1 Evolution of the Partnership Model in the World Bank*

The View from the Top: Visions of Partnerships

The meaning of what it is to be a partner, and what defines a partnership, have undergone significant transformation. Originally the concept of partnership focused on reciprocal responsibility for development outcomes between donor and recipients, but by the mid-1990s “partnership” had begun to invoke the inclusion, participation, and empowerment of civil society and business actors. It also provided an opening for private actors to join the governance process by sharing risks and opportunities, creating new policies for the provision of global public goods, and mobilizing new financial resources.1

In 1967, World Bank president George Woods, who served from 1963 to 1968, called for the formation of a commission of experts, at the end of a decade of disappointing development results and growing concern over diminishing flows of financial aid to the developing world. The Commission on International Development, which became known as the Pearson Commission after its chair, Lester B. Pearson, was tasked with reviewing the previous twenty years of development experience and providing recommendations for the strategic directions of World Bank development assistance (World Bank 2003). The Pearson Commission presented its report, titled Partners in Development, to the incoming president, Robert McNamara, in 1969. The reference to “partners” signaled a new relationship between donors and recipients. The report described partnerships as a bargain between developing and donor countries, in which the former would commit to poverty reduction and good governance and the latter to consistent flows of development aid (Pearson 1969).

* Part of this chapter appears in T. Kramarz, “World Bank Partnerships and the Promise of Democratic Governance,” Environmental Policy and Governance 26, no. 1 (2016): 3–15.

The concept of partnering as the sharing of responsibility between donors and recipients as equals was received with widespread criticism, coming as it did from an institution identified with top-down prescriptions and aid conditionality (Patel 1971). Critics argued that the World Bank was now using partnerships as vehicles for deflecting responsibility for aid effectiveness (Helleiner 2000). On the one hand, the bank dictated prescriptions for development loans, but on the other, it could invoke the partnership concept as justification for shared responsibility in the outcomes of those prescriptions. For instance, structural adjustment policies that encouraged neoliberal prescriptions (examples may include cutting government spending to reduce deficits, privatization of state-owned industries, deregulation of markets, devaluation of currencies, and an end to food subsidies) as a condition for receiving bank loans are among the most frequently cited examples of the considerable influence the bank wielded in selling not just its loans, but its particular ideas on development policy (Kramarz and Momani 2013). When these policies turn out to be wrong, it may be more convenient for the bank to speak of partners in development and focus on the recipient side of the equation, questioning that party’s commitment to good governance.

During the 1980s and into the 1990s, World Bank aid was strongly characterized by conditionality. Countries struggling to meet debt obligations after overborrowing during the 1970s petrodollar boom looked to the bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for loans to service their debts. Developing countries accepted conditions as the price of doing business with these development agencies. However, the structural adjustment programs required as part of the loan conditions soon began to draw heavy criticism from civil society for the social costs they exacted. The bank came under attack from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for large infrastructure projects that displaced people and caused environmental havoc. Two highly publicized and controversial examples were the Narmada Dam in India and the Polonoroeste development project in Brazil (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Rich 1994).

It was in the context, then, of a backlash from civil society, increased debates over good governance, diminishing official development assistance, increasing private capital flows to borrowing countries, and poor project performance results, publicized by the internal Wapenhans Report, that James Wolfensohn became president of the World Bank in 1995. The structural environment and the personal vision of the organization’s new leader became mutually reinforcing forces paving the way for a reemergence of the Pearson Commission’s discourse on partnership, ownership, and participation (King and Mc Grath 2004).

Under President Wolfensohn, partnerships became high-profile initiatives. Wolfensohn repeatedly invoked the approach as the new way of doing business and made it the centerpiece of his plans for institutional renewal. The bank transformed its view of civil society and the private sector. While these actors were traditionally seen as rule-takers, the bank began to refer to them as joint rule-makers. (The degree to which this view was internalized in meaningful ways is the subject of analysis of the following chapters.) Some scholars have referred to partnerships as old wine in new bottles (Bäckstrand and Kylsäter 2014; Glasbergen, Biermann, and Mol 2008). However, a historical investigation suggests a more nuanced view. There have been some important departures from, as well as continuities with, previous conceptions of partnerships.

In Wolfensohn’s first annual meetings as president, his remarks to the board of governors were firmly grounded in the idea of partnerships. In a departure from the previous Pearson Commission conception of partners as donors and recipients, Wolfensohn emphasized the role of civil society and the private sector as partners. Throughout his ten years in office, Wolfensohn offered varying messages when referring to partnerships, but most often he focused on democratization of development governance, innovation, and raising the required financial resources to protect global public goods.

When speaking to officials from developing countries, Wolfensohn often claimed that the bank was becoming a better “listener” to its partners, showing respect and sharing with them authority to plan their development (Wolfensohn 2001a). He returned repeatedly to the idea of cooperation (Wolfensohn 2000b). To civil society, he acknowledged that the World Bank had “sat on a mountain with the IMF” for fifty years, but it was now changing and looking to join forces with civil society in meeting the challenges of development (Wolfensohn 2000b, para. 6). Internally, he also cautioned the board of governors that “to be a good partner, we must be ready to listen to criticism and respond to constructive comments” (Wolfensohn 1995, para. 65).

During the 2002 annual meeting of the bank and the IMF, the president spoke to the board on three key dimensions of partnerships: inclusion, participation, and empowerment (Wolfensohn 2002, 4). He described partnerships as a mechanism for inclusion and consultation with parliaments, civil society, and the private sector in speaking with the Parliamentary Network of the World Bank (Wolfensohn and Kircher 2005).2 In addressing the Rwandan National Assembly, Wolfensohn invited African countries to deliver a specific message to donors: “It is really necessary that African leadership come out and say for itself, ‘We don’t want favors. We want a partnership. And we don’t want to be treated as third class citizens, because we are not. We want to lead our countries into the 21st century, and we want to do it standing upright and not with charity, but with leadership that is African leadership and choice that is African choice’” (Wolfensohn and Kircher 2005, 358).

At the Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development, Wolfensohn implicitly referenced the message of the Pearson Commission. He told other financial institutions that partnerships would mean a commitment in which developing countries would pursue good governance and developed countries would respond with the needed resources. Wolfensohn went on to cite this pact between donors and recipient countries in several speeches, memos, and media interviews. This conception of partnerships as a bargain between developing and developed countries bears striking resemblance to the ideas of the 1969 Pearson Commission. It shows an important line of continuity with traditional conceptions of partnerships as a contract between equals, overlooking the asymmetrical negotiating position of recipient countries. Wolfensohn (2005) took great pains to point out that the developing world’s commitment to better governance, including judicial reform, better financial systems, and the fight against corruption, was not being imposed from the top down. This time, the third world had freely chosen its development priorities, and that is what made the donor-recipient relationship a partnership and renewed the legitimacy of each actor’s commitments. It remains a matter of interpretation whether Wolfensohn believed that donors and recipients stood on equal footing to negotiate development assistance as partners or whether, by speaking in these terms, he was trying to steer other donors away from the traditional hierarchical relationships with recipient governments of developing countries.

When speaking to World Bank staff, Wolfensohn keyed in on the financial impact of private sector partners on development. He reasoned that, while private sector finance for development was half the size of official development assistance in the 1980s, it had grown to six times the size of official development assistance by 2000 in terms of dollar volume. “The involvement of the private sector is, of course, essential, and so as a source of partnership in terms of our own activities, the volume has risen dramatically,” he said (Wolfensohn 2001b, 13).

When Paul Wolfowitz took up the presidency of the World Bank in 2005, his endorsement of the partnership model was tepid compared to that of the Wolfensohn administration. In a speech at a climate change conference, Wolfowitz wondered whether the model of the public-private partnership could help promote climate-friendly technologies (Wolfowitz 2007). His anticorruption agenda dominated his tenure, and he drew heavy criticism from within the bank for appointing a team of outsiders to conduct evaluations of corruption surrounding bank projects. As he adopted what was deemed an outsider and hierarchical approach to internal management decisions, it was perhaps predictable that Wolfowitz would not rely on the language of partnerships, inclusion, or participatory decision-making. Wolfowitz’s few public references to partners concerned developing countries or multilateral development organizations. This was perceived as a move away from the Wolfensohnian conception of civil society and business actors as key and equal partners in the provision of global public goods.

When Robert Zoellick became president of the bank in 2007, a new version of partnerships emerged. In a speech widely cited in development circles, titled “Democratizing Development Economics,” Zoellick (2010a) referred to partnering in terms of inclusion. He stated that partners are vital sources of resources and knowledge. No longer would aid prescriptions flow from the bank in a unidirectional way. On the eve of the bank’s 2010 annual meeting, Zoellick’s message concerned democratizing development and recognizing partners’ roles in that enterprise. However, in Zoellick’s speeches the image of the bank as an active agent in partnerships was even more subdued than in Wolfensohn’s statements. The bank was described as a connector of actors rather than a convener, coordinator, or launcher of new relationships.

The foreign aid regime has grown in size and complexity, and many development institutions have emerged since President Wolfensohn left office. Today, municipalities in developed countries provide direct technical assistance to counterparts in the developing world, emerging economies have become major bilateral donors, private actors in developing countries extend commercial loans to governments everywhere, and manufacturing companies in developed countries invest directly in development projects for emission trading credits. Within this heavily populated constellation of development options, President Zoellick struggled to redefine the role of the World Bank. In what he termed a new multilateralism, Zoellick described the bank as a connective tissue stretching over a large sprawl of institutions and individuals who had the power to influence global governance. He likened the new multilateralism to the sprawl of the internet and contrasted it with the old multilateralism whereby a club of developed nation-states made the key economic decisions that would affect the lives of most of the world’s populations. During a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Zoellick (2010b) said, “Woodrow Wilson wished for a League of Nations. We need a League of Networks” (para. 97). The wider conception of partners as public and private actors again became prevalent in bank literature, and partners were identified as valuable sources of new ideas. In 2008, Zoellick affirmed: “Donors need to be more flexible and innovative in creating partnerships with new players. I’m delighted that we have so many foundations and civil society groups joining this effort. I found them to be extremely useful in prodding, thinking, and trying to come up with new ideas” (para. 13).

Although this book covers the twenty-year period between 1992 and 2012, when Zoellick left office, it is interesting to note that the World Bank under Jim Yong Kim changed its focus on key partners and put increasing emphasis on the role of the private sector for financing and implementing projects for development. The World Bank Group’s 2013 Strategy (World Bank 2013b) identified the private sector as an important source for resources and expertise in meeting global development needs, and partnerships as a key tool for leveraging it. The bank increasingly took on the role of a middleman, facilitating profitable investments in emerging markets and projects to address climate change (Thomas 2018). President Kim put much greater emphasis on infrastructure partnerships, which are closer to service agreements between a government actor and a private entity and quite different from what the World Bank calls global and regional partnership programs, which are the heart of this study.3 For example, the Public-Private Partnership Knowledge Lab, launched in 2015, is exclusively focused on infrastructure partnerships.

Under Kim, public-private partnerships remained an important vehicle for driving improvements in infrastructure and basic services such as health, education, sanitation, and housing (World Bank 2013b). At the Third International Conference on Financing for Development in Addis Ababa, Kim 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” (Kim 2015). During a speech at the London School of Economics in 2017, Kim made it clear how significant this shift was:

To succeed with the immense tasks ahead of us, we have to fundamentally change our approach to development finance . . . our top priority should be to systematically de-risk both projects and countries to enable private sector financing, while at the same time ensuring that these investments benefit poor countries and poor people. We should do this by crowding in the private sector, whenever possible. And we should combine this with our knowledge—technical expertise, knowledge about the countries and the economy—so that the capital really works for poor countries and poor people. (paras. 51–54)

In 2018, the New York Times published an article in its business section titled “The World Bank Is Remaking Itself as a Creature of Wall Street” (Thomas 2018). This cultural and organizational shift sparked debate within the bank and among civil society organizations over the extent to which the organization should rely on the private sector to help the poor and how much aid should be delivered through the bank’s traditional multilateral partnerships (Loewenberg 2015; Thomas 2018).

The impact of leaders, including their preferences, styles, and authority over the IOs they direct, has been the subject of much study since the League of Nations. As Robert Cox (1969) explains it,

The origin of the comparative study of executive heads of international organizations was the observation that Albert Thomas was a very different kind of man from Sir Eric Drummond and had very different ideas about how to carry out his job. From this observation stemmed a number of speculations. The failure of the League of Nations in the late thirties was contrasted with the apparent success of the International Labor Organization (ILO). Would the story have been different had a Thomas been Secretary-General of the League? (205)

The executive head is an important intervening variable in the development of IO partnerships, and therefore this discussion has briefly described the changing visions of bank presidents since George Woods. However, the book’s thesis concerns the impact of bureaucracies on partnership performance, so the next sections explore how the bank translated the idea of partnership into action.

The View from Operations: Implementation Milestones of the Partnership Model

Global partnerships emerged spontaneously and uncoordinated within different divisions of the bank, addressing different regions and themes. Until 2000 the bank lacked a consistent, coherent definition of partnership, criteria for bank involvement and institutional or thematic priorities, and organizational processes for approval and oversight. As a result, the impetus for the bank to join or initiate a partnership was largely a matter of motivated bank staff in a given sector, external groups’ initiatives, or high-level interest that generated specific global programs (e.g., the World Bank/World Wildlife Fund Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use). This situation was partly remedied in March 2001, when the bank defined five priority areas for involvement in global partnerships: information and knowledge, communicable diseases, environmental commons, international financial architecture, and trade and integration (World Bank 2002a). In September of that same year it announced that it was becoming a full partner with the UN in implementing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These eight goals had the virtue of identifying some measures of development. However, with eighteen subgoals and forty-eight indicators, the MDGs were very broad and covered the full range of development work. This attempt to be thorough diluted the objective of defining priorities for global partnerships. Thus guidance remained generic enough to justify involvement across a wide gamut of topics and partners. There was no specific guidance as to which partners the bank should select. In this context there was mounting concern over the reputational risk the bank was assuming as it started partnering with a wide range of private actors (World Bank 2004a).

In 1998 the bank started consolidating partnerships under fewer institutional units and managing them through the new Development Grant Facility (DGF). The DGF was meant to bring a higher level of coherence to the bank’s grantmaking activities to “encourage innovation, catalyze partnerships and broaden the scope of Bank services” (World Bank 1998, 7–8). Approximately two-thirds of all World Bank partnerships received DGF funding.4 In 2001 the bank launched a series of organizational initiatives to streamline the general strategy, oversight, and operational responsibility of partnerships. Today the bank refers to global partnerships as a group of collaborative development initiatives that go beyond traditional country work (World Bank 2017a, 64). However, dispersal and lack of coherence in selecting global partners, and poorly elaborated criteria for selecting the initiatives and partners the bank should support, remain key concerns.

In 2005 the bank created a new product line, GP: Global Partnerships, to differentiate and internally account for its growing partnership business. The Strategic Framework for the World Bank’s Global Programs and Partnerships stipulates three lines of work within the GP product. The first are institutional collaborations, which are “simple partnerships in which there is no shared financing or formal shared decision making”; the second are called partnership programs, in which “partners seek to work together to fund and implement new programs jointly in the form of a partnership program, which may have a separate governance structure and a dedicated secretariat”; and the third are programmatic trust funds, in which the bank acts as a fiduciary manager of “a growing number of donor-funded grant programs” (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2005, 37). Although the bank refers to these three types of arrangements as global partnership programs, this book focuses specifically on the second line of work, which the bank calls partnership programs. Table 1.1 lists some of the key historical events that marked the way the bank conceptualized and executed partnership governance arrangements over time, with an emphasis on those events affecting the growth of partnerships in the environmental sector.

Partnership Implementation

At the beginning of the millennium, the bank reported it had seventy global partnerships (World Bank 2002a). By 2010 there were 132 global and regional partnership programs that were defined by a set of stricter criteria, including shared governance between partners (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2011). Research for this book on the status of partnerships in 2012 increased the number of initiatives that count as global or regional partnerships according to the bank’s stricter criteria to 145 (World Bank 2013b; World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2011).5 Because of the number and variety of issue areas in which the bank has initiated or joined partnerships, it is not possible to distill here how such varying arrangements might affect democratic, innovative, and financial deficits in global governance. A large and heterogeneous number of cases of this sort would require the use of proxy measures that are crude and unreliable metrics of democracy and innovation, for example. Instead, I examine general patterns of growth across time and the types of partners the bank involved in all its global partnerships, then analyze the partnerships that focus on biodiversity specifically. This increasingly narrower stocktaking allows a comparison of biodiversity partnerships with others the bank is engaged in, followed by an assessment of their impact on democracy, innovation, and financial resources for conservation.

Table 1.1

Timeline of Major Events for the Partnership Approach in the World Bank (Environmental Sector)

1968

• First public-private partnership involving the World Bank is launched, the International Comparison Program. This program, which compares GDP across states, started as a collaboration between the United Nations Statistical Division and the University of Pennsylvania, with support from the Ford Foundation and the World Bank. It has since grown to cover much of the world, with partners from international, national, regional, and subregional agencies. It continues to this day.

1969

• Pearson Commission releases its report, Partners in Development.

1972

• First public-private partnership with an environment-related theme, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, is launched, with UNDP, FAO, foundation, and other agricultural research initiatives.

1991

• Global Environmental Facility is created, with the World Bank as the fiduciary administrator. The GEF is a financial mechanism to support international conventions and is primarily focused on biodiversity, climate change, and international waters. The bank, UNDP, and UNEP were selected as the first implementing agencies.

• First grant from the GEF is approved: a $4.5 million project to protect the biological diversity of two endangered forest ecosystems in Poland.

• Multilateral Fund for the Implementation of the Montreal Protocol is launched.

1995

• In his first address at an annual meeting as president, James Wolfensohn highlights partnerships and calls for a new “compact” between the bank, donors, and recipient countries (Wolfensohn 1995).

• President Wolfensohn sends an internal memo to staff reflecting on his first annual meeting and highlighting the importance of the partnership approach.

1996

• World Bank creates a new information clearinghouse for private businesses that want to become involved in the bank’s development projects. The Business Partnership Center serves as a central contact point for information and referral services for the private sector.a

• World Bank’s Operations Evaluation Department releases its Annual Review of Evaluation Results. Among its key recommendations are building strategic alliances with partners with expertise in technical assistance.

1997

• President Wolfensohn issues The Strategic Compact: Renewing the Bank’s Effectiveness to Fight Poverty. One of the pillars of the compact was to improve partnership with clients. As a result, the number of global partnerships grew significantly beginning in 1998.

• Bank establishes the Development Grant Facility and places all global and regional programs and partnerships receiving World Bank funding under a single management umbrella.

1998

• Development Committee meets in Washington to discuss the increased role of partnerships.b

• World Bank joins with over 70 private sector and civil society organizations to implement new ways of working in partnership with governments and communities to maximize development impact through a new initiative called Business Partners for Development.

• Collaborative Partnership on Forests is launched, with multilaterals, the Convention on Biodiversity secretariat, and forest networks.

• World Commission on Dams partnership is launched, with governments, industry, academia, and NGO networks.

• World Bank and World Wildlife Fund announce the Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use.

1999

• World Bank Group releases its formal mission statement incorporating the language of partnerships “to help people help themselves and their environment by providing resources, sharing knowledge, building capacity, and forging partnerships in the public and private sectors” (World Bank 2004c).

• President Wolfensohn launches the Comprehensive Development Framework. One of its four pillars is forging partnerships.

• Partnership Council is created as an advisory panel “to support a more proactive management of partnerships and to provide a forum for Bank-wide discussion and learning” (World Bank 2002a, annex A, 1). It is chaired by a managing director and consists of vice presidents particularly active in partnerships.

• Prototype Carbon Fund is established.

2000

• Bank’s board of directors receives the first presentation on a bankwide strategy for selection and oversight of global partnerships. Six criteria for engaging in partnerships are stipulated. Managing directors are to review all new major partnerships at the conceptual stage.

• The bank’s Environment Strategy emphasizes the importance of the partnership approach.

• Working Together, the World Bank’s report on how and why it partners with civil society, is published.

2001

• The bank’s board is presented with a consolidated Framework for Managing Global Programs and Partnerships.

• World Bank creates the Management Committee, composed of the president and managing directors, to address priority setting and strategy for global programs and partnerships.

• World Bank identifies five global public good priorities for bank involvement in global partnerships: information and knowledge, communicable diseases, environmental commons, international financial architecture, and trade and integration.

• Private Sector and Infrastructure Network is the first to formulate a risk assessment and approval process for private sector partnerships.

• World Bank launches PATS, a new Partnership Approval and Tracking System, which integrates several partnership-related processes into one business process.

• President Wolfensohn’s (2001b) welcome address to the Second Annual Staff Exchange Program is titled “Unleashing the Power of Partnerships,” reinforcing his focus on this governance approach.

2002

• President Wolfensohn speaks at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, calling for partnerships for peace.

• President Wolfensohn’s speech at the Monterey Conference on Financing for Development calls for enduring partnerships.

• Twenty-four multilateral and bilateral donor agencies launch a joint website to share information on the activities each organization is undertaking in developing countries, the Country Analytic Work Partnership.

• World Bank launches a new $100 million BioCarbon Fund, a public-private partnership to provide finance for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

2004

• President Wolfensohn’s remarks on the environment at the Brookings Institution repeatedly invoke the partnership approach.

2005

• TerrAfrica is launched, drawing partners from governments, international organizations, civil society, and the private sector. To date, this partnership has secured $3 billion in investments to address land degradation in Africa.

2007

• Robert Zoellick succeeds Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank Group and announces that the bank will significantly increase its support to international efforts to fight climate change. Global and regional partnerships with a focus on environmental issues, particularly climate change, increase substantially under Zoellick.

• World Bank launches the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, which compensates developing countries for greenhouse gas emission reductions.

• Start of 2007–2008 world food price crisis and a renewed focus on partnerships to promote food security.

2008

• World Bank and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launch a partnership to manage coastal resources and measure changes in climate in Latin America.

2011

• IFC launches Handshake, a quarterly journal on public-private partnerships published by the World Bank Group.

2012

• Jim Yong Kim becomes president of the World Bank. He was cofounder of a community-focused health organization called Partners in Health.

• Global Partnership for Oceans is launched, bringing together 150 partners from government, international organizations, civil society, and the private sector to restore ocean health.

Notes: a. The Business Partnership Center ceased operations in June 2002. b. The Development Committee is a forum of ministers of finance or development who advise the board of governors of the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on critical issues related to development.

Sources: “The World Bank Group Historical Chronology” (World Bank 2011), President Wolfensohn speeches (Wolfensohn and Kircher 2005), World Bank Support for Global and Regional Initiatives under the Development Grant Facility (World Bank 2002b), “TerrAfrica” (World Bank 2015), interviews with Bank Information Center staff (July 2018), Handshake (Carter 2011).

In the mid-1990s the bank initiated a number of global partnerships. Their systematic growth is particularly visible during the Wolfensohn presidency and at the time of the Strategic Compact, which was billed as a plan for institutional renewal (World Bank 2002a). The Strategic Compact was a response to various internal and external forces coalescing for change. Weaver and Leiteritz (2005) have argued that it was an institutional response to a particularly turbulent period in the bank’s history. Organized civil society groups and NGOs had mounted campaigns against the social and environmental damage of bank loans. The internal evaluation known as the Wapenhans Report delivered a scathing review of different projects’ performance. With the threat of communism receding, donors started cutting back on foreign aid. Client countries complained of the extensive red tape involved in loan operations and started to borrow in larger amounts from private capital sources. At this time, bank management became particularly active in promoting new partnerships to encourage private actors’ participation and innovation as part of the institutional renewal agenda (World Bank 2002a). An Operations Evaluation Department assessment of a sample of seventy of the bank’s global programs at the time shows a spike in new initiatives in 1998 and a relative decrease in their growth after the compact ended in 2000. The report explains that the decrease was the result of bank budgetary cutbacks, after the compact’s $250 million resources for administrative costs came to an end and stricter criteria for approving and managing new partnerships were put in place (World Bank 2002a). However, environmentally related partnerships grew more rapidly after 2000, suggesting that the Strategic Compact did not have the same effect in this issue area (World Bank 2008, 2013b; World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2011).

In 2009, a stocktaking assessment showed that bilateral partners were the most frequent donors in partnership arrangements with the World Bank. The United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States were at the top of the list (World Bank 2010b). These three countries also have a domestic history of actively promoting partnerships, although their domestic partnership models diverge substantially from the bank’s approach. The history of the British, Canadian, and US governments’ experience shows a very narrow view of partnerships for financial efficiencies.6 The bank instead justified its partnerships based on the governance values of democracy and innovation, which it expected would catalyze additional financing. Evaluating whether this demonstrates a failure to internationalize domestic norms is outside the scope of this book, but it is interesting to note the divergence between the domestic and international practice of public-private partnerships with respect to the traditional assumption in international relations that international organizations (IOs) are mere reflections of state interests. If the bank has been pursuing partnerships because its largest donor states have pushed the organization in this direction, then these same donors did not give the IO a mandate with a specific approach to forging those partnerships. The bank followed its own interpretation of what the goals and means of partnerships should be, which diverged from what its bilateral donors were doing domestically.

The bank’s assessment of its most frequent partners also shows that, among multilateral partners, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) was the most recurrent collaborator, followed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the African Development Bank. Among foundations, the bank partnered most often with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and George Soros’s Open Society Institute. Finally, among NGOs only environmental organizations appear to have been frequent bank partners, with Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund as the only institutions repeatedly chosen to form alliances with the bank (World Bank 2010b).

A simple frequency calculation of how many times the bank partners with any one individual organization does not say much about the significance of the partnerships being formed. There is no indication of how strategic a given initiative may be for the bank, the partners, or the global issue area the partnership will govern. Similarly, partnerships like the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, with $11 billion in financing and a wide spectrum of public and private partners, is weighed on equal terms with a partnership like the Gender Innovation Fund, which had three partner institutions and a budget of $8 million. With this methodological limitation in mind, global partnerships were still principally formed with public actors rather than civil society organizations or private firms. This empirical picture, illustrated in figure 1.1, suggests that the debate and concern over the privatization of state authority through partnerships need to be qualified.

There are some important exceptions. The Gates Foundation was almost as frequent a partner of the bank as the IMF, the bank’s sister organization. It was also a more frequent partner than the EU, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, and UNICEF. An interview with a senior bank official yielded a possible explanation. Private actors in some issue areas, such as the Gates Foundation in health, surpassed the bank’s ability to convene stakeholders, finance projects, and create policy.7 In such cases, bank partnerships with civil society grew in particularly high numbers. The bank reached out to such strategic partners as frequently as it did in an effort to ensure the IO remained relevant in a particular global issue area. The issue area of the environment is unique in that it is the only area that generated a number of global partnerships between the bank and the NGO community. Some NGOs became as prominent as privately endowed foundations in bank relationships, making NGOs important environmental governance players. However, these were not just any NGOs; the bank chose large international conservation organizations as its main partners. Finally, individual firms were not frequent partners. Though business actors participated in bank partnerships, no single firm partnered with the bank on several initiatives.

Figure 1.1

Proportion of Partnerships for Each Partner Type—Biodiversity and All Sectors, 2012. Source: World Bank Independent Evaluation Group (2011).

Features of Biodiversity Partnerships

Environment-related partnerships, including those in the agriculture, energy and mining, environment, and water sectors, have been disproportionately represented in the bank’s partnerships portfolio, in both relative numbers and budgets. Figure 1.2 shows the relative weight of these four sectors in relation to the rest of the bank’s partnerships. The bank’s most frequent partners in biodiversity have been NGOs, with Conservation International leading that group. Of the remaining categories of actors, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) is the most frequent multilateral partner, the MacArthur Foundation the most frequent partner among foundations, and the Netherlands the most frequent among bilateral donors. Business partners participate in only two global partnerships. Academic institutions participate in only one partnership. Whereas the bank as a whole is still largely forging partnerships with public actors (mainly other multilateral organizations), in the case of biodiversity conservation NGOs are the most frequent partners. As figure 1.1 shows, in biodiversity the bank partners with NGOs 83 percent of the time, whereas the bankwide average shows NGOs as partners 44 percent of the time. This is a comparison between all bank partnerships and those exclusively focused on biodiversity conservation. The World Bank’s biodiversity partnerships (n = 12) are few in number, and a change in the partner composition of an individual biodiversity partnership will have a significant impact on the overall proportion of partner types involved. Nonetheless, the figure illustrates the bank’s reliance on civil society actors for biodiversity governance, and how some large conservation NGOs have assumed positions of influence by partnering with the bank on conservation activities.

The World Bank Group’s publications frequently refer to engaging the private sector, and in 2008 the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the GEF launched the Earth Fund, a trust fund to explicitly engage business actors in biodiversity conservation.8 This represented a concerted effort by the World Bank–administered GEF to enlist private sector participation. Among the cases analyzed in this book, IFC also launched two global partnerships to engage business actors, the Small and Medium Scale Enterprise Program and the Environmental Business Finance Program. In both cases, governance decisions rested almost entirely with IFC, yet IFC did not commit any of its own funds and chose to rely exclusively on GEF financing. The drive to engage business actors was not matched with financial commitments on the part of IFC. Furthermore, private actors in most cases participated in advisory or implementation capacities, akin to the public-private partnership model that the UK, Canada, and the United States operationalized between governments and businesses. Private actors did not have executive and formal decision-making roles in bank partnerships.

Figure 1.2 represents a snapshot of the World Bank’s involvement in GRPPs in which it was actively involved in 2012. It does not perfectly capture the historical trend of World Bank involvement in GRPPs as some partnerships may have closed at the time this snapshot was taken so they will not show up here. It will also be biased toward partnerships occurring more recently, as very few old partnerships would still be active in 2012. Nonetheless, this figure illustrates the influence of internal and external events on the evolution of GRPPs.

The biodiversity partnerships examined in this book are defined by five key conditions: they are global, cogoverned, public-private, operational initiatives that finance biodiversity conservation interventions on the ground. The basic features and justifications for these criteria are as follows:

Figure 1.2

A Snapshot of World Bank Partnerships in 2012. Source: World Bank Independent Evaluation Group (2011); World Bank (2013a).

Between 1992 and 2012, eighteen global partnership programs were launched to target biodiversity conservation, as identified through a portfolio review of the biodiversity unit, a stocktaking of global and regional partnership programs by the bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), and the FY2014 Development Grant Facility (DGF) report (World Bank 2008, 2013a; World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2011).14 However, only twelve of these partnerships meet the conceptual criteria detailed here; they are marked with an asterisk in table 1.2.15 A short description of the launch dates, partners, governance structure, goals, and conservation approaches championed by these twelve partnerships follows. The synopsis of each initiative is based on a review of the primary and secondary literature relevant to each partnership, including project documents, external and internal evaluations, and partnership budgets.16

Small and Medium Scale Enterprise Program

Launched in 1995 by IFC and the GEF, the Small and Medium Scale Enterprise Program (SME Program) received new funding in 2004 and continued under the name Environmental Business Finance Program. The SME Program provided-low-interest rate loans to financial intermediaries, which in turn would fund SMEs that wanted to invest in high-risk environmental ventures such as ecolodges, private reserves, certified fishing ventures, certified wood and forest products businesses, shade-grown coffee, and other sustainable agriculture initiatives. These partner intermediaries would receive risk incentives and performance fees according to the projects they generated (International Finance Corporation 2004). In total, twenty-five intermediaries were financed; they included both national firms, such as El Sewedy Electrical Supplies Company (for projects in Egypt), and international NGOs, such as the World Wildlife Fund-US (for projects in Papua New Guinea). These intermediaries in turn financed 140 SME ventures in twenty-one countries. The initiative was considered significant because of these accomplishments and as a first demonstration to the GEF of how nongrant, private sector solutions could help environmental governance; it was a market approach to conservation. “The program sought to demonstrate that environmental benefits could be achieved through the private sector on a commercial basis, without the need for grants or subsidies” (International Finance Corporation 2007, 30). The innovative aspect of this partnership was that it was among the first attempts by IFC to green its lending portfolio and target beneficiaries that were normally not served by its large loans. Profitable loans for the bank are above $10 million, and loans of this size are too large for small conservation business ventures (Heher 2003). The SME Program’s idea was “to devise financing mechanisms for projects that are too small or unproven to attract other sources of international credit” (French 1998, 80). It was a timid step toward community-based, market-supported conservation, and one that IFC moved away from in the years that followed. In both the SME Program and its later incarnation, the Environmental Business Finance Program, IFC did not risk its own resources, preferring to use GEF financing instead. Despite IFC’s repeated statements as to the importance of the private sector, the market’s role in conservation, and the innovative nature of this program, only one other similar partnership has been launched since 1992.

Table 1.2

Global Biodiversity Partnerships, 1992–2012

Partnership name FY

1.

*Small and Medium Scale Enterprise Program

1995

2.

*Global Invasive Species Program

1996

3.

*World Bank/World Wildlife Fund Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use

1998

4.

*Forest Trends

1998

5.

Forests and Biodiversity Window

2000

6.

*Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

2001

7.

Local Language Field Guides

2001

8.

*PROFOR

2002

9.

Development Marketplace—Climate Change and Biodiversity

2003

10.

*Environmental Business Finance Program

2004

11.

*Coral Reef Targeted Research and Capacity Building For Management

2004

12.

*Biodiversity and Agricultural Commodities

2007

13.

Assessment and Recommendations on Improving Access for Indigenous Peoples to Conservation Funding

2007

14.

*Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund Phase 1 and Phase 2

2000 and 2007

15.

*Global Tiger Initiative

2008

16.

International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime

2010

17.

Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services

2010

18.

*Save Our Species

2011

Note: *Initiatives that meet the conceptual definition of partnership advanced in this study.

Sources: World Bank (2006, 2008); World Bank Independent Evaluation Group (2011).

Global Invasive Species Program

Initiated in 1996, the Global Invasive Species Program (GISP) sought to protect biodiversity by limiting the impact of alien invasive species. Its objectives were to improve the scientific basis of decision-making, develop early-warning systems and responses, enhance control methods, and strengthen international agreements on invasive species (World Bank 2008). The founding partners were the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), The Nature Conservancy, and the South African National Biodiversity Institute. The partnership was governed by an executive board, which was composed exclusively of the four founding members and a representative from Australia’s National Science Agency. The GISP secretariat was hosted by various institutions: initially by Stanford University, then by the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, followed by the South African National Biodiversity Institute in Cape Town, South Africa, and finally the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International in Nairobi, Kenya (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009).

The IEG assessed the bank’s participation in GISP between 2003 and 2006. It noted several shortcomings in the design and management of the partnership and questioned the logic behind the bank’s participation. One of the comments it made on governance was that GISP had blurred the roles of governance and management. Most members of the management team also serve on the board of directors (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009). Unlike the other cases in this study, the World Bank did not initiate this partnership. The partnership was also unusual in that the bank was a major financial supporter but never became part of the partnership’s executive board, its main governing body.17 The bank contributed US $3 million to the existing partnership between 2003 and 2006. This covered more than 80 percent of the partnership’s budget during these years. The main goal of the bank during this time was to help the partnership establish its secretariat in South Africa (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009).

The focus of the partnership’s activities was on organizing workshops and generating publications to provide scientific and technical tools for states to manage the invasive species problem at the national and regional levels. As such, it was most closely aligned with a state-centered conservation approach to biodiversity.

World Bank/World Wildlife Fund Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use

Initiated in 1998, this partnership was one of the first high-profile experiments of the World Bank with the partnership model. The partners were the World Bank and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the partnership was more widely publicized than any previous ones. Its goal was the conservation of forests, and biodiversity conservation was one of its main justifications. Forests, in particular rainforests, house the greatest part of Earth’s biological diversity. Deforestation is one of the biggest threats to biodiversity. As such, the bank routinely cited this partnership as a best practice in biodiversity governance. The alliance set three concrete targets for conservation: 50 million hectares of new forest protected areas, 50 million hectares of existing reserves brought under effective protection, and 200 million hectares of the world’s production forests under independently certified sustainable management (World Bank/World Wildlife Fund Alliance 2004). With its clear focus on financing projects that create more protected areas and general discourse on protection, the alliance’s approach was mainly one of command and control. However, it also relied on certification schemes, which fall within the liberal environmentalist model of conservation. Interviews with partnership staff members suggest there was a strong preference for command and control prescriptions wherever possible, with market incentives for conservation introduced only when it was not otherwise possible to create protected areas.18

Forest Partnerships Program: Forest Trends

This NGO grew out of the World Bank’s Forest Market Transformation Initiative. The bank convened a group of conservation NGOs, private sector innovators, and foundations to generate project proposals for forest management. The World Bank and the MacArthur Foundation supported the creation of this Washington-based NGO in 1999. Other partners at different times of the partnership included the Netherlands, the Ford Foundation, the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Wallace Global Fund, Summit, Rockefeller Brothers, and the Kohlberg Foundation (World Bank 2002b). A board of trustees governed the NGO through a board of directors, in which the World Bank had a representative. The NGO stated that its work program was based on “ecology, economy and equity” (Forest Trends 2010, para. 1). It used such market-based mechanisms as marketing certified timber to promote conservation and enhance the livelihoods of local forest communities. Since it veered from the traditional conservation approach of creating protected areas, it represents a relative innovation in biodiversity governance.

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Launched in 2004, this project had the objective of conducting a scientific appraisal of ecosystem change and its consequences for human well-being. The founding partners, who identified the need and purpose of the assessment, were the World Resources Institute, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Bank, and UNDP. Once the partnership was in full operation, the Millennial Ecosystem Assessment’s governing board was made up of representatives from several UN organizations, international conventions, NGOs, academic institutions, business, and indigenous peoples. I consider it a partnership because the founding members jointly established the goals of the association. It produced the first global snapshot of the state of the world’s biodiversity, predating what became the Global Assessments of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. The four founding partners were mobilized by the impact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had in providing a scientific basis for policy action. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change could count on the authoritative force of this expert panel, but the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) lacked a similar mechanism. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment thus incorporated research from more than 1,360 experts worldwide, and its findings were published in technical and synthesis reports (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Working Group 2005). The partnership’s overall purpose, to use scientific claims to influence policy, belongs to a command and control approach to conservation governance. However, the reports also include many references to valuations of ecosystem services and linkages between poverty and conservation.

Program on Forests

The Program on Forests (PROFOR) was a global initiative launched in 1997 and managed first by UNDP and then relocated to the World Bank in 2002. At the bank, the European Commission and the governments of Finland, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, the UK, Italy, and the Netherlands were its primary funders. All of its financial partners were public actors. It is included as a public-private partnership because an advisory board that includes its donor members, as well as two nondonor representatives from the private sector, developing countries, or NGOs, governed it. The advisory board operated on the basis of consensus (PROFOR 2002). As such, this partnership marginally meets the partnership criteria outlined above. Like IFC’s initiatives, it represents one of the few instances among the bank’s global partnerships of an alternative governance approach to the command and control tradition. PROFOR was one of the only initiatives that adopted a community-based approach and promoted local biodiversity interests (rather than mainly global interests) in conservation.

Environmental Business Finance Program

Considered a second phase of the Small and Medium Scale Enterprise Program, the Environmental Business Finance Program (EBFP) was an expansion of the earlier partnership. This and the previous SME Program were borderline cases of partnerships in terms of the criteria stipulated earlier. Although both initiatives made repeated claims that their financial intermediaries were partners, they had implementation functions and few if any governance functions. However, the EBFP set up an advisory board that had some governance functions. The IFC review committee, which made decisions on loans and intermediaries, was advised by a panel of internal and external environmental experts and made joint investment decisions. To this limited extent there was a “partnership” governance body,19 though it was institutionally much closer to the domestic partnership model in which the public actor retains governing authority and private actors are hired to implement activities.

Coral Reef Targeted Research and Capacity Building for Management

This global partnership involved a consortium of research institutes studying coral reef vulnerabilities. Launched in 2004, the initiative had as its goal addressing “key gaps in the world’s knowledge and understanding of coral reefs, and put[ting] new knowledge and technology into the hands of decision-makers and reef managers where it can make a difference” (Coral Reef Targeted Research 2009b, para. 1). The founding partners were the World Bank, the GEF, the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, and the University of Queensland, Australia.

The initiative was organized around six key research themes established by the founding partners: coral reef bleaching, disease, biological connections between reefs, restoration, remote sensing, and tools to help policymakers manage reefs. Though partnership publications refer to more than fifty research institutes as partners, none of these had authority to establish the lines of research—and though the categories of investigation are admittedly broad, they were specifically geared toward assisting policymakers. The investigators focused on implementing the partners’ vision. An executive committee composed of academic institutions and NGOs allocated further resources based on its review of research conducted. For this reason, and because the founding partners shared authority in establishing the original direction of this initiative, it is included as a partnership.

The initiative was coordinated through regional centers in the Philippines, Mexico, Zanzibar, and Australia. One of the reasons these countries were selected (with the exception of Australia) is because the initiative sought to rectify the discrepancy that whereas most coral reefs are found in the developing world, most research on them is conducted in universities of developed countries (World Bank 2004a). To this limited extent there are echoes of the participation and equity discourses of the community conservation approach. However, the research was expressly geared toward assisting states to better monitor and manage their coral reefs, and stressed the role of science-based management. As such, it engaged in a top-down command and control approach to conservation.

Biodiversity and Agricultural Commodities

Launched in 2007, the Biodiversity and Agricultural Commodities (BACP) initiative was a partnership among IFC, GEF, Japan, and the Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil. Its aims were to reshape production practices in four main commodity industries: palm oil, soy, cocoa, and sugarcane. The objective was to preserve genetic, species, and ecosystem diversity in the production of these agricultural commodities. The partnerships’ secretariat was hosted by Chemonics International. This private consulting firm and the international NGO Ecoagriculture Partners won bids to respectively manage and monitor the partnership’s activities. This separation of financing, implementation, monitoring, evaluation, and governing roles across many public and private actors represents a unique case of governing arrangements among bank partnerships. The BACP was formally governed by a steering committee composed of IFC, the GEF, World Bank, independent experts, the Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil, and representatives from the soy, sugar, and cocoa industries. The governing board self-consciously noted that its membership was designed to “guarantee a needed plurality of views, thematically and geographically” (International Finance Corporation 2008, 1). It promoted verification and certification schemes and incentives for financial institutions that adopted policies that encouraged biodiversity-friendly supply chains. The partnership adopted a market-oriented conservation approach.

Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund

The Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund (CEPF) has been one of the highest-profile partnerships for the bank over the past two decades. Originally launched in 2000, it was renewed in 2007 with additional financing. Its founding partners were Conservation International, the GEF, and the World Bank, with the MacArthur Foundation and the government of Japan joining soon after its inception. This partnership manages a small grants program that provides financing to NGOs and local communities to work in biodiversity “hotspots.” These are geographic areas first designated in 1988 by the environmentalist Norman Myers for their high degree of endemism coupled with substantial habitat loss.20 The partnership assigns each hotspot a set of strategic priorities, and project applicants must fit their funding requests within one of these priorities to be eligible for a small grant (World Bank 2007). The protected areas recipe receives extensive financing.21

Conservation International still hosts the CEPF secretariat in its Arlington, Virginia, offices. The partnership adopted a pure shareholder mode of governance; hence noncontributing institutions were not part of the decision-making process. The fund is governed by a high-level donor council, which meets once a year and is advised by a working group. Decisions made by the donor council include articulating a strategic vision for the partnership, approving each of the ecosystem profiles, approving the annual spending plan, and setting the conditions for new donors to enter the fund (World Bank 2007). However, it is important to note that this shared decision-making arrangement exists only at the pinnacle of the partnership, not at the community level, where the partnership works to “build constituencies of civil society groups in each hotspot that can implement activities in a manner that collectively achieves the program’s conservation goals” (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2007, vii) rather than to facilitate local decision-making with respect to biodiversity management choices.22 Although the partnership’s literature makes frequent reference to the extensive involvement of local communities, the financing is directed toward activities that fit well within the command and control approach. Communities and NGOs are not called on to define the biodiversity problem but to respond to the problem as framed by the fund’s partners. Yet CEPF, Conservation International, and the World Bank promote the initiative as innovative because it focuses on community conservation. In the bank’s words, the fund is “a new and different approach to biodiversity conservation. It focuses on providing strategic assistance to engage nongovernmental organizations, community groups, and other civil society partners in conserving Earth’s biodiversity” (World Bank 2006, 52).

Global Tiger Initiative

Launched in 2008, the Global Tiger Initiative (GTI) is a partnership whose founding members included the World Bank, the GEF, the WWF, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Smithsonian Institution, and the International Tiger Coalition (representing more than forty NGOs); the initiative was led by thirteen tiger range countries. It was subsequently restructured as the Global Tiger Initiative Council. The secretariat was hosted by the World Bank, while the partnership was governed jointly with tiger range countries (Global Tiger Initiative 2015). The objective of the GTI was to promote tiger conservation by developing management strategies and securing political commitment for conservation. It sought to accomplish these goals by raising awareness about the crisis facing tigers globally, using partnerships and creating international forums with conservationists and range countries to develop conservation plans and secure political support, while raising funding for conservation projects from donors. The GTI adopted a primarily state-centered approach to conservation, promoting policy and institutional strengthening of the state to improve habitat protection and counter illegal trade in tigers, as well as underwriting scientific monitoring (World Bank 2012; Global Tiger Initiative Secretariat 2013).

Save Our Species

Save Our Species (SOS) was launched in 2011 as a partnership among the World Bank, the GEF, IUCN, and the World Wildlife Fund. Modeled on lessons learned from the CEPF and GTI initiatives, its objective was to raise financial resources from the private sector and provide grants to civil society actors to support conservation of threatened species and the conservation priorities of its corporate and private sector donors (Global Environment Facility 2011; World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2015b). IUCN was the managing partner. Based on the bank’s previous experience relating to Conservation International’s conflict of interests as managing partner and grant recipient in CEPF, IUCN would not be eligible to receive the grants it administered. The partnership was governed by a donor council composed of the four founding partners and chaired by the GEF. An additional four seats were allocated to private sector donors, who contributed above $1.5 million over a three-year period. After the initial term, WWF’s seat was to be allocated to an NGO on the basis of its financial contribution to the partnership (Global Environment Facility 2011). The council set the partnership’s strategic direction and approved its operational plans. After the initial funding from the GEF and World Bank ended, SOS aimed to raise additional resources through partnerships with the private sector. However, the bank’s Implementation Completion Report rated the partnership as unsatisfactory, noting that it had failed to raise a significant amount of funding from any source (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2017).

These twelve initiatives showcase the scope of the bank’s governance of global biodiversity through partnerships. They demonstrate that the practice of partnering with non-state actors has an established historical trajectory within the World Bank and IFC; that there is a tendency to partner with NGOs rather than with firms, although these NGOs are almost exclusively large international US-based organizations; and that the traditional governance approach of command and control is a prevalent approach, with the exception of some experiments with market conservation led by IFC. These trends are counterintuitive to some degree. For example, one might expect the World Bank, and particularly IFC, to have been able to create a business case for environmental conservation among private firms. Similarly, if partnerships were designed to be laboratories for experimentation with governance approaches, then the continued reliance on state regulation through command and control policies also requires additional explanation.

Conclusion

This chapter has traced the evolution of the partnership model at the World Bank from the perspective of presidents enacting a vision for the organization, operational staff tasked with designing organizational processes and procedures to implement that vision, and the partnerships that emerged as a result of this trajectory. Some general patterns that emerge from this stocktaking are investigated in more detail in the next chapter. Environmental partnerships (which include those in the agriculture, energy and mining, environment, and water sectors) constitute a significant proportion of all World Bank global partnerships. Biodiversity partnerships are unique in the kinds of partners that join the bank. Unlike partnerships in other issue areas, these partnerships are most often formed with NGOs rather than multilateral or bilateral donors. NGOs have become leading players in one of the main global environmental issue areas, though these are specifically large international conservation organizations and not subnational civil society or community groups in developing countries.

Is this an encouraging sign in global environmental governance? Susan Park (2009) analyzed how NGOs socialize IOs to conform to certain environmental standards.23 She described the power of transnational advocacy networks in greening the bank and transforming the identity of the organization. Non-state actors used persuasion through dialogue, protests, naming, and shaming as some of the main mechanisms to socialize IOs. Park extended this analysis to examine how the bank then diffused its environmental norms to other organizations. The question that remains unanswered is whether NGOs, which have had a desirable socializing impact as lobbyists, may be even more effective as partners (Domask 2003). Beyond greening the bank, have NGOs as partners been able to help the bank achieve its objectives of a more democratic, innovative, and financially sustainable biodiversity governance? This chapter’s review of twelve partnerships that meet the criteria set out in this book introduced the bank’s partners, goals, and approaches to conservation, information that allows us to start to answer that question. In the next chapter, I develop specific measures to systematically analyze what gains biodiversity partnerships have achieved in terms of democracy, innovation, and financing.