2 The Performance of World Bank Biodiversity Partnerships*

The World Bank has significant influence over its partnerships and takes on many roles in these governance arrangements, including as founder, convener, lender, and trust manager. An internal evaluation that sampled twenty-six global partnerships, found that the bank was a founder or cofounder of new partnerships in 97 percent of cases, a convener 89 percent of the time, contributed financial resources from the bank’s budget to 85 percent of the partnerships, was a member of the governing board in 89 percent of cases, chaired the board in 40 percent of cases, and hosted the partnership’s secretariat in 40 percent of cases (World Bank 2004a). Therefore, in most cases the bank exerts considerable formal control over partnership processes and outcomes.

In light of this influence, what impact has the World Bank had on its partnerships? There are many measures of impact; however, the bank’s own goals for pursuing partnerships constitute an important point of departure. I focus on the stated purposes that partnerships were set up to promote: democracy, innovation, and resources. If these have justified increasing the bank’s partnership business, then how well have biodiversity partnerships been able to deliver on these goals? This chapter assesses the twelve biodiversity partnerships identified and described in the previous chapter against the World Bank’s own rationale for promoting this kind of hybrid governance arrangement.

* 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.

Do Biodiversity Partnerships Democratize Global Governance?

Conceptions of what constitutes democratic decision-making evolve over time, as norms and values change. For example, Douglas Kenney (2000) evaluated arrangements for the collaborative management of natural resources in the United States and found that the current normative discourse on democratic decision-making favors participatory democracy in the Jeffersonian tradition rather than representative democracy following Madison’s model. As such, the normative ideals ascribed to healthy democratic institutions from an American perspective include diversity, pluralism, and adequate representation (Kenney 2000). This interpretation is consistent with the bank’s discourse on democratic goals, as the speeches of former bank presidents James Wolfensohn and Robert Zoellick demonstrate. The key goals highlighted by the bank have related to developing countries’ capacity to be in the driver’s seat, local ownership of development, and building consensus with all sectors of society. Wolfensohn in particular saw a crucial role for partners in helping coordinate the provision of global public goods. He said, “There is no way that the World Bank should be seen as assuming the role of coordinator of all programs” (Wolfensohn 1999, 22).

There are many pitfalls in defining what counts as democratic decision-making for a multilateral development bank. Democracy is understood differently by clients in varying contexts. The United States’ discourse to which Kenney refers may be a dominant one at the bank, but it represents a limited worldview with respect to democratic values. Different democratic values are unequally represented in the bank’s activities (Bexell, Tallberg, and Uhlin 2010). This can result in projects that expound the value of decentralization in the name of democracy without empowerment. For example, Jesse Ribot (2004) points out that in the interest of decentralization in forest conservation, central governments and big donors have often precipitated negative outcomes. Local people were not empowered to make decisions for themselves but were merely mobilized as labor to execute other actors’ conservation visions.1

The literature on community participation in natural resource management supports the idea that an engaged citizenry is better than a passive one. The debate is over what kinds of citizen participation are best for democracy and the environment (Irvin and Stansbury 2004). Studies in natural resource management have used a wide array of democratic measures, which limits conceptual agreement. With this limitation in mind, I refer to three key general dimensions of democracy the bank advocates, which are supported by a review of the literature on effective practices in environmental governance and an in-depth study of collaborative management of natural resources (Irvin and Stansbury 2004; Leach 2006). These dimensions of democracy are inclusiveness, representation, and empowerment.

Inclusiveness: Who Participates in Biodiversity Partnerships?

Inclusiveness is an important initial measure of democracy because it tells us who is allowed and enabled to participate in a given process. Partnerships that do not extend participation to actors beyond those who regularly take part in global governance may perpetuate, under a fashionable new governance recipe, existing power imbalances that make the status quo a preferable option to the partnership alternative on democratic deficit grounds alone (Leach 2006). To score inclusiveness, I assess the diversity of actors participating in any given partnership. Biodiversity governance is contested along public versus private, north versus south, and local versus global lines. Consequently, partnerships that include actors from civil society, firms, and government who come from developed and developing countries where biodiversity interventions take place and who advocate on behalf of global and local interests are considered relatively inclusive. On the other hand, a partnership that is limited to the bank and one international nongovernmental organization (NGO) that advocates primarily for conservation of global biodiversity is deemed less inclusive.

Bank partnerships tend to be diverse. In nine of the twelve cases introduced in the previous chapter, founding partners came from at least three of the six sectors analyzed here: multilateral organizations, bilateral organizations, NGOs, business, foundations, and academia. One sharp contrast between biodiversity partnerships and other partnerships is that the bank’s biggest partners are other multilateral organizations or NGOs. Whereas in other sectors, NGOs tend to be the least frequent partners, in biodiversity conservation NGOs participate most frequently. Business actors are not regular founding partners; in only two of the twelve cases were business actors involved in launching a new partnership, and these were both International Finance Corporation (IFC)–led initiatives. The IFC’s partnership with business actors is expected since the IFC’s mission is to assist business firms in developing countries. However, the absence of business firms from bank partnerships is analytically (if not empirically) puzzling. I discuss this in more detail later.

Other striking characteristics of biodiversity partnerships are that partners are overwhelmingly from Western, developed countries (the “north”) and work on global rather than local issues. The overwhelming majority of partner secretariats are located in North America or Europe, and the majority of partners were engaged in global programs. The headquartering of a partner in Europe or North America is not per se indicative of what policies the partnership will promote. Forest Trends, the institution resulting from a bank partnership, is an example of a northern NGO that promoted market policies that framed conservation around the livelihoods of the poor. However, an analysis of bank partners shows that most are organizations largely focusing on the global benefits of biodiversity conservation. Local needs and local benefits of conservation, such as environmental services for rural livelihoods, are not well represented in partnerships. In summary, bank partners in biodiversity conservation are diverse, though non-state actors, mainly from the NGO sector, are overrepresented vis-à-vis other private actors. The fact that the bank has associated mostly with northern, globally focused actors suggests that its partnerships are preserving the bank’s partners’ traditional focus on global biodiversity as informed by northern perspectives.

Representation: How Are Biodiversity Partnerships Governed?

Representation is also a key dimension of democracy because it describes how interests are managed at the governance table. In this case, representativeness is gauged using three measures: who chairs a partnership’s governing board (if the partnership’s executive board is chaired by the World Bank or another organization, that gives an indication of who the de facto lead partner is), whether the chair position is fixed or rotating (an indication of the extent to which formal decision-making leadership shifts among partners), and whether the partnership secretariat is hosted by the World Bank or by another organization (an additional indication of the level of control the bank exercises over partnerships).

In ten the twelve cases, the bank was the founder or cofounder of the partnership. The two exceptions are PROFOR, which was founded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the Global Invasive Species Program, which was initiated by international NGOs. This confirms the argument that international organizations (IOs) are partnership entrepreneurs and that they participate in partnerships of their own making, rather than become involved in programs launched by other global actors (Andonova 2007). Partnerships set up independent governing bodies. In eight cases, the bank chaired those governing boards. In the remaining four cases, another partner had the role of chair. However, the location of the entity hosting the partnership secretariat shows exactly the inverse. Secretariats hosted by the partnership management team are located inside the bank in only four cases. The bank retains control over the governing process by leading the partnership boards, but partners retain significant influence over the day-to-day implementation process by hosting the partnership management units. This division of influence may create a principal-agent relationship analogous to the one the bank has with its donor members. Whereas the bank is the agent and donor countries are the principals, in partnerships, the bank delegates responsibilities as a principal and its NGO partners execute as agents.2 In all cases except two (the Biodiversity and Agricultural Commodities Partnership and the Coral Reef Targeted Research Program), when secretariats are hosted outside the bank, they are always hosted by a large international conservation NGO.

Empowerment: Who Has a Voice in Biodiversity Partnership Governance?

The third component of democracy discussed here is empowerment. It measures the extent to which partners are able to bring their preferences to bear on the decisions made by the partnerships. Two dimensions of empowerment are probed: Who has a voice in the governance of a given partnership? And how influential is that voice in steering the partnership’s actions? To capture the first dimension, I evaluate whether the partnership follows a shareholder or stakeholder model of governance. In the former, only those actors that contribute financially to the partnership become members of the governing board. In the latter model, noncontributing actors are also part of the board that gives strategic direction to the partnership (World Bank 2002a). “The basic logic behind the stakeholder-centered model of representation is that having a moral or economic stake in the outcome of a public decision-making process entitles each faction to a seat at the table” (Leach 2006, 101). The stakeholder versus shareholder assessment is particularly relevant in the case of the World Bank, since stakeholder governance has been recommended as a best practice since 2002 in global partnerships (World Bank 2002a).

To capture the second dimension of influence of partners over the governing process, I evaluate whether the governing board has executive or advisory powers. If it has executive powers, the governing board has direct and formal influence over management and can direct the strategic direction of the partnership, allocate funds according to the priorities it establishes, and select future lines of work. If it has advisory powers, the governing board advises but does not prescribe. An important indicator of empowerment is the partners’ degree of involvement in framing the problem and designing the solutions that a given partnership can provide, as opposed to being auxiliary advisers to a management unit that has ultimate authority to decide on the type of interventions it executes.

The biodiversity conservation problem is not a clear-cut fact. This is what Syma Ebbin (2011) argued in evaluating the conservation approaches of different comanagement regimes in the fishing sector, stating that these problems “are constructed by humans. Framed through an integration of what is perceived to be the relevant facts, values, theories, and interests, problem definition is integral to the policymaking process” (151–152). In the context of partnerships, the ability of partners to continually frame the issues and solutions through an executive governing board is a distinct form of empowerment. The partnerships that are most empowering of their partners have governing boards that are both inclusive and authoritative. That is, they follow a stakeholder model of governance and set up a board that has strong executive powers rather than weak advisory functions.

An evaluation of the governance style and functions of the twelve partnerships reveals that nine adopted a shareholder model of governance. In most cases, funding partners are represented in governing bodies, but stakeholders who will be affected by partnership interventions at the local level do not have a formal voice in the process of decision-making. In eight cases, governing bodies have “strong” executive functions rather than “weak” advisory roles. In general, most partnership boards are authoritative but exclusionary bodies of decision-making. Furthermore, an assessment of the relationship between governing model and board functions reflects the tendency that more inclusive boards (which adopt a stakeholder governance model) usually have weaker influence (they have only advisory functions).

Overall, the findings on the three dimensions of democracy analyzed here show that NGOs have become key players in biodiversity governance through their participation in most of the bank’s partnerships. NGOs may have significant influence on partnerships since most of the time they host the secretariat and the management team that implements activities in the field.3 Second, partnerships are overwhelmingly based in the United States or Europe and focus on the “global” biodiversity problem rather than on the local environment-rural livelihoods nexus. Third, partnership boards are authoritative in steering the partnership’s actions, and the bank is authoritative within those boards. Yet these decision-making bodies exclude local participation.

The troubling finding is that partnerships perpetuate a significant problem in global governance: the underrepresentation of local interests and an undemocratic process of arriving at biodiversity intervention decisions under the banner of promoting more democratic governance (Ribot 2004). Even in those cases in which partners shared decision-making authority, the approach was not extended to relationships with the so-called “beneficiaries.” This supports recent findings regarding multistakeholder partnerships across a range of issue areas (Biermann et al. 2007). On the ground, end users are given “strategic directions” to qualify for partnership funds, as in the case of the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund. The participation of local beneficiaries remains circumscribed to a consultative role at best, or an implementation role at worst.

Do Biodiversity Partnerships Incubate New Policies?

Partnerships are often viewed as innovative cooperative arrangements, and much of the existing literature focuses on their operational effectiveness. Undoubtedly, this is an important dimension of the transnational partnering phenomenon. What remains underexplored is the policy prescriptions that partnerships promote and how they vary from traditional approaches of governing a global public goods problem. This is an important dimension of the partnership phenomenon. I take the view previously argued by Steven Bernstein (2001) that literature on cooperation in international relations has neglected the question of “which values cooperative outcomes promote, because they focus primarily on the functional requirements of cooperation or on institutional design and effectiveness” (vii). When new actors gain decision-making authority, we expect to witness a range of new ideas and interests reshaping how biodiversity is governed. Furthermore, one of the explicit goals of partnering is to facilitate innovation. The analysis in this chapter sheds light on two questions of concern: the extent to which partnerships generate innovation in governance and what values are privileged, as judged from the approaches that are deployed to achieve them (Alcock 2008).

I develop a framework to analyze innovation that is based on three competing approaches to conservation governance. Each relies on different sources of authority, maintains its own discourse, and is implemented through specific types of projects.

Mapping Policy Innovation

To gauge policy innovation, I analyze dominant and alternative governance approaches in biodiversity conservation. Each is animated by different underlying values and produces corresponding policies. As a result, governance approaches address certain aspects of the biodiversity loss problem and reveal subjective beliefs on causal connections (Clapp and Dauvergne 2005). The framework presented in table 2.1 maps three competing approaches to conservation governance, then assesses the standards of appropriate action that each embodies and evaluates their corresponding sources of authority to regulate behavior, emblematic discourses to promote and justify a particular vision, and specific types of projects that are ultimately financed to execute that vision.

The first approach, and the one most often used by partnerships engaged in addressing biodiversity loss, is command and control. It involves top-down regulatory policies informed by scientific “knowledge” claims (Bäckstrand 2006). Some of the defining characteristics are centralization and a focus on compliance, with the state seen as the appropriate authority in conservation. In general, projects include activities that strengthen the hierarchical authority of the state over the territory and its population, such as strengthening line ministries, centralized policy development, and planning. One of the core components of this approach is creating or strengthening protected areas and developing economic activities in buffer zones around parks to keep communities from using the resources of the parks. The guiding principle of the protected areas response (dubbed “fortress conservation”) is that nature is best preserved when the state builds fences to keep wildlife in and people out. Scientific research for coding and organizing nature to facilitate its control and administration is also a common component of projects that fall within this approach.4 Activities include mapping nature and resources (e.g., creating hotspots or ecosystem maps), developing taxonomies, and centralizing monitoring of flora and fauna.

This approach is contested by at least two others. The one that has received the most attention in environmental governance literature, owing to the high visibility and rapid growth of carbon trading schemes in the climate change regime, is liberal environmentalism, which calls for the commoditization of nature to save it from further deterioration. This is a market-based strategy to conservation that has been described as a compromise between previously adversarial forces, economic growth and environmental protection (Bernstein 2001). The market is recognized as the appropriate authority to regulate actors’ behavior. Some terms used in connection with this approach are decentralization, internalization of externalities, self-financing, and efficiency gains. In general, the types of activities likely to be associated with projects that emerge from this approach include ecotourism, payment for ecosystem services, and the privatization of protected areas. It is the presumption that private business actors will favor this approach to environmental governance, which has led to significant controversy over public-private partnerships (McAfee 1999; Richter 2004).

The third approach is community conservation. Also described as “civic environmentalism,” it includes a reform and a radical version (Bäckstrand 2006; Wapner 1996). The reform version highlights the complementarity of transnational and state-centric approaches and proposes that adding a transnational element gives environmental governance greater accountability and legitimacy. The radical version sees the environment fundamentally at odds with state-centric and market-driven responses. It advocates “redefining governance towards environmental equity” (Bäckstrand 2006, 2). Some defining characteristics of the reform version of community conservation are transparency and public accountability, while a guiding principle of the radical version is ecological justice. In both, civic groups are the appropriate source of authority. Many of the bank’s partnerships that claim to be adopting this approach focus on public awareness and educational activities to enable civic participation in conservation decisions. Since “participation” has a wide array of meanings, the degree to which bank activities actually empower communities to make decisions about biodiversity needs to be examined on a case-by-case basis.

This categorization of conservation approaches highlights two central dimensions of biodiversity protection, the “who” and “how to” (Molnar, Scherr, and Khare 2007). Who is the appropriate authority and the final arbiter of environmental governance—the market, the state, or the people?5 “Authority” refers to who is, de facto, entitled to prescribe or proscribe behavior. The “how to” references the appropriate policies to achieve conservation.

Differences over who and how, over appropriate actors and appropriate actions, represent different beliefs about global environmental governance. Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink (1998) suggest that such shared assessments of what “ought” to happen often manifest in justifications. They suggest examining the communications among political actors that these justifications tend to produce. To this end, I examine partnership discourses to uncover reasons for action. Yet these partnerships are not just forums for deliberation. Specific types of projects receive varying amounts of partnership funds. Level of funding hence is an important indicator of what approaches are viewed as most appropriate within a given partnership.

To measure the extent to which partnerships promote traditional versus innovative approaches to conservation, I analyze partnership discourses and types of activities in their project mix. In table 2.1, I map the general approaches of the twelve cases selected as a way to identify innovation, divergence from traditional policies, and convergence around certain biodiversity governance systems. Mapping partnerships in this way achieves at least three important goals. First, it creates categories of variance for the dependent variable of “innovation.” Second, it makes a statement about whether and how IO partnerships differ from multilateral approaches to conservation and from each other. Third, it identifies clusters of partnerships that exhibit a preference for a particular approach. This allows us to evaluate whether a certain conservation approach is emerging as dominant among World Bank partnerships and to compare this finding with some intuitive expectations. For example, was the rise in private governance and the use of market-based approaches to addressing climate change also apparent in biodiversity partnerships?

As with many typologies, there is a danger of reducing complex partnership activities on the ground to a box that fits a map category. In practice, partnerships have a range of activities in their project mix. Similarly, they produce a variety of discourse types. Hence they may straddle categories of conservation approaches. Although I recognize that complexity, in the last column of table 2.1, I indicate the conservation policy approach that each of the twelve bank partnerships follows for the most part.

This mapping reveals convergence around two conservation approaches and particular normative preferences regarding the question of authority in environmental governance. Command and control and market approaches, with the state and the market as recognized authorities for conservation, are the most dominant approaches promoted by bank partnerships. Partnerships represent an invitation into governance roles for actors that were previously outside the governing process and often resorted to lobbies and boycotts to influence global policymaking (Domask 2003). Now that these prior adversaries are partners, there is no evidence of a potentially healthy battle of ideas over the best approaches to conservation. There seems to be surprising agreement over what causes biodiversity loss and the best solutions to mitigate further deterioration.6

Despite its reputation as a so-called champion of neoliberal and market-oriented prescriptions (Broad 2006; Stone 2003), the World Bank is not attracting business actors to finance conservation. The absence of business partners might explain the limited focus on market-based approaches. Of the four partnerships implementing market-based activities, three were IFC-led initiatives rather than led by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). In contrast, the bank has been more successful in creating partnerships with business around climate change (e.g., the Prototype Carbon Fund). As it stands, the bank has not been able to articulate a value proposition (either on the basis of corporate social responsibility or on the basis of direct financial gain) to attract business partners and their policy approaches to the issue of biodiversity.7 Yet large conservation NGOs, such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Conservation International, and The Nature Conservancy, are drawing in a significant number of business actors and resources, setting up internal units to continue to bring in private actors into partnerships, and increasing market based conservation programming (MacDonald 2010).8 This makes the question of why the bank is bucking the trend more intriguing.9

Most important, innovation is not apparent among partnerships. They most often apply the same state-led command and control conservation policies that emerged during the early years of conservation in the United States. These policies have received a great deal of criticism in both practice and scholarship. Creating protected areas has often precipitated land conflicts, generated grievances from local communities, created environmental refugees among dislocated populations, and proven to be financially unviable since developing countries lack the resources to maintain these areas (de Koning 2008; Hayes and Ostrom 2005; International Union for Conservation of Nature 1999). In many cases, protected areas are referred to simply as parks on paper. Yet protected area coverage is one of the leading indicators the bank uses to demonstrate the effectiveness of its conservation work, without a more in-depth analysis of the conditions and social and economic trade-offs precipitated by the creation of these parks. The rate of expansion of protected areas has increased significantly in the last twenty years. Terrestrial protected areas cover 14 percent of Earth’s surface, and the bank reports to have made substantial contributions toward that conservation achievement (World Bank 2010b).10

Table 2.1

Map of Policy Innovations among the World Bank’s Global Biodiversity Partnerships, 1992–2012

Policy approach	Source of authority	Discourse types	Project activities	Partnerships mostly following this approach
Command and control	The state	Integrity Centralized Top-down Scientific Fortress conservation Land-lock Regulated Compliance Ecomanagerial	Institutional strengthening of line ministries, protected area offices, specialized state institutes Strengthening or expanding size of protected area borders Enforcement through park rangers, arming against poachers Use of global information systems for monitoring and management of land and resources Outsourcing park management under the strong shadow of the state	1. Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund 2. WB/WWF Alliance for Forest Conservation 4. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 4. Coral Reef Targeted Research and Capacity Building for Management 5. Global Invasive Species Program 6. Global Tiger Initiative 7. Save Our Species
Commoditize	The market	Efficiency Entrepreneurial Innovative Voluntary Production with efficiency gains Self-financing Internalizing of externalities	Privatize protected areas Ecotourism ventures Bioprospecting Biodiversity offsets Developing supply chains of biodiversity-friendly products Payments for ecosystem services	8. Small and Medium Scale Enterprise Program 9. Environmental Business Finance Program 10. Biodiversity and Agricultural Commodities 11. Forest Trends
Community conservation	Civic/community groups	Equity Ecojustice Participatory Democratic Legitimate Accountable Rights-based conservation Livelihoods approach	Land tenure reform Comanagement of natural resources Compensation for access to traditional knowledge and uses of local biodiversity	12. PROFOR

A World Bank biodiversity portfolio review acknowledges that, since 1988, the organization has focused on strict conservation without sufficient linkages to “maximizing the livelihood contributions and poverty reduction returns of conservation” (World Bank 2014, 10). The creation of protected areas has been a singularly favored approach to pursue conservation without the required ties to development. Figure 2.1 shows bank biodiversity projects since 1988 that have been coded and plotted against the Convention of Biological Diversity’s (CBD’s) Aichi Goals. It clearly demonstrates that biodiversity at the bank has been concentrated on Goal C, which seeks “to improve the status of biodiversity by safeguarding ecosystems, species and genetic diversity” (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity 2011, 2). Bank biodiversity investments have focused least on Aichi Goal D, which seeks to “enhance the benefits to all from biodiversity and ecosystem services.”

Since partnerships continue a reliance on the command and control approach, they are also strengthening the authority of the state. This supports challenges to prior assumptions that public-private partnerships erode state authority or diminish government responsibility (Glasbergen, Biermann, and Mol 2008). Partnerships with private actors seem to favor state authority above all other types. In most cases the two types of activities implemented under the command and control approach are creating or strengthening protected areas and carrying out inventory, research, and monitoring of species, habitat, and genetic diversity. These activities are reinforcing the state’s authority to administer nature rather than improving the effectiveness of market systems or community management of natural resources. For example, the Coral Reef Targeted Research and Capacity Building for Management partnership states as its primary goal to “fill the critical gaps in our global understanding of what determines coral reef ecosystem vulnerability and resilience to a range of key stressors—from localized human stress to climate change—and to inform policies and management interventions” (Coral Reef Targeted Research 2009a, para. 1). More pointedly, one of its three main activities is to “link scientific knowledge to management and policy” (Coral Reef Targeted Research 2009a, para. 2). This directly refers to assisting the state.

Figure 2.1

Number of Projects Addressing the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi Goals, 1988–2014. Note: There may be multiple goals in each project. Source: Adapted from World Bank (2014, 9).

Market approaches are also significant. Most partnerships include activities based on production landscapes, sustainable financing, and market mechanisms. Four of the twelve partnership cases financed market-based projects more often than they did any other conservation activities. The market is recognized as a viable vehicle both for conservation of global biodiversity and for securing local community benefits. However, of the twelve cases, only PROFOR and Forest Trends link the use of market-based conservation mechanisms to securing community tenure rights, one of the most tangible and permanent economic benefits for the rural poor.

Overall, this analysis shows an absence of cases that focus on community management of biodiversity conservation. PROFOR and Forest Trends are the only partnerships that consistently incorporated the discourse of fairness and rights-based conservation choices. Only two partnerships, the Global Invasive Species Program and the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, dedicated some financial resources to raising public awareness, education, or work with indigenous people. This finding again contrasts with the bank’s claim that 75 percent of its projects involve civil society. The Civil Society Engagement Review is published as a comprehensive guide to bank–civil society relations. One of its reports during the period of these partnerships states, “CSOs were also involved in different ways in the design and preparation of 792 of the 1,059 projects funded over the last three years” (World Bank 2009c, vii). Global initiatives do not reflect even a fraction of that level of civil society participation.11 Finally, the limited number of activities in the conservation-development nexus arguably neglects the implementation of some of the key objectives of the CBD. The convention stresses not only conservation but also the sustainable use and fair and equitable sharing of the benefits of biodiversity (The Convention on Biological Diversity 1992).

Do Biodiversity Partnerships Catalyze Financial Resources?

The World Bank Group invested $6.5 billion in biodiversity conservation between 1988 and 2009. Only 30 percent of those funds were bank loans. Another 23 percent were disbursed as grants on behalf of the GEF. The bulk of the remaining resources, 45 percent of biodiversity investments, came from other sources, including bilateral organizations, multilateral organizations, private actors, and, in most cases, developing countries, which directly contributed resources to meet cofinancing, or “leveraging,” ratios that the bank and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) impose on loans and grants (World Bank 2009a). The bank has regularly attached GEF grants to its larger loans for borrowing countries that incur debt on behalf of global biodiversity conservation. The grant portion is typically significantly smaller than the loan, yet the GEF requires cofinancing ratios from national governments and other partners that can be as high as $7 dollars to $1 of GEF grant (Global Environment Facility 2018). Therefore, there can be a significant material opportunity cost for developing countries that are expected to invest in biodiversity conservation from their national budgets.

One of the reasons IOs promote partnerships is to generate additional financing for conservation from private actors. The bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) conducted a survey among task team leaders of global partnerships and found that most of them viewed the need to bring in additional resources as the primary justification for their partnerships (Lele 2002). The total budget for biodiversity-related activities for the twelve partnerships launched between 1992 and 2012 was US $359 million. The bank contributed US $129 million, or 36 percent of that budget. This figure is a little higher than the 30 percent the bank has contributed to all biodiversity investments since 1988. Figure 2.2 shows four partnerships that stand out for the significant inverse relationship between the resources the bank contributed versus resources contributed by other partners: the Global Invasive Species Program, Save Our Species, the Coral Reef Targeted Research program, and the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund Phase 1. In three of these four cases the major partners were large international NGOs (The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, and the IUCN), with the Coral Reef partnership the exception. Surprisingly, the bank partners most often with well-resourced international conservation NGOs, yet it is with these partners that it tends to have the least advantageous cofinancing ratios.

Figure 2.2

Cofinancing Ratios of Four World Bank Partnerships with NGOs. Sources: World Bank (2008, 2009b, 2017b).

Partnerships as defined in this book accounted for a small percentage of the bank’s biodiversity budget between 1992 and 2012.12 To provide a point of comparison, more than 56 percent of Conservation International’s budget for 2006 came from partnerships with corporate partners or sponsors (Brechin 2008). A 2014 portfolio review of the organization’s work in biodiversity found that “the World Bank’s investments in biodiversity have been decreasing in numbers and volume in the last seven years” (World Bank 2014, 7). The cases reviewed in this chapter do not show evidence of significant resources being mobilized for biodiversity conservation. This observation confirms an earlier, internal World Bank evaluation of global programs across several issue areas, which stated: “At the aggregate level, global programs have added little new money to ODA. Exceptions include funds from private sources for the Prototype Carbon Fund; from the Gates Foundation for Health; and small amounts from pharmaceutical companies” (World Bank 2004a, xviii). In general, biodiversity partnerships show somewhat more advantageous cofinancing ratios for the World Bank, but this may not matter much when the overall investments are not considerable. The relative financial gains to biodiversity in general, and to the bank in particular, have to be measured against the reputational risks, coordination costs, and overall effort required to launch and coordinate partnerships.

Conclusion

This chapter began with an observation on the various roles and clout the World Bank has within its partnerships. As a founder, convener, donor, and cogovernor, the organization has enjoyed significant influence over procedural and substantive outcomes. Since the bank has promoted partnerships as a vehicle to enhance democracy, innovation, and financial resource mobilization in the provision of global public goods, it is important to evaluate how the organization has used its influence within its partnerships to achieve those goals. These goals are abstract aspirations in the absence of specific measures that tell us how we might recognize them in practice, so this chapter set out criteria for democracy (inclusion, representation, and empowerment), innovation (identifying market and community conservation as alternative approaches to the dominant command and control strategy), and financial leverage (cofinancing ratios, and growth in resources mobilized for biodiversity).

Table 2.2

Measures of Democracy, Innovation, and Financing

Democracy	Innovation	Financial Leverage
Inclusiveness • How many different social actors participate in the partnership? Who are they? • Are the partners’ main offices located in an industrialized or developing country?	Command and control What evidence of these activities exists in the partnership’s projects? • Institutional strengthening of line ministries, setting up protected area offices or specialized state institutes • Strengthening or expanding the size of protected area borders • Enforcement through park rangers, arming against poachers • Global information systems used for monitoring and management of land and resources • Outsourcing park management under strong shadow of the state	Financial significance of partnerships • World Bank’s environmental investment through traditional projects versus partnerships
Representation • Who chairs the partnership’s governing body? • Is the chair position fixed or rotating? • Is the partnership’s secretariat located inside or outside the World Bank?	Commodification What evidence of these activities exists in the partnership’s projects? • Privatization of protected areas • Ecotourism ventures • Bioprospecting • Biodiversity offsets • Developing supply chains of biodiversity-friendly products • Payments for use of ecosystem resources	Cofinancing ratio • World Bank’s versus partners’ financial resources used in biodiversity partnership budgets
Empowerment • Is the partnership governed according to a shareholder or a stakeholder model? • Does the governing body have executive powers or advisory powers only?	Community conservation What evidence for these activities exists in the partnership’s projects? • Land tenure reform • Comanagement of natural resources • Compensation for access to traditional knowledge and uses of local ecosystem resources

The measures of democracy, innovation, and financing, summarized in table 2.2, were applied to twelve biodiversity partnerships between 1992 and 2012, and the resulting analysis identified structural conditions in partnerships that tended to amplify rather than diminish inclusion and power differentials. This finding is consistent with research on the impact of partnerships on participation and inclusion in other issue areas and IOs (Biermann et al. 2007; Pattberg 2010; Pattberg et al. 2012). For example, in the case of World Summit for Sustainable Development partnerships, research shows that “the vast majority of partnerships strengthens the participation of those actors that already participate: governments, major international organizations, and those civil society actors that have had a say in global governance already before the partnership phenomenon emerged. In many cases, those that had been marginalized before have also been marginalized in the partnership process” (Pattberg et al. 2012, 242).

In the case of the World Bank, evidence from project activities financed by each partnership suggests limited incursions into nontraditional conservation policies. A review of the financial impact of partnerships shows marginal gains in leveraging ratios but a continued trend of lower budgets dedicated to biodiversity conservation compared to other environmental sectors. Therefore, this twenty-year review of the bank’s biodiversity partnerships shows that, far from being the gold standard of good governance, partnerships produce mixed and often negative results when evaluated against the broad goals the organization espoused for them. Yet bank partnerships do distribute financial resources globally with minimal staff supervision and can register high marks on operational metrics. For example, bank partnerships are often credited for the large number of new protected areas they create, the hectares of forests they bring under certification standards, or the number of park rangers that are trained in conservation management plans. This divergence creates a more complex picture that requires a theory of partnerships with large bureaucracies like the World Bank. The next chapters in this book are dedicated to developing a theoretical account that can explain why bank partnerships fail to deliver on their original promise yet do deliver on other metrics. The theoretical frame is then applied to analyzing two partnership cases in depth to understand why they turned out the way they did.