Partnerships have become part of the everyday practice of global governance. International organizations (IOs) promote them as a gold standard of good governance. Both the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals declared partnerships a global objective, similar to ending poverty, eradicating hunger, and protecting all life on land.1 The World Bank has lauded partnerships as textbook examples of cooperation that enable greater participation of stakeholders, produce creative solutions to complex problems, and generate needed financial resources from dedicated partners to address the provision of global public goods, such as the conservation of biological diversity, which is the focus of this book. Yet World Bank partnerships end up performing poorly on those values that have served as standards and justifications for promoting them. This book investigates the rift between the hope and rise of partnerships, on one side, and the reality of failed expectations on the other. In an era in which multistakeholder initiatives have become a widespread means to address many environmental issues, it has never been more important to understand why partnering with IOs is fraught, and why partnerships often fall short of delivering on their promise.
A routinely underexamined aspect of partnerships, and multistakeholder governance arrangements in general, is how they function in practice. This book addresses that gap. It finds important limitations in the ability of partnerships to contribute to the democratic quality of global governance, incubate new approaches to conservation, or significantly increase financial resources for improved environment outcomes. The picture of partnerships that emerges from this research stands in stark contrast to their conventional characterization as horizontal, organic governance arrangements, based on trust and reciprocity, that are both innovations in governance and able to promote creative new approaches to solving global problems (Andonova 2010; Powell 1990; Tesner and Kell 2000). If this characterization is empirically incorrect in the case of the World Bank and biodiversity partnerships, we need to elucidate why IO partnerships function the way they do, and how they might be improved.
Based on a review of biodiversity partnerships over a twenty-year period and in-depth case studies, I show that partnerships largely fail to fulfill their promise when they are set up and executed in the shadow of large, mature bureaucracies. When the bureaucratic elephant in the room twitches and grunts, the partners listen and comply.2 Some partners still manage to promote individual agendas; others do not. But in the end, the partnership as a whole suffers. Its potential contribution to global governance succumbs to the goals of bureaucratic efficiency. As a result of the World Bank’s involvement, many partnerships have become organized as hierarchical delegative relationships, with routinized rules and procedures and a functional specialization of labor.
IO partnerships have been on the rise, and, as Pattberg and colleagues (2012) have documented, over half of all partnerships are led by IOs and state agencies. Andonova (2017) refers to IOs as “governance entrepreneurs” because they are one of the driving forces behind the groundswell of partnership arrangements. The growing literature on orchestration also identifies IOs with expansive governance mandates but limited resources to fulfill all tasks expected of them as ideal orchestrators of non-state intermediaries that can implement various activities through public-private partnerships (Abbott and Snidal 2010). In short, the rise of partnerships is largely driven by IOs.
This book provides an in-depth account of the World Bank’s efforts to govern biodiversity through partnership arrangements. The research reported here generates important insights for future research on IOs and partnerships, though it does not provide a template that is generalizable to the experiences of all IO-led partnerships. The World Bank is one of the largest IOs forging global partnerships with non-state actors and, since the 1980s, the largest funder of biodiversity initiatives.3 As such, it provides an ideal test subject for this inquiry.
Partnerships and trust funds have become identified as “big business” for the organization (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2015a). Not only has the World Bank embraced partnerships with business and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as de rigueur policy in global environmental initiatives, in 1999 it also incorporated such partnerships into its mission statement: “To fight poverty with passion and professionalism for lasting results and to help people help themselves and their environment by providing resources, sharing knowledge, building capacity and forging partnerships in the public and private sectors” (emphasis added) (World Bank 1999; 2001b, 7; 2004c). In environmental governance, the bank has referred to partnerships as the only way to do business. The annual report of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF; also known as the World Wide Fund for Nature), one of the bank’s first high-profile partnerships in biodiversity conservation, states that “for the World Bank or WWF, or any other institution intent on securing our future on a livable planet, going it alone is not an option” (World Bank/WWF 1999, 4). In 2011 the organization launched its own quarterly publication on public-private partnerships, with a number of issues since then dedicated to environmental themes. In 2015 it created a Public-Private Partnership Knowledge Lab with fourteen other multilateral development banks, affirming its continued commitment to producing authoritative knowledge on the governance of global public goods through partnerships.
These partnerships are formal, cogovernance arrangements between the bank and private actors (including business firms, NGOs, foundations, trade organizations, and academic institutions) through which partners design and implement global conservation interventions on the ground. Partnerships are said to promote cooperation and coordinated action, and are the instrument of choice at many IOs (Abbott et al. 2012). They are sometimes described as win-win-win solutions: for the poor, for capital, and for the environment (Clark 2012). This new attitude of cooperation has encouraged some scholars to write of an emerging normative consensus, or a new synthesis, in multilateral governance (Thérien and Pouliot 2006). This optimism may be justified, if one considers the extent to which multilateral agencies like the World Bank have embraced old foes in partnership arrangements.4 Partnering was not always the standard practice that we see today between IOs and civil society. The World Bank used to largely ignore coordination with NGOs. Around the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, the organization started to engage civil society more broadly. Ten years later, during the Johannesburg Summit, partnerships with civil society and for-profit firms gained momentum and were endorsed as key instruments for effective global environmental governance. The summit announced the creation of more than two hundred partnerships between state and non-state actors. This increased to 330 partnerships registered with the United Nations after Johannesburg (Biermann et al. 2007; Pattberg et al. 2012).
Global partnerships at the bank have mushroomed since the early 1990s. In 2012 the bank was involved in 145 global and regional partnerships with shared governance arrangements, across all issue areas, with a combined annual budget of more than $7 billion (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2011, xiii; World Bank 2013b).5 World Bank president James Wolfensohn, who served from 1995 to 2005, made them one of the hallmarks of his administration. Throughout President Robert Zoellick’s administration (2007–2012), the bank continued to highlight the importance of global partnerships to such an extent that Zoellick called for a “League of Networks,” a reference to the old League of Nations (Zoellick 2010b). Zoellick’s presidency was followed by that of Jim Yong Kim, who as a student at Harvard had already cofounded Partners in Health, a collaborative initiative with local villagers in Haiti. When he became president of the bank, Kim often said that “to go from billions in official assistance to trillions in investments, we will have to push even further our willingness to collaborate through creative partnerships. . . . Only by doing so can we be the first generation in human history to end extreme poverty in our lifetime” (Kim 2015, 3).
Partnerships are framed as precisely the kind of solutions required to address global environmental problems, and sometimes are recommended as the solution to problems that are yet to be fully identified. To the extent that they are taken for granted as an optimal governance arrangement, and because World Bank projects need to document the efforts that have been undertaken to engage partners, some have referred to partnerships as a trend with no alternative (Richter 2004). However, research on partnerships has been divided between what Andonova (2017) calls “partnerships skeptics” and “partnership enthusiasts” (6). Some scholars argue that they have limited power to address the three main deficits in global governance: regulation, participation, and implementation. Biermann and colleagues (2007) conducted a large-n study of four hundred partnerships and concluded that partnerships do not have a significant impact on global governance. In another wide-scope study, Pattberg and colleagues (2012) determined that a “comprehensive analysis of more than 300 partnerships that have been agreed around and after the 2002 Johannesburg summit leads to a rather critical assessment” (241). This logically raises the question of why partnerships continue to be pursued at all. Furthermore, both scholars and practitioners have shown concern with a new era of private governance in which firms become rule-makers instead of rule-takers, nature is commoditized for profit, or an unelected cadre of NGOs gains global governance authority. Hence the equally compelling question is whether partnerships should be pursued.
Others, however, identify partnerships as potential vehicles for more legitimate and effective outcomes in global governance (Börzel and Risse 2005). Abbott and Snidal generated a new research program titled “Transnational New Governance” in which IOs play a pivotal role as orchestrators of public-private partnerships. They believe that partnerships in turn could have a beneficial effect on IOs by stimulating them “to learn and adapt, offsetting some of their bureaucratic pathologies” (Abbott and Snidal 2010, 341). The World Bank has encouraged the growth of its partnerships with non-state actors using three main arguments: they democratize decision-making, promote governance innovation through private sector participation, and mobilize additional financial resources.
This book examines World Bank partnerships with conservation organizations between 1992 and 2012 and finds that they have developed in ways that confound the expectations of both critics and supporters alike. First, whereas critics had feared privatization of governance, private actors have not assumed authoritative positions in conservation; instead, state authority has been reaffirmed. More democratic governance systems have emerged between partners, but partnerships per se have largely failed to democratize decision-making on the ground. Second, although proponents championed partnerships as tools for innovation, conservation partnerships have reverted back to the traditional approach of command and control and eschew policy experimentation. Third, the additional financial resources that IOs expected these partnerships to generate, have not materialized in any significant way. Despite their promise, these hybrid governance arrangements are designed in ways that accomplish some successes but produce many failures. In light of this empirical picture, it is imperative to understand why partnerships with one of the world’s most important IOs are failing to deliver the benefits of enhanced democracy, innovation, and financing that the World Bank predicted from this new form of cooperation. This book explores how the World Bank’s partnerships promise one thing but are designed for another, and largely fail to deliver on their promise.
Existing analyses typically focus on why partnerships develop and how IOs can bring partners together. Often missing from such studies is an accounting of the negative influence that entrepreneurial IOs can have on their partnerships, why partnerships often turn out to be less beneficial than expected, and how they might be improved. In the case of the World Bank, bureaucratic rationality becomes as much a part of the problem as it is of the solution. Although large-n studies are important in highlighting trends, more in-depth, qualitative work is needed to understand the mechanisms at play.
This book begins by examining the promise and achievements of World Bank partnerships in biodiversity conservation, then moves on to address the question of why partnerships fall short of their democracy, policy innovation, and fundraising promise, and develops a theoretical position to explain the gap between promise and outcomes. The theoretical framework is then applied to two partnership cases, one a partnership that was specifically designed to deliver on the democracy promise and the second a partnership designed to deliver on the goal of innovation. Neither of them achieved those ends. The conclusion elaborates the implications of these findings and presents some alternatives for partnerships with large bureaucracies.
The partnership concept has become stretched. It is so fashionable in IO circles and has become such an imperative touchstone in speeches that defining what actors mean when they say they are working in a partnership can be a daunting task.6 Jane Nelson (2002) has argued that there is a tendency within the United Nations system to loosely refer to most kinds of relationships as partnerships. The UN’s definition of a UN-business partnership illustrates the vagueness with which the concept is used: “a mutually beneficial agreement between one or more UN bodies and one or more corporate partners to work towards common objectives based on the comparative advantage of each, with a clear understanding of respective responsibilities and the expectation of due credit for every contribution” (Tesner and Kell 2000, 72). Even one-time meetings may be referred to as public-private partnerships (Broadwater and Kaul 2005). However, it is not all rhetoric, since partnerships create new institutions, commit financial resources, and implement actual projects on the ground.
The cases of global public-private partnerships in biodiversity conservation analyzed in this book meet five conditions: (1) their activities are global, (2) they establish an independent organization with a formal governing body, (3) partners come from both public and private sectors, (4) they finance interventions on the ground, and (5) they are focused on addressing biodiversity loss. These conditions are consistent with the World Bank’s own definition of global partnerships, which states that these initiatives must generate benefits “intended to cut across more than one region of the world and in which the partners: reach explicit agreements on objectives; agree to establish a new (formal or informal) organization; generate new products or services; [and] contribute dedicated resources to the program” (World Bank 2002a, 3).
The partnership cases evaluated here span the period between 1992 and 2012. The start year was chosen because it is around the time of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, often referred to as the Rio Summit, that IOs’ attitudes toward business and NGO sectors seemed to shift from distrust to engagement. The Rio Summit marked a clear start to the international practice of partnerships. Principles 7, 21, and 27 of the Rio Declaration all incorporate an explicit call to form partnerships as a mechanism of addressing global environmental problems. The Convention on Biological Diversity also opened for signatures in 1992, during the Rio Summit, and entered into force the following year. In 2000, 189 nations signed a declaration to end extreme poverty. This pact, in enlarged form, became known as the Millennium Development Goals, one of which was an explicit call to develop a global partnership for development (United Nations 2000). In 2002 the international community institutionalized the partnership model during the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD, also dubbed Rio+10) in Johannesburg. Partnerships with the private sector were endorsed as a key policy strategy for effective global environmental governance. One of the official outcomes of the summit was the announcement of more than two hundred partnerships between state and non-state actors. The period under study ends in 2012, marked in the international arena by the Rio+20 Summit, which reaffirmed the value of partnerships. This span of time allows the inclusion of World Bank partnerships that have generated sufficient information to allow an assessment. Newer partnerships lack an established governance structure and history of project approvals to gauge a clear preference for conservation approaches. Finally, 2012 also marks the end of a World Bank presidency, providing a closing bracket for this inquiry into the organization’s vision for, and results achieved through, its partnerships. When President Kim started his tenure in 2012, he renewed the call for partnerships and launched a partnership lab, library, and an advisory facility in the bank. However, despite Kim’s public declarations to transform “billions to trillions” through partnerships, this did not translate operationally into more partnerships on the ground. The bank also shifted to a more contractual use of the partnership concept during Kim’s tenure. This shift marked a departure from the cogovernance approach of previous presidents, which is the focus of this book.
Although the World Bank joined its first formal public-private partnership in 1968,7 the enthusiasm over partnerships as vehicles to solve complex global problems is a more recent phenomenon. Partnerships are often characterized by supporters as innovative arrangements. “Innovation” sometimes makes its way into the definition itself. The World Economic Forum defines a public-private partnership as “an innovative organizational and financial solution that emerges from cooperation between the public and private sector with a view of supplementing the government’s public response to growing social needs in a specific sector, country or region” (World Economic Forum 2014, 11). But what counts as innovation in practice, and what is the added value of partnering? The World Bank suggests that partnerships are institutional innovations in their own right, ones that create new avenues for diverse actors to participate in global decision-making, produce new ideas and policy innovations, and tap into new sources of financial resources—all yielding the dividends needed to address global public goods. The World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group states that partnerships “enable the Bank to pool its expertise with that of partner organizations with complementary capacities. . . . Partnership programs also support long-term fund raising as their shared governance arrangements ensure greater and more lasting donor buy-in. The shared governance feature also helps ensure legitimacy to efforts, important for example for standard-setting and global public goods initiatives” (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2015a, 4).
Since the early 1990s, the number of multistakeholder arrangements in global environmental governance has grown significantly (Andonova 2010). Pattberg and Widerberg (2016) argue that “such partnerships have become mainstream implementation mechanisms for attaining international sustainable development goals and are also frequently used in other adjacent policy domains such as climate change, health and biodiversity” (42). The announcement of two hundred Type 2 partnerships after Rio+10 signaled that the world was moving away from the traditional state-centered model and toward a new paradigm of transnational relations (Elsig and Amalric 2008). In the outcome document of the Rio+20 conference, titled “The Future We Want,” nearly 10 percent of its 283 operative clauses referred to the importance of partnerships (United Nations General Assembly 2012). The bank’s office for Global Partnerships and Trust Fund Policy characterized partnership governance as “the new multilateralism.” A concern emerging from this phenomenon relates to the representative quality of this new kind of governance. What is the significance of a weakened state, and who are the private actors gaining rule-making authority? Embedded in this inquiry is a concern with who is now accountable for the provision of public goods. For example, if governance were to become a “franchise,” who would hold business and civil society organizations accountable, and for what, and how might sanctions be imposed in the absence of hierarchical authority (Andonova and Levy 2003; Park and Kramarz 2019)?
Partnerships are seen as necessary legitimating arrangements for IOs. Bäckstrand and Kylsäter (2014) evaluate the results of the WSSD partnerships and find them to be operational failures but an important asset “enabling a UN legitimation strategy aiming to prove the organization’s relevance in an era where multilateralism relies on collaboration between state, market, and civil society actors” (344). This assessment of UN partnerships is consistent with an internal 2002 World Bank evaluation of the role of partnerships. It states that several bank documents since 2000 “have emphasized that the provision of global public goods requires partnerships to increase the legitimacy of traditional international organizations and to engage the perspectives and expertise of other stakeholders” (World Bank 2002a, 2).
In the drive to partner, the World Bank and other IOs have rebranded many existing projects, initiatives, and financial mechanisms as partnerships. For example, in 1997 I worked for the World Bank in what was then called the Regional Mesoamerican Biological Corridor Project (World Bank 1997a). In 2004 the project was named one of the bank’s global and regional partnerships. The bank also cites the Global Environment Facility (GEF) as its largest environmental partnership. The GEF is a multilateral fund established in 1992 to help countries meet the goals of international environmental conventions and agreements, and its secretariat is located within the bank. The World Bank is the trustee, administrator, and one of the three original implementing agencies of GEF-funded projects. Across its projects and global initiatives, the GEF was always referred to as a multilateral financial mechanism. However, the GEF has also now been reborn a partnership.
The bank states that partnerships are driven by common responses to global problems in ways that are “transcending old power relationships” (World Bank 2010a). There is continued emphasis on the democratic additives that can be realized through partnerships. For example, Wolfensohn (2000a) said, “If we embrace a comprehensive approach, working in partnership with governments, and if we achieve this participation, this equity, and this inclusion, then we will have democratized development” (28). One of the four pillars of Wolfensohn’s signature reform program at the bank, the Comprehensive Development Framework, was promoting partnerships. The key justifications for this proposal were “ownership, coordination, transparency, and accountability” (World Bank 1999, 11). The traditional division of public actors as decision-makers and private actors as consumers of public regulation collapsed in the partnership model. Partnerships theoretically eliminated that divide by making both public and private actors joint decision-makers in formulating rules for the world. Hence partnerships that set up public and private actors as cogovernors of global public goods are also seen as institutional innovations to achieve more inclusive, representative, and participatory governance. This rationale highlights the power-sharing component of partnerships. As noted by Stephen Linder (1999), advocates of privatization argue that privatizing empowers consumers because it devolves power from governments to individuals, while partnerships instead redirect power horizontally and give government, civil society, and the private sector an arrangement for sharing responsibility, knowledge, and risk. In cases of regulation and compliance with environmental standards, partnering takes the adversarial edge away from the government-business relationship (Linder 1999).
However, the assumption that inviting for-profit and nonprofit actors to a global decision-making table leads to greater democracy has been challenged for some time. In the 1971 issue of International Organization on transnational relations, Karl Kaiser vigorously argued against making this connection. He said the opposite was likely the case, writing that “the evidence that transnational relations erode the democratic process appears reasonably strong. The forces of progress in our interdependent world happen to further a multinationalization of previously domestic activities and intensify the intermeshing of decision making in multinational frameworks” (Kaiser 1971, 370). More recently, Börzel and Risse (2005) took up this debate and concluded that further empirical evidence is required to assess if and when partnerships may serve as vehicles to greater participation and accountability in global governance. This book contributes to this ongoing debate by focusing on a large IO with significant autonomy that has an established record of entrepreneurial partnerships in environmental governance—one of the most significant growth areas for these governing arrangements (Andonova 2017; Biermann and Siebenhüner 2009).
One of the most common features attributed to partnerships is that they represent and enable “new” or “innovative” governance. As Gro Brundtland, then director general of the World Health Organization and one of the early champions of public-private partnerships in the health sector, said, “Only through new and innovative partnerships can we make a difference” (2002, 15). Although partnerships have been around for a long time at the domestic level, the exponential growth of the partnership model at the global level is a more recent phenomenon (Andonova 2010; Pattberg and Widerberg 2015; Raustiala 2017). Also more recent is the normative commitment to newness as a sufficiently vital added value such that reports often state only that work is innovative to imply that it is good, better than what is being done currently and what has been done before. Yet, as James March famously noted, adaptive systems that focus on innovation at the expense of small improvements to existing processes based on prior learning “are likely to find that they suffer the costs of experimentation without gaining many of its benefits. They exhibit too many undeveloped new ideas and too little distinctive competence” (March 1991, 71). A focus on innovation alone will not be productive.
In business, definitions of innovation share a common reference to “something new, be it products, services or processes” (Oerlemans and Pretorius 2008, 665). As I explain in more detail below, I focus on substantive aspects of policy innovation, but there is also an argument made in terms of the procedural innovations partnerships might enable. For example, there is a presumption that business actors will contribute a more effective and efficient approach to problem solving (Paulsen 2006). The new public management literature reflects this expectation, that government ought to be remade in the market’s image and partnerships can be a vehicle to achieve that transformation. An association with the private sector is meant to imbue government with all the positive traits of the market: competitiveness, efficiency, and innovation (Linder 1999).
In the context of global partnerships, this book investigates what new conservation governance approaches and resulting policies these initiatives promote. Actors hold different beliefs about appropriate responses to biodiversity loss. When partners hold these beliefs intersubjectively, they can create new policy prescriptions (Tannenwald 2005). To gauge innovation, we must first review the traditional approaches to conservation, and from this vantage point assess whether partnerships promote an advance beyond the standard recipes.
The question of innovation has direct implications at both local and global scales. It sheds light on the values and approaches that partnerships privilege and the financing they make available to promote a given vision of conservation on the ground. This sequence helps explain what nature is protected and why, who benefits, and who decides. The stakes are high not only for the preservation of nature but also for local communities, whose autonomy, control over local resources, and livelihoods are affected by the quest to protect the global commons (Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008). Globally, this assesses the relevance of partnerships as substantive alternatives to the conservation work that was already being done under traditional IO-led multilateralism.
The negotiations leading up to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) were tense. Industrialized countries sought to promote conservation, while developing countries, where most of the world’s biodiversity exists, campaigned to broaden the framework and focus on the “sustainable use of biological resources” and include “financial and technological transfers” to support conservation efforts (Raustiala and Victor 1996, 3). The three objectives of the CBD reflect the compromises reached between developed and developing countries. The treaty text states: “The objectives of this Convention, to be pursued in accordance with its relevant provisions, are the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources” (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 1992, 3).8
Despite the three-pronged approach of the convention, the World Bank and the GEF have traditionally devoted most of their financing to projects that create and strengthen protected areas.9 This satisfies the first objective of the convention but largely neglects the remaining two. Some have argued that this policy choice is based on normative commitments that emerged from the American experience. The legacy of John Muir is conservation based on the model of Yellowstone National Park. This was the first successful park in the American system (Wilshusen et al. 2002).10 Muir’s idea, on which Yellowstone was created, was of a wilderness that is set aside and separated from people. This became national policy in the 1964 Wilderness Act, which defines wilderness as a place “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain” (Wilderness Act of 1964).
The most dominant approach to conservation governance today still reflects the enduring impact of Muir’s principles. Command and control calls for the state to ensure that humans have limited impact on the wild, on the assumption that nature is best preserved when the state builds fences to keep wildlife in and people out. The policy tool most often used is the creation of protected areas. This is dubbed “fortress conservation.” Most World Bank projects finance activities that include creating and strengthening protected areas, developing economic activities in buffer zones around parks to keep communities from encroaching on the park, and launching scientific research initiatives to code and organize nature to facilitate its control and administration (e.g., using geographic information systems, identifying hotspots or creating ecosystem maps, developing taxonomies, conducting inventories and monitoring). Centralization and a focus on compliance are defining characteristics of this type of conservation approach. The state is seen as the appropriate authority, as is evident in the financing dedicated to institutional strengthening of state control over the territory and its resources. One way to recognize policy innovation in conservation is by assessing how often partners implement projects that go beyond this traditional command and control approach.
The Yellowstone model proved impractical in the developing world, for various reasons. Critics pointed out that poverty in rural communities pushes people to exploit the natural resources that surround a park, and neither fences nor park guards will keep people from trying to secure their livelihoods. Community-based conservation critics noted further that people have lived with biodiversity for generations and have actually been nature’s best stewards. For instance, they reserve areas of forest for conservation or rotate crops for better maintenance of soil fertility. Building fences around parks not only disrupts rural livelihoods, it also denies local communities recognition of the traditional work they provide to the global commons through maintaining their ecosystems in balance and productive (Brechin et al. 2003; Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008). Therefore, while the command and control approach has historical roots in the United States, where conservation has been organized around a strong system of protected areas, it has been ineffective and widely contested in much of the developing world, where most of the existing biodiversity is concentrated (Brockington, Duffy, and Igoe 2008).
Challenges to the command and control strategy resulted in an amalgamated approach that considered both environmental and human benefits. In the mid-1980s, conservation and development came together under one umbrella. IOs started embracing integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) as a way of giving development assistance to communities in proximity to national parks and keeping them from encroaching on the parks’ natural resources. But conservationists argued that making development money available to communities living next to the parks created a significant lure for the rural poor to migrate to those communities, increasing population pressures on natural resource use, such as by cutting timber and grazing livestock in the parks, and encroaching on the resource-rich parks, particularly after donors’ development projects in those communities came to an end. Some noted that ICDPs were not radical departures from the command and control approach, instead offering sweeteners at best, and bribes at worst, to communities that would be most affected if denied access to a park’s resources (Horwich et al. 2012).
Toward the end of the 1990s, the pendulum started to swing back toward stricter adherence to the traditional command and control approach. Conservationists in the United States observed that years of spending on development to avoid environmental destruction had not halted the rate of forest loss or produced other significant biodiversity gains. Some influential scientists also raised the stakes around this debate. The ecologist John Terborgh, author of A Requiem for Nature (1999), called for the militarization of the parks in developing countries.11 In justifying the eviction of indigenous communities from protected areas, the paleontologist Richard Leakey made the contentious observation that “the global interest in biodiversity might sometimes trump the rights of local people” (cited in Dowie 2006, 12).12 Using data from the UN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and research by anthropologists, Dowie concluded that in the “range of 5 million to tens of millions” conservation refugees have been created in the name of biodiversity protection (2006, 9).
Given the deeply problematic outcomes of traditional conservation policies, partnerships with the private sector have held the promise of a much-needed correction. There are at least two broad perspectives challenging traditional conservation frameworks, each relying on different sources of authority, maintaining its own discourse, and seeking specific types of project interventions. One perspective is guided by the assumption that the best way to preserve nature is to commoditize it: attaching a price to its services, proponents believe, will ultimately save it from further deterioration. This view recognizes the market as the appropriate authority to regulate actor behavior. Some key terms in the commoditizing discourse are decentralization, internalization of externalities, self-financing, and efficiency gains. Project activities might include nature tourism, payment for ecosystem services, and privatization of protected areas. It is the presumption that business actors favor this approach to environmental governance, which has engendered much of the controversy surrounding public-private partnerships (Martens 2003; McAfee 1999; Richter 2004).
The other major alternative perspective endorses community-based conservation. It is critical of traditional conservation by states or markets and is based on the foundational assumption that conservation ought to be reconciled with human needs. As such, it recognizes certain cultural claims to resources. Its projects focus on enabling communities to participate in political decisions on the environment and on creating property rights that secure a community’s interest to its resources (Western, Wright, and Strum 1994). “Community” is the locus of authority on conservation decisions, although there is disagreement on what community entails. Agrawal and Gibson (1999) write that the most conventional references in the literature construe “community as a small spatial unit, as a homogeneous social structure, and as shared norms” (629). They advocate shifting away from this reflexive understanding of “community” and thinking instead about institutions that would enable local management of resources.
There is no theoretical reason to assume that public and private partners are simply involved in a functional task of coordinated action directed toward a shared goal, and not also participating as political actors with distinct ideas and the power to promote those ideas. Their definition of the biodiversity problem, their ideas about the most appropriate authority to govern, and their views on appropriate responses need not be either similar or compatible. The three general approaches outlined above—command and control, commodification, and community conservation—offer ample room for both contestation and innovation through partnerships. Within the NGO sector alone, one study identified twenty-one different conceptions of biodiversity conservation, all differing on the target of environmental protection (human or only biological species), the geographic focus of conservation (local or global), and how decisions should be made (according to the most efficient use of resources, or international recognition of sites worth conserving, or the extent to which such sites might ensure benefits to people) (Redford et al. 2003). If there are such fundamental cleavages within the NGO community, then partnerships between more disparate actors—the state, the marketplace, and civil society—suppose an even greater level of normative divergence.13 In other words, there is room to expect divergence in views among partners and variance in the types of projects financed by different partnerships. This may be a strength of the partnership approach: the plurality of interests may result in a larger repertoire of policy scripts that respond to broader global constituencies. Therefore, partnerships are theoretically a perfect arena for innovation. Yet they may also be used to re-entrench existing conservation approaches under the guise of a fashionable new recipe. This is the “old wine in new bottles” argument against partnerships (Melber 2002).
The need for resources beyond traditional official development assistance became widely referenced as a justification for launching partnerships after the announcement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the report of the High-Level Panel on Financing for Development, headed by Ernesto Zedillo (2001), which announced shortfalls in the resources required to meet the MDGs. In this context, supporters claimed partnerships were promising fundraising vehicles, and frequently listed the promise of additional financing as one of the key dimensions of this form of governance (Kim 2015; World Bank 2013b).14 There was evidence from other issue areas to suggest more financing would be a plausible outcome of conservation partnerships. For example, health partnerships have been used to develop future streams of income to ensure predictable funding, or to frontload official development assistance, where necessary, by selling bonds against future grant commitments from traditional multilateral or bilateral donors (Gavi: The Vaccine Alliance 2019). Partnerships with the business sector have leveraged private financial resources to support infrastructure projects and deliver public services. In some cases the public side offers risk guarantees in exchange for private-side investment. One estimate found that “Bank Group-supported PPP mechanisms registered leveraging ratios of 6.7 through Bank Group partial risk guarantees and insurance schemes, 7.5 through partial credit guarantees, and 5.6 on debt buy-downs using private donations” (Girishankar 2009, 9).15 Partnerships of this sort have become well established in the bank’s financial, extractive, and infrastructure sectors, with the last including the provision of water, roads, and health systems. However, the same has not been true of biodiversity conservation partnerships.
Partnerships are viewed as “an instrument of choice” (World Bank 2010b, 13) because of their potential to mobilize financial resources from a number of actors. Wolfensohn articulated this belief succinctly in several speeches by referring to the ratio of private sector financing to official development assistance. Since the 1990s, when he assumed the presidency of the bank, official development assistance has become dwarfed by private investment. Private giving has also risen. Foundations, NGOs, and other civil society organizations from OECD countries financed $40 billion worth of development initiatives in 2006, which was 50 percent of official development assistance to lower- and middle-income countries that year (Girishankar 2009). Hence, joining forces with firms, NGOs, and foundations assumes greater impact and harmonization of initiatives under a common financial umbrella.
Critics have held that the opposite is true. Partnerships can and often do fragment or duplicate efforts, raise transaction costs, and create a capricious hierarchy of geographic and thematic issues that does not reflect need but the outcome of atomized efforts (Abbott and Snidal 2010; Girishankar 2009). Pattberg and Widerberg (2015) note that fragmentation may negatively impact governance architecture through inefficiencies and conflicting goals, norms, and policy processes.16 The bank has raised this concern and documented it in evaluations of its global partnerships (World Bank 2004a).
Analysis on the impact of partnerships in leveraging resources is limited, and this topic has become an important research area in light of the heightened expectations for private sector financing to catalyze climate action (Pauw et al. 2016). As Chan and Amling (2019) note in evaluating the limits of the Global Climate Action Agenda, “According to UN Environment’s Climate Adaptation Gap Report (UNEP 2016), adaptation costs currently exceed available public finance by at least two to three times, and this financial gap is expected to further widen to six to thirteen times. Transnational adaptation action, in this perspective, could contribute to the closure of gaps, both in terms of financing, implementation, capacity (building), and in terms of the realization of emissions reductions and physical infrastructure” (435–436).
In analyzing the financial component of partnerships, some of the substantive questions that need to be examined are not only whether these raise money for conservation beyond traditional public funds (official development assistance), but what influence funding has on partner selection. What local versus global funding is mobilized? Which actors in the private sector contribute, and why? Which conservation approaches receive most of the partnership’s financing, and why?
Since its first global public-private partnership in 1968, the World Bank had expanded its participation to 145 partnerships by 2015 (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2011, 2015). These partnerships raised $79 billion annually across all issue areas between 2007 and 2011 in 134 countries around the world. By 2012, the World Bank was contributing $2.9 billion to these partnerships (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2015b, xv). Despite this growth, there has been limited research on why IOs operating in the public sphere, such as the World Bank, pursue partnerships with actors in the private sphere (Jönsson and Tallberg 2010). It is not clear that partnerships improve IO’s resources, enhance their reputation, or contribute to other governance objectives. Much more attention has been paid to the partnering trend in the opposite direction. For example, some scholars have noted that private actors reach out for partnerships with public institutions to attain social or environmental legitimacy. As Inge Kaul (2006) has written, “Being seen as an accepted peer of a respected public actor in a sustained partnership is an effective, relatively low-cost way of signalling social or environmental concern” (231).
Virtually all IOs have partnership programs in their environment portfolios (Andonova 2010). In a study of global public-private partnerships, Kaul (2006) noted that the environment and health are the leading issue areas. This prioritization is mirrored in the World Bank’s partnerships, the majority of which have been brokered with the Sustainable Development Network.17 Within this sector, biodiversity remains a blind spot in partnership research. Unlike climate change, biodiversity in general and its partnerships in particular have received much less attention in the environmental governance literature. During a 2018 panel discussing the organization’s performance, then CEO of the World Bank and current managing director of the IMF Kristalina Georgieva noted that environmental issues that are not directly linked to climate, including biodiversity, forestry, land management, and oceans, receive less attention and funding from the bank. Georgieva said that climate change is, broadly speaking, embraced by the world, and there is less space for biodiversity. Staff working on biodiversity struggle to make the case that biodiversity should also be seen as a critical economic good (World Bank Group 2018). Legagneux and colleagues (2018) have also documented less research, public attention, and debate on improving governance to halt the rate of species extinctions and rapidly degrading habitats.18 This is a significant lacuna if we note that the World Bank is the largest financier of global biodiversity initiatives, and that many of these have involved partnerships. As such, the bank and its partners have significant clout in shaping international policy (Jackobeit 1999). Biodiversity constitutes “the very foundation of human existence,” and one of the most distinguishing features of the crisis of biodiversity loss is its irreversibility (Heywood and Dowdeswell 1995, vii; Mittermeier et al. 1999; Toly 2004). Research on biodiversity governance requires scholarly attention, and this should not be triggered only when the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) releases a devastating report on species extinctions or the Amazon is on fire (IPBES 2019; Londono and Casado 2019).
Biodiversity is an arena in which traditional policies and authority to govern have been heavily contested, while the financial means to address the problem have been very limited. As with climate change, the appropriateness and legitimacy of global governance responses are divided along north-south, global-local, and public-private axes (Bäckstrand 2006). The partnership approach could improve governance by devolving decision-making authority to stakeholders; bringing in new actors, interests, and ideas; and mobilizing new sources of funding.
Literature on the relationship between IOs and non-state actors has grown since the late 1990s (Börzel and Risse 2005; Cutler, Haufler, and Porter 1999; Domask 2003; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Park 2009; Reinicke and Deng 2000). In the environmental sector, there was a particular rise in research dealing with the growth of policy networks, non-state market-driven systems, private regimes, and partnerships between public-public and public-private actors. Analysis of public-private partnerships in particular focused largely on questions of policy effectiveness, including performance (Brinkerhoff 2002), optimal design and management features (Beisheim, Liese, and Vosseler 2014), problem-solving capacity (Biermann et al. 2007), and the extent to which partnerships could fill implementation gaps (Benner, Reinicke, and Witte 2003; Biermann et al. 2007; Reinicke and Deng 2000).19 Within this growing literature, IOs are recognized for their special role as entrepreneurs, hosts, or nodes of said partnerships (Abbott and Snidal 2009; Andonova 2017; Hale and Roger 2013). However, there has been little analysis of how IOs shape their partnerships, who gets to be a partner of a major IO, what policies IO partnerships promote, and what governance standards they create. This book speaks to a gap previously identified by Bernstein (2001) and Conca (2006), namely, that literature on cooperation in international relations has largely ignored the importance of “principled content” and the direction in which those principles are trending.
If we take the World Bank’s justifications for pursuing partnerships as a point of departure, we find that results are mixed. Partnerships largely fail to satisfy their original rationale but claim success in implementing a number of operational goals, such as establishing protected areas, producing taxonomies of species, or establishing monitoring systems. An internal World Bank evaluation of 120 global and regional partnerships found that almost all the programs evaluated showed positive achievements at the activity-based output level but difficulties in demonstrating results in the longer term and at the more comprehensive outcome level (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2011).20 My argument is not that producing taxonomies or creating protected areas are trivial accomplishments but that the purpose of partnerships is broader than these singular outputs, and therefore partnerships need to be evaluated in broader terms. The philosophy of partnerships is that in the long run, biodiversity goals are best achieved through more democratic governance, with space for innovation and more financial resources. The promise was that having these multiple purposes work together would generate positive and lasting outcomes. This book examines why partnerships instead generated limited gains in biodiversity governance, and what would need to change to embed durable results through these hybrid governance arrangements in the future.21
A dominant academic explanation of IO performance is based on the principal-agent model of agency theory. The model holds that principals delegate authority, with incentives for agents to follow specific mandates, but also that agents are granted a certain degree of “slack” so that they can advance their institutional needs. However, since principals and agents do not share identical preferences, the former make use of technical and asymmetrical information, thereby abusing agency slack. Within such a frame, the World Bank may be conceived of as the principal and its partners as agents, although in practice, this turns the principal-agent relationship on its head, since IOs are usually considered the agents of states, not the principals (Gutner 2005b).
This book shows that the relationship between the bank and its partners can indeed be represented as one of complex and multiple delegations rather than a bargain among equals. In its partnerships, the bank behaves as a principal and delegates responsibilities to partners, who execute a mandate, perform the role of agents, and in turn delegate roles to others further down the implementation chain. The principal-agent model would predict that partnerships turn out differently than expected because partners abuse agency slack and use partnerships to pursue their own goals.22 However, this model does not take us very far. It does not tell us why bank partnerships are managed hierarchically when these forms of organization are supposed to be characterized by horizontal governance; why the bank delegates authority to manage its partnerships to a very select group of non-state actors; what determines policy content; and what policies can be expected on the ground. At the policy level, a principal-agent model would prescribe that the principal apply stricter controls over the fledgling agent. This runs counter to a partnership model of shared responsibilities among equals.
In light of the theoretical and policy limitations of the principal-agent model, the book explores a second approach. Sociological institutionalism suggests looking at the organizational character of IOs like the World Bank, which are large bureaucracies, and how this character creates proclivities for dysfunctional action that undercuts some IO goals. This is because of the nature of bureaucratic rationality, which prioritizes operational efficiency above all other goals and values. As Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore (1999) conclude in their seminal article on the pathologies of IOs, “For all their desirable qualities, bureaucracies can also be inefficient, ineffective, repressive, and unaccountable” (726).
The book develops this theoretical approach to argue that partnerships turn out differently than originally intended because the bank’s culture casts a long shadow, subverting the organizational logic of partnerships and shaping them in its own image, which is risk-averse, hierarchical, bound to repeated rules and procedures, and functionally compartmentalized. The first theory is an explanation with intentionality, which assigns responsibility to opportunistic partners for sabotaging the partnership. The second theory suggests less intentionality on the part of any one individual agent and focuses on the endogenous organizational features—the bank’s DNA—as a key explanation for partnerships’ failure to deliver on their expected outcomes. The principal-agent model implies delegation is necessarily antagonistic and agents are traditionally the focus of concern. A sociological institutionalist framing suggests that the principal’s own organizational idiosyncrasies can be responsible for the limited results of its partnerships. Using Weber’s theory of bureaucracy as a point of departure suggests looking more closely at the organizational character of the bank and how this affects its relationships with partners. This theoretical perspective highlights the pervasive influence of bureaucratic features on bank relationships with non-state actors. Specifically, it shows that the bank’s risk aversion, hierarchy, focus on rules and procedures, and division of labor become significant factors influencing partnership outcomes.
Chapter 1 traces the historical evolution of the partnership concept within the World Bank, the major milestones, and the internal and external conditions that surrounded the growth of the approach. It then identifies and describes the global biodiversity initiatives the IO launched between 1992 and 2012 that fit within the criteria of this study. Chapter 2 develops measures of the three dependent variables, democratization, innovation, and financing, and examines how the partnerships described in chapter 1 performed on these measures, which form the basis of the bank’s rationale for entering cogovernance arrangements with private actors in the first place. The analysis reveals convergence around certain conservation approaches, some patterns of democratic activity in partnerships, particular preferences on the question of authority in environmental governance, and limited financial impact.
One set of results remains constant: bank partnerships have promoted the inclusion of a select few private actors, continue to largely rely on traditional and often ineffective conservation policies, and have not added significant financial resources to biodiversity conservation initiatives. This sets up the basic questions of this book: Why do IO partnerships turn out the way they do, and what can be done to improve partnership outcomes? There is not only an academic but also a policy imperative behind these questions. Executive directors of the World Bank and management have voiced concern about the effectiveness of partnerships, including the bank’s reputational risk, loss of decision-making authority, and dilution of the organization’s development objectives. The Committee on Development Effectiveness, one of the five standing committees of the World Bank’s board of executive directors, stated that some directors believe the bank is involved in too many global partnerships and “may be spreading its resources too thinly and losing the focus on its main mission” (World Bank 2004a, 248).
If partnerships can help address a democratic deficit in global governance or produce more effective policies and catalyze funding, then their implementation needs to be more closely examined. What would partnerships need to do to enable democratic processes? What are the organizational requirements to create a breeding ground for new ideas? How can partnerships bring together financial investments to address global problems in ways that could not be achieved through traditional multilateralism? The remaining chapters are devoted to answering these questions.
Chapter 3 investigates two theoretical lenses that can address why partnerships fail to deliver on their original promise. The first lens relies on the principal-agent model from agency theory. The second employs a Weberian model of bureaucracies from the school of sociological institutionalism. The chapters that follow analyze in depth two cases, applying a combined rationalist and constructivist approach. The partnership cases differ in their genesis, budgets, and bank evaluations. The question is why, in such distinctly different cases, similar outcomes emerge.
In selecting these cases, my aim is to understand the performance of World Bank partnerships in biodiversity conservation—from promise through process to outcomes. Although I am not testing hypotheses on conditions of effectiveness, my approach does tell us some things about effective and ineffective partnerships that other methods cannot. This includes understanding how and why partnerships perform the way they do, which is what we ultimately want to know to improve governance and desirable outcomes, beyond short-term outputs. The discussion of these case studies is informed by results of archival research, document reviews, participant observation, and forty-four semistructured expert interviews carried out between 2007 and 2018. Informants included staff members from a number of World Bank departments in Washington, DC, and field offices; the International Finance Corporation; the United Nations Development Programme; the United States Agency for International Development and the U.S State Department; the Canadian International Development Agency; US-, European-, and developing-country-based NGOs; foundations; academia; and private consultants hired by the bank as independent project evaluators.
The first case study introduced in chapter 4 is the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), one of the highest-profile partnerships of the World Bank in the environment sector and often cited by the bank as a model of best practices in global partnerships. It is an important partnership to study because its stated objective is “to strengthen the involvement and effectiveness of civil society in contributing to the conservation and management of globally important biodiversity” (World Bank 2007, 3). CEPF goals are unlikely to be merely rhetoric, since the bank willingly invested financial resources and faced reputational risks and operational challenges in a partnership that promised to involve civil society to conserve biodiversity.
A close analysis of the case shows multiple delegative relationships between the World Bank and its CEPF partners. Yet the concept of slippage found in principal-agent relationships provides a limited explanation for the disappointing outcomes observed. Applying a Weberian bureaucratic lens, I examine how the bank’s hierarchy, procedures, and risk-averse behavior become the more significant factors influencing the partnership. Bureaucratic requirements become internalized by CEPF and trump concerns over achieving real participation, inclusion, and representation of actors. This has undermined the partnership’s goal of achieving democracy. On the other hand, the partnership has been very successful at achieving such operational goals as the disbursement of grants to thousands of local recipients throughout the world, with uniform delivery and reporting procedures. These are precisely the types of products that bureaucracies are set up to provide efficiently.
The next case study, taken up in chapter 5, is the Global Invasive Species Program (GISP), one of the bank’s earliest biodiversity partnerships. It was originally considered a pioneering partnership with significant potential to expand the scope of biodiversity conservation and thereby contribute to global policy innovation. As a case study, GISP offers the added benefit of providing variance within the same partnership. GISP was an established partnership before the bank joined as a partner, and therefore offers two periods of evaluation—before and after the bank exerted its bureaucratic influence. Today the bank rates it among the least satisfactory cases in its partnership practice. However, the negative assessment is not derived from a failure to achieve good governance outcomes but rather from the partnership’s failure to deliver the desired operational outputs. The discussion demonstrates how the bank’s influence on GISP undermined the partnership’s ability to produce the desired operational outputs and ultimate governance outcomes.
These case studies trace the impact of the type of bureaucratic rationality that orients the bank’s preferences and actions in partnerships. The bank has significant influence over its partnerships, and these respond to the bank’s logic of action. Since this kind of rationality prioritizes goal efficiency or technical calculations of means to ends, the values of democracy and innovation through partnerships remain elusive. When partnerships fail to include new actors or open policy space for innovation, they also fail to create attractive alternatives for both new and existing donors.
The conclusion presents the results of this research, including the theoretical, policy, and normative significance of the findings, and sets out future research questions on partnerships involving IOs. I outline a case for rethinking the potential of these arrangements to enhance democratic representation, participation, and empowerment, as well as to generate policy innovations. IO partnerships are not the horizontal governance instruments conceptualized in the literature. There are extended chains of delegation behind these partnerships. Delegation is a key domain of the principal-agent model and is the most often used explanation of IO behavior. However, principal-agent accounts are not well equipped to explain the principled content of partnerships. Pointing to an alternative literature in business administration, this chapter highlights some of the main components of an organizationally aware policy for a next wave of World Bank partnerships.