discrimination in the application of environmental and social safeguards to favour some clients over others.