5 The Global Invasive Species Program and the Promise of Innovation

In 1996 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau International (CABI), and the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) partnered to launch an initiative that was hailed as a pioneering approach to global biodiversity conservation. The Global Invasive Species Program (GISP) was a horizontal network of concerned scientists who came together to help policymakers develop a coherent global response to the growing threat of invasive and alien species. The Nature Conservancy and the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) later joined the partnership during its second phase. GISP operated between 1996 and 2011, and during that time it broadened the global scope of biodiversity conservation to include the significant and previously omitted threat of invasive species. The partnership’s purpose and network method were particularly innovative in light of the state of global biodiversity conservation in the 1990s, when GISP was formed. The topic of invasive species was not part of the biodiversity agenda, despite its key importance to conservation, and global multistakeholder partnerships were still rare arrangements for coordinated action in the area of the environment.

The World Bank’s best intentions to support this initiative brought temporary funding, but the bank required that the association form a hierarchical secretariat and relocate to South Africa, actions that GISP’s executive director would eventually deem “lethal blows” to the partnership.1 Furthermore, because of the bank’s specialization of labor into technical units, the partnership was championed by a single environmental specialist in the organization, but it never received the kind of extensive institutional support that would have been one of the greatest benefits of partnering with the World Bank. The GISP story illustrates how the bank, in becoming a partner of a high-functioning initiative, brought with it bureaucratic baggage that, in the end, undermined a partnership spearheading global policy innovation. Whereas the previous chapter offered a case study of a global conservation partnership that the bank considers a best practice, this chapter examines the opposite end of the spectrum. GISP is, according to the bank, a study in what not to do in partnerships. An evaluation of regional and global partnership programs ranked GISP last among all bank initiatives, rating it “highly unsatisfactory” (World Bank 2011, 263). By GISP’s own accounting, it is a “really good study on what not to do with a really serious global issue.”2

The analysis of this case proceeds in three parts. First, it describes the origins of GISP, examining its transformation from a loosely connected network of scientists interested in working together on invasive species into a hierarchical organization receiving World Bank financing. The second section examines the transformation of the network once it moved from Washington, DC, to South Africa to comply with bank rules and obtain significant levels of financing from the bank. The third section investigates how the bank’s internal division of labor created silos of support for the partnership rather than enabling the kind of widespread institutional support that a large organization could have provided. The bank’s division of labor also explains why the bank failed to internalize the substantive goals of the partnership and incorporate into its own portfolio the issue of invasive species. After all, if the central goals of the partnership included raising awareness and promoting policy to deal with the threat of invasive species, how do we explain the failure to achieve that goal within the one organization that provided the bulk of the partnership’s financing?

The Origins of GISP

It is important to start by tracing GISP’s origin as a basis for analyzing its transformation and to understand how an organic, loosely structured, collaborative initiative founded on reciprocal relationships between research institutes and academics became a hierarchical, rational structure that eventually engendered instrumental calculations, replacing trust among its partners. GISP was launched in 1996 and ended in 2011. Its principal goal was to control the global spread of invasive species through research, training, and policy development. Although the World Bank got involved with GISP only in 2003, it became a very important actor in shaping the evolution of the partnership. At times, its resources accounted for up to 95 percent of GISP’s core financing, and this level of dependency on a single donor made World Bank requirements a primary concern for GISP partners.

The creation of the partnership dates back to the early negotiations on a global architecture to govern biodiversity. GISP was a product of the 1996 Trondheim Conference, where the theme was global invasive species. The Trondheim Conferences are meetings organized by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the government of Norway since 1993, directed at policymakers and scientists to engage with international biodiversity topics ahead of what is discussed by formal bodies such as the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice and the Conferences of the Parties (COP). For example, in 1999 the Trondheim Conference’s theme was developing an ecosystems approach to sustainable development. This was later adopted as the Principles for Ecosystem Approach at the COP 6 in 2002. In this regard, Trondheim is an important forum because its impact on early problem framing often creates both path dependence and operational guidance for policymakers. In 1996, the conference theme was invasive species, and the discussions at Trondheim represented a new frontier in the global environmental agenda of the time. The emergence of GISP from the conference was a practical operationalization of that new frontier. As Elizabeth Sellers (2004) has written, GISP was the result of “the first major meeting to consider the global character of the IAS threat” (20). At the time, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was only three years old, and even issues like preservation of forests, which host most of the world’s biodiversity, had not reached the signatories’ attention.

Innovation may be conceived as a new way of governing biodiversity that addresses existing governance deficits or yields a new outcome, such as new policies to help reduce the rate of biodiversity loss. Arguably, the GISP partnership qualifies as an innovation on both fronts—process and products. It was the first collaborative effort to address the threat of invasive species to biodiversity, and under the CBD clearinghouse mechanism it became a rule-making network to provide advice and policy toolkits for combating that threat at a global scale. This scope was significant in addressing the problem of alien invasive species. The creation of a global entity is seen as a key component of a comprehensive and timely response that had been missing until the formation of GISP. The rapid growth of economic globalization had increased trade and created or altered pathways of species transfer between countries (Chornesky et al. 2005). Without global guidelines, national efforts would not be well timed, coordinated, or effective. Chornesky and colleagues write:

Invasion biology confounds timely management decisions. Most species persist at low densities prior to rapid population growth, and during this period often are characterized by small, unstable, and widely dispersed populations that are difficult to detect. Because their full economic and environmental impacts are uncertain, government agencies and forest managers may be unwilling or unable to regulate species movements or to implement eradication programs early in the invasion sequence, although this is precisely when quarantine, eradication, and control are most likely to succeed. (342)

GISPs founding partners shared a concern over the global threat of invasive alien species to biodiversity, which is described as second in importance only to habitat loss (Given 2003). The issue of invasive species was appealing to many lawyers, economists, social scientists, and environmentalists from the start because of the inadequate attention it had received and its many linkages to biodiversity, human health, and food security (Given 2003). A GISP evaluator noted, “The timing was right for a global theme with big impact. It emerged as a political issue but with a primary focus on good science rather than policy” (Given 2003, 7).

Harold Mooney, the founding father of GISP, was an ecologist at Stanford University who had long been associated with SCOPE, an international interdisciplinary body of national science academies that reviews environmental threats. Throughout the 1980s, this organization had convened scientists to research the issue of global invasive species and produced several publications. One of the most important among them was the synthesis report published in 1989, titled Biological Invasions: A Global Perspective (Drake et al. 1989). Mooney was one of the editors of the volume. By the early 1990s, the work done under the auspices of SCOPE had promoted sufficient research to raise the alarm among a community of scientists, but this had not been translated for policymakers. As Mooney (1999) put it:

We are on the way to establishing a whole new biotic order on the Earth due to the massive breakdown of biogeographic barriers to migration. Although the SCOPE program was quite successful scientifically it did not offer much to managers except to inform them they were not alone in the world dealing with these problems. (97)

With an ongoing interest in addressing the problem of invasives, Mooney searched for other scientists and organizations working on the same issue. He engaged the IUCN because it had a working group established in this area, and then CABI, an international NGO based in the UK that develops and publishes scientific information on problems of agriculture and the environment, because it was the only other organization involved in this issue.3 Together, they launched what would become the first phase of GISP. They secured funding from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) through UNEP and the Packard Foundation, MacArthur, La Fondation Total, UNESCO, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), NASA, the IUCN, SCOPE, and the governments of Denmark, New Zealand, the United States, Brazil, Germany, and the European Commission. It secured $3.13 million during this first phase of the partnership (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009). The objective was to develop a scientific basis for policy action. These actors spent much of the initial investment on inventorying existing invasive species and levels of threat they posed (Global Environment Facility 2003). This is how, long before it was common practice to refer to governance coordination between public and private actors as partnerships, SCOPE, CABI, and the IUCN created GISP as a voluntary network with financing from several donors (McNeely 2001).

One of the most important features of GISP’s early work was its achievement of advancing the issue of invasive species onto the international environmental agenda and helping prioritize it as one of the main threats to biodiversity conservation. However, being ahead of its time may have also had drawbacks that weakened the partnership. The last executive director to serve the partnership, Sarah Simons, looked back on its origins and regretted that the partnership disenfranchised many key actors from the outset of its formation. The issue of invasive species was “pigeon holed in biodiversity” from early on, and did not move beyond there. In an interview, she discussed the importance of developing invasive species science as a multisectoral issue, rather than restricting it to the biodiversity arena. Though it may have been far too pioneering at that time, GISP did not include key actors from the agricultural, trade, or transport communities. These would have been stronger political partners than organizations dealing only with biodiversity. A focus on food security would have been an obvious way to win international support for the issue because invasive species are the single biggest threat to food security. Failure to make GISP a genuine multisectoral issue right from the outset was a critical mistake, in Simons’s opinion.4 Yet donors and many stakeholders considered the results of the first phase a success (Given 2003). GISP had been able to mobilize financial support from up to twenty donors and to advance scientific and political awareness of invasive species as a threat to ecosystems. The results of the first phase included a global assessment, a global strategy, national toolkits for diagnosing an invasive species threat, and a pilot database.

In 2001, GISP started a second phase focused on implementation (table 5.1). Its goal was to begin execution of the global strategy it had developed in its first phase. The partnership operated out of its two coordination units, at Stanford University and the Smithsonian, and within two years it had organized five high-profile regional workshops and reports, provided expert consultation to the CBD, and produced a study on development assistance and invasive species for Southeast Asia (Global Invasive Species Program 2010). It is important to note that GISP functioned well and produced desirable outputs well before the World Bank became involved with the partnership. In other words, it was not an organization that was at risk of collapsing that prompted the bank’s assistance but an association that was—with limited funds—achieving significant goals. The World Bank became interested in supporting GISP following the success of the partnership’s first phase and the growing trend in global governance toward forging partnerships with non-state actors (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009).

Table 5.1

GISP Secretariat Locations

GISP locations Period Dates

Stanford University

Phase 1: Knowledge building

1997–2000

Offices at both Stanford University and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

Phase 2: Implementation phase

2001–2003

SANBI, Cape Town, South Africa

Phase 2: Implementation phase (World Bank involvement with GISP)

2003–2007

CABI, Nairobi, Kenya

Phase 2: Implementation Phase

2007–2011

Source: Adapted from World Bank Independent Evaluation Group (2009).

From Network to Hierarchy: World Bank Support, with Baggage

The director of the World Bank’s Environment Department announced the organization’s commitment to supporting GISP during the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. The conference registered more than two hundred Type II partnerships. The international setting was ripe for the bank to support an initiative like GISP. There was a growing consensus leading up to the conference that traditional intergovernmental relations had reached their limit of effectiveness and that only through partnerships with nonstate actors would the global environmental agenda gain new ground (Andonova 2005, 2010). Like most international organizations (IOs), the World Bank responded to the call for partnerships. GISP was one of several initiatives that provided an opportunity for the World Bank to demonstrate a commitment to this emerging approach in global governance. Partnership funding rapidly increased after the summit, and most of this funding came not from the private sector, as was hoped, but from IOs (Bäckstrand 2006; Hale and Mauzerall 2004).

Some scholars, such as Karin Bäckstrand (2006), argue that the type of global partnerships that developed after the Johannesburg Summit were simply repackaged intergovernmental programs that had previously existed under a different name. The discourse of partnerships served essentially to give a new lease to what was already being done at the intergovernmental level and avoided real governance innovation. Furthermore, many IOs verbally committed to the partnership approach but did not make fresh financing available to these new initiatives, and often merely rebranded existing resources. However, in all these respects GISP was different. It was a network that incorporated some of the basic criteria of genuine partnerships, as defined during the Johannesburg Summit. That is, it supplemented rather than replaced government action; it was voluntary and based on shared responsibility; and it involved the participation of a wide scope of stakeholders from different public and private sectors (United Nations 2003). The World Bank’s support for GISP during its second phase also involved the genuine allocation of fresh funds from its Development Grant Facility (DGF) and the Bank-Netherlands Partnership Program, rather than the reclassification of existing resources. Between 2003 and 2008, the bank provided more than $3.1 million to GISP.5 This is a small amount of financing by global partnership standards, yet it was significant as a percentage of the total partnership budget and the rules that governed allocation limits from the bank’s DGF.

The bank’s interest in GISP seems to have stemmed from a genuine attempt to support a pioneering approach to biodiversity conservation. In fact, the bank’s task team leader was personally invested in the goals and success of the partnership. However, the best intentions of individual bank staff did not manage to alter the adverse effects that partnering with a large bureaucratic institution can have on a small partnership like GISP. The organizational logic of the bank displaced the nimble, horizontal, and cooperative structure that had facilitated participation and innovation, and replaced it with a hierarchy and bank operating rules.

The bank’s financial support started in 2003, during what would become known as the second phase of the partnership.6 When the bank became involved as a major donor of GISP, it changed the fundamental character of the organization by requiring it to develop an executive secretariat with hierarchical roles and divisions of labor along executive, managerial, and administrative lines; move its offices from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, to Cape Town in South Africa; and acquire a number of new reporting procedures. In so doing, the World Bank recast the network in the image of a rational bureaucracy. This was a network that prior to 2003 functioned as an organic and horizontal association. The original form of organization shared closer traits with the analytical definition of networks, as described in chapter 3.

Toward the end of its financial support, a World Bank evaluation report recognized that there should have been an appraisal of how suitable were “the decisions and actions that led to the institutionalization of the network prior to 2003 to ascertain whether the configuration of the program . . . was relevant and efficient” (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009, 8). The evaluation report concluded, “The Bank dramatically changed the nature of the GISP network” (32). To distill the specific ways in which the bank changed GISP, I examine the bank’s decision to direct its support toward establishing a global secretariat and the stipulation that GISP move to a developing country, the choice of South Africa in particular, and the bank’s reporting requirements. These decisions had a significant impact on the development of the partnership and its potential to continue to pioneer global biodiversity policy.

During the first phase, partners coordinated horizontally and with manifest concerns for democratic representation. This stands in contrast to the second phase, which the World Bank financed and shaped. During the first phase, the executive body of the partnership was composed of a steering committee, a chairman, and lead coordinators of the working groups. An editorial committee and a scientific editor advised this body, and a small administrative secretariat maintained day-to-day operations. The steering committee involved twenty to twenty-five people, among whom were “representatives of a number of concerned groups whose input will be essential to the project . . . and strong representation from countries with a long history of dealing with invasive species” (Global Environment Facility 1998, 14). In the GEF-funded project document, GISP highlighted the priority of establishing appropriate levels of developing country representation in decision-making: “UNEP and SCOPE will endeavour to ensure adequate representation of developing countries in the membership of the steering committee and working groups” (Global Environment Facility 1998, 14).

Many initiatives make similar commitments to incorporating developing countries’ knowledge, supporting participatory decision-making, and empowering stakeholders. However, if the partnership’s organizational structure is not designed to put these principles into action, commitments can remain mere rhetoric and never translate into democratic governance practices. The organizational structure of GISP during its initial phase, illustrated in figure 5.1, was geared towards horizontal participation and fluid interaction between partners and other organizations. Thanks to this organizational design, the first phase of GISP brought together sixty-five countries and six global working groups under the coordination of CABI, the IUCN, and SCOPE (Fox and Moran 2006).7 This stands in contrast to the hierarchical chain of command that characterized the second phase receiving World Bank financial support.

It would be difficult to overstate the influence of the World Bank on the partnership’s development during its second phase since it provided up to 95 percent of the partnership’s core financing. As the partnership’s external evaluators noted: “The Secretariat also operates at the discretion of the World Bank, its principal funder and economic lifeline. If the World Bank indicates that funding is contingent upon this or that activity or report, the Secretariat is beholden to the World Bank to produce it” (Fox and Moran 2006, 12). During the second phase, GISP fulfilled bank requirements. It became legally established as a voluntary association and acquired nonprofit status in South Africa, which hosted its secretariat between 2003 and 2007. In 2005 it developed a constitution that delineated the supervisory roles of the executive board over the secretariat and the advisory role of the Technical Advisory Committee. According to its last executive director, the period in which GISP operated from South Africa was the definitive turning point toward the dissolution of the partnership.8

Figure 5.1

GISP Governance Structure during Phase 1. Source: Adapted from Global Environmental Facility (1998).

The partnership’s governance mechanism during the second phase was vertically oriented. With a new emphasis on establishing a secretariat, the partners allowed the working groups to languish, and they were eventually abandoned. The focus on the working groups as vehicles to participation and ownership in GISP was thereby lost in favor of establishing a secretariat (Fox and Moran 2006). A concern over establishing clear supervisory roles between executive, management, and administrative bodies replaced the previous language on stakeholder representation. The bank exhibited concern over appropriate chain of command lines and identified this as a basic principle that should guide the partnership’s organization, stating that these are “generally accepted standards of public sector governance” (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009, xxi). As the World Bank (2009) noted:

Figure 5.2

GISP Governance Structure during Phase 2. Source: Adapted from World Bank Independent Evaluation Group (2009).

The lines between GISP’s governance and management have been somewhat blurred—four of the seven persons that comprise GISP’s management team also serve as Board or alternate Board members. This is symptomatic of smaller, less mature programs that require time to establish formal governance mechanisms. (31)

While the bank was concerned with setting up an international secretariat that would live up to the standards of public sector governance, something more corrosive to the long-term health of the partnership was taking place on the ground. The creation of hierarchical forms of reporting generated instrumental calculations between the partners and the secretariat, resulting in explicit displays of animosity and power struggles. The secretariat’s work program often overlapped with what individual partners were doing in their organizations. When the secretariat received funding to deliver training or other project work, partners saw it as an opportunity lost for their own organizations rather than as an opportunity gained for their common goal of strengthening a global initiative. CABI and the IUCN had project funding mechanisms and were competing with one another and GISP for projects on invasive species. According to board minutes, the board resolved this situation by instructing the GISP secretariat to pull back from implementing projects so that it did not compete with any of its founding partners. But, with dwindling World Bank funds, the only source of funding the GISP secretariat was likely to secure for its future was through projects. There was an inherent conflict of interest.9 The basic ties of trust and reciprocity within the partnership were broken. It would be difficult to imagine how a partnership whose members perceive each other as threats to their organizations could promote democratic principles or have confidence to experiment and foster policy innovation.

Executive board meeting minutes show that new partners evaluated joining GISP as a vehicle for their organizations to gain international visibility, rather than as a mechanism to pursue a common purpose in biodiversity policy making (Global Invasive Species Program 2006). Through GISPs role as the CBD’s International Thematic Focal Point on Invasive Species, partners gained influence in international negotiations. “GISP has made a difference to the Association Members because it has helped to bring them to the table at the CBD, where they can influence the deliberations of the member states” (Fox and Moran 2006, 18). The presence of such instrumental calculations, rather than trust and reciprocity, is one of the key characteristics differentiating hierarchies from networks (Powell 1990).

An independent evaluation of GISPs second phase stated that there was: “widespread dissatisfaction with the way the Association has been managed, and concerns about where it is heading” (Fox and Moran 2006, 1). Specifically, the evaluators noted:

The evaluators reported that partner organizations viewed GISP as having lost a clear set of objectives around which partners could rally. Partners did little to rectify this lack of direction. GISP’s executive director of the secretariat in South Africa, Lynn Jackson, said that the competition that existed between partners was not among individuals but between organizations. The key issue was one of organizational behavior, not a clash of individual personalities, confirming the claim in this chapter that a schism between partners emerged following changes at the organizational level initiated by the World Bank.10 The secretariat received conflicting demands from its partners through the executive board, its host organization in South Africa (SANBI), and the World Bank. This extracted energy from the partnership’s strategic planning and work program. The secretariat became overwhelmed by what it saw as overly bureaucratic requirements from SANBI and “turf protection” battles with its partners as it tried to fulfill the operational tasks the bank expected in return for funding.11 These tasks included meeting a number of different objectives: executing on country-based projects, delivering training modules, supporting invasive species activities in South Africa, and serving as the information clearinghouse organization for the CBD.12

In light of the deteriorating conditions within GISP, the partner organizations would have been well served by refocusing their energy on the central goal that brought them together and developing a corresponding business plan. The bank should have similarly adapted its financial support to established appropriate organizational processes for the partnership to continue to produce pioneering work in the participatory manner that characterized the first phase. Innovation and participation in biodiversity governance had been the original justification for financing GISP. Instead the bank focused on a narrower, product-defined agenda.

An important lesson learned from the partnership, according to one of its evaluators, is that you cannot just put people in a room and have them work together. There must be a sense of trust that pervades the relationship and serves as a foundation for building a work program together.13 This insight is consistent with the literature on why partnerships fail, as discussed in chapter 3. In statistical studies of partnerships in natural resource management, trust and social capital are the most significant predictors of reaching agreements within partnerships (Leach and Sabatier 2005). I have argued that the trust that bound the founding members to GISP in 1996 was significantly altered by the World Bank’s decision to finance the development of a formal secretariat with built-in hierarchical relationships. This changed the way the partners interacted and the calculations they made about the partnership’s value to their individual organizations. Thompson (2003) states that it is the identity of a common purpose that gives partnership meaning and logic for purposeful action or, as Martha Hollis (1998) puts it, a common purpose can produce calculations based on we-rationality. When the structural ties that bound GISP members together changed, the purpose of saving the world from invasive species may not have been altered, but the perceived instrumentality of the partnership to achieve this end did change for its member organizations. By 2010, partners had begun to formally withdraw from the partnership. Once the partnership’s secretariat relocated to Nairobi, SANBI drastically reduced its involvement. The Nature Conservancy abandoned the issue of invasive species altogether, reporting an economic downturn and loss of revenue. Two of GISP’s board members were staff from the conservancy; their absence was significant to GISP. In 2010 the IUCN withdrew from the partnership, just months after GISP had negotiated a new partnership agreement with the IUCN. The CBD then appointed the IUCN the new clearinghouse organization for invasive species.

Relocating the Secretariat: Compliance with World Bank Rules

World Bank financing came attached with requirements. One of the most significant, from the point of view of the partnership, was the move of the secretariat from Washington, DC, to South Africa. The bank’s rationale was that its financing should be deployed in a developing country. The bank chose South Africa for three reasons. First, South Africa, and SANBI in particular, had experience managing World Bank-GEF projects (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009). Hence having an installed capacity to respond to bank rules and reporting requirements was seen as an advantage. SANBI was thus selected to host the GISP secretariat. Bureaucratic efficiency calculations took center stage in a decision that would shape the evolution of GISP. Second, one of SANBI’s programs, called Working for Water, was already working with invasive species. The program addressed unemployment and water scarcity by using a large jobless workforce to manually remove invasive plants from waterways (Cadman et al. 2010). Third, SANBI and the Working for Water program had committed a significant amount of financing to GISP. The combination of these three factors served as the basic rationale for relocating the partnership’s secretariat to South Africa.

Some people in the GISP secretariat viewed the move as one of the lethal blows to the partnership’s survival, and from early on warned the bank that South Africa was a risky choice. Staff from the secretariat made the case that post-apartheid South Africa was not ready to host a multinational secretariat. For example, the government stipulated that all staff had to be remunerated in Rand, a currency that lacked both value and stability at the time. This made it very difficult to attract international experts to work in the secretariat. The World Bank later recognized that “when it was located in South Africa, the program faced the problem of not being able to remunerate its staff in an international currency, which limited the ability to recruit staff from outside of South Africa” (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009, 2). Furthermore, many black South Africans were not yet being incorporated into government positions, which resulted in a secretariat staffed entirely by white South Africans.

The fact that only South Africans staffed the secretariat compounded the perception by the international community that GISP was now a South African program. The external evaluation confirmed this when it stated that “the Secretariat is strongly perceived by some as ‘too South African.’ . . . It is critical that GISP be, and be perceived as, an international body. This may mean employing some non-South Africans at the Secretariat. But it especially means that the Association should utilize the branch office structure of its members to raise the profile of GISP globally” (quoted in Fox and Moran 2006, 14). This perception of a domestically focused partnership stands in direct contrast to its first phase, in which GISP was recognized as the first initiative focusing on invasive species as a global issue. The move to South Africa also brought an unlikely new partner to GISP. A national institute like SANBI would not ordinarily have become a partner of an international secretariat, except that as a host organization it found its way into the partnership. In the words of the last executive director, Sarah Simons: “It ended up catapulting a national program [SANBI] to international program status, while other partners that would have been more consistent with such an international secretariat were excluded. GISP did not have the right set of partners.”14 This was another strategic oversight by the World Bank, which was instead focusing more narrowly on the operational advantages to the bank. Placing GISP within SANBI, an organization experienced in managing World Bank projects, outweighed the potential obstacles that would fundamentally alter the nature of the partnership.

South Africa was also an unlikely country to host GISP since it was far removed from other sources of funding. Unlike Nairobi, which is an African hub for international organizations, Cape Town lacked proximity to potential donors. From the point of view of the bank, the move to South Africa promised GISP a lifeline. SANBI and the Working for Water program had committed substantial resources to the partnership, and without this funding, GISPs long-term viability was at risk (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009). However, the expected funding never materialized, and GISP remained overwhelmingly dependent on World Bank resources for its existence.

By 2007, resources had become very limited, and the secretariat moved for a third time, to Nairobi, where it was hosted by CABI. The partners hoped that the new location would make the partnership more visible to other initiatives and donor organizations, while it enjoyed the infrastructural support of one of its founding partners. Yet the partners were not committed to a common unifying purpose led by the secretariat. As one of GISPs external evaluators noted, there was strong unanimity on raising the profile of invasive alien species and vectors and in having an aquatic and terrestrial focus. In other words, there was strong scientific agreement among the partners. The key issues of disagreement had to do with how strong the secretariat should be.15 GISP formally continued to operate as a partnership until 2011, though it held its last board meeting in 2010.

Why was GISP able to mobilize financing from up to twenty different donors before the World Bank’s involvement and unable to raise the core resources required to survive after the bank became involved with the partnership? So far I have offered two explanations. The creation of a hierarchical secretariat changed the relationship and commitment of partners, and the move to South Africa distanced GISP from donors. The World Bank became a version of a Trojan horse for GISP. It brought money to the partnership, but it also brought a set of bureaucratic components that hindered GISPs pioneering path. In addition to the impact of the components discussed above, the bank’s division of labor had a profound effect on GISP. This dimension of bureaucratic forms of organization produces “siloization,” which is particularly ill suited to deal with wicked problems such as invasive species (Lægreid et al. 2014; Rittel and Webber 1974). Lægreid and colleagues (2014) discuss how these multidimensional, complex issues that transcend organizational boundaries and administrative levels “demand interconnected responses from the system. However, there seems to be a mismatch between the problem structure and the organizational structure” (2).

Division of Labor and Silos

While work specialization improves the efficiency with which bureaucrats tackle a similar problem time and again, it has some notable negative effects. The features of differentiation and specialization that Max Weber described as hallmarks of bureaucratic organizations have often been associated with the creation of silos of action and information (de Bri and Bannister 2010). Specialization can result in limited collaboration and cross-referencing of projects between different units of work.

The World Bank has tried to overcome this structural silo effect for a long time. In 1997, James Wolfensohn implemented a matrix management system specifically designed to create lines of reporting that cut across geographic regions and thematic networks to dismantle the stovepipe influence of bureaucratic specialization. However, success on this front has been elusive. Several bank assessments point to “the persistence of sector ‘silos’ leading to weak cross-sector collaboration and untapped synergies” (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2010b, 14).

For GISP, the silo effect at the bank became a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allowed the bank’s biodiversity task team leader to become an unhindered champion of the partnership and secure grant funding from the bank, even in ratios that violated bank rules. On the other hand, no other units in the bank became involved when wider support would have been instrumental to the long-term health of the partnership. For example, food, transportation, and trade sectors in the bank would have been key sources of support and may have mobilized important constituencies to the partnership. Yet GISPs survival rested on the lead biodiversity specialist, while the bank as an institution remained disconnected from the issue of invasive species in general, and GISP in particular. To explore this further, we need to analyze the functional and dysfunctional effects that specialization had on the partnership.

Bureaucracies impose specialization and compartmentalization of tasks to improve operational efficiencies. “Because individuals have only so much time, knowledge and expertise, specialization will allow the organization to emulate a rational decision making process” (Barnett and Finnemore 1999, 718). Kathy MacKinnon, the organization’s lead biodiversity specialist and GISP task team leader, occupied such a specialized role in the bank. Partnership documents and interviews with evaluators attest to the critical support GISP received from MacKinnon. She is a committed conservationist with extensive field experience and a wide publication record. This includes academic and policy papers on the threat of invasive species (MacKinnon 2007; Westphal et al. 2008). She was able to leverage her professional stature and senior technical role within the bank to gain support for the partnership. Her influence came from her experience in the field, which made her a credible source of policy advice, and from her job function as the top biodiversity specialist at the bank. This is a model of what Barnett and Finnemore (2004) describe as an authority in authority.

As task manager, she used this influence to actively promote GISP and its work, advancing the frontier of biodiversity conservation through control of invasive species. For example, on World Food Day in 2004, she was the source of a bank press release pointing to the vital connection between food security and invasive alien species that GISP was addressing (World Bank 2004d). At the 2004 World Conservation Congress in Bangkok, she presented on behalf of the World Bank at a GISP training workshop titled “Invasive Alien Species Management for Practitioners in Gumboots, Flip Flops or Suit and Tie” (World Bank 2004b). Beyond generally leveraging her influence in support of the partnership, she was instrumental in achieving two specific outcomes: continued financial support from the World Bank and securing a privileged role for GISP within the CBD. The World Bank used two of its grant instruments to provide financing: the DGF, which has provided seed financing to several global partnerships, and a trust fund, the Bank-Netherlands Partnership Program. Between these sources, GISP received more than $3.1 million between 2003 and 2008. The DGF portion alone represented 72 percent of resources during the grant period, despite DGF rules that stipulate it can fund only up to 15 percent of a program’s total budget (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009). The task team leader defended the grant applications to DGF, asserting, “The program’s partners and associates contributed considerable in-kind and cash co-funding for capacity building, outreach, and on-the-ground GISP activities, but under their own brand programs” (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009, 26). MacKinnon also helped position GISP within the CBD and secure its role under the clearinghouse mechanism as the international thematic focal point on invasive species (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009).16 Through several COP decisions and a Memorandum of Understanding with the CBD, GISP assumed the lead in providing information and training on invasive species. The partners noted this accomplishment as the single most important one of GISP, and it was enabled by a committed bank staff with legitimacy and influence because of her functional specialization.

Yet specialization of job functions within bureaucracies also has dysfunctional effects. In the case of GISP, the two main consequences were a silo of support from within the bank and very limited cross-sectoral coordination. As a result of the silo effect, the bank continued unfazed by the problem of invasive species within its own work program and the limited cross-sectoral coordination in the bank precluded GISP from achieving support from other potential key sectors within the IO. As discussed earlier, the lack of a multisectoral basis of support for the partnership was a weakness of GISP’s founding history. This could have been remedied through a partnership with the World Bank, as the world’s largest globally focused multilateral development organization and the main donor to GISP. However, the compartmentalization of functions within the bank kept GISP as an initiative of the bank’s biodiversity sector alone. The bank’s organization into distinct jurisdictions and remits effectively ensured that one champion at the bank was able to support the partnership’s goal of putting the issue of invasive species onto the global environmental agenda while the rest of the organizational units within the bank remained disconnected and unaware of these efforts.

The invasive alien species issue remained largely absent within the bank’s project portfolio. This is further evidence of the segmented manner in which the bank interacted with GISP. In 2011 the bank’s evaluation department carried out an assessment of all World Bank–financed projects since 1997, including those implemented for the GEF, and found: “Of the 1,817 projects searched, only 76 projects (four percent of the total) included some reference to IAS, and only 11 of these 76 projects directly addressed IAS eradication from an ecosystem management perspective” (World Bank 2011, 33). There is also only one reference to the threat of invasive species in the 2002 Environment Strategy, no reference to invasives in any of the regional strategies, and only a passing mention of invasives in the 2003 Rural Development Strategy. In sum, the bank’s evaluation unit concluded, there is “very little evidence that the management of harmful IAS is a development priority” (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009, 18). Despite the bank’s position as the largest multilateral donor for development, its role as GISPs largest funder, and the task team leader’s personal efforts to promote GISP and its work on invasive alien species, the bank never developed an operational policy to regulate the impact of its development projects on invasive species. Operational policies are a central governing mechanism used to ensure that bank-financed activates do not cause financial, social, or environmental damage.17 This shows that GISP was receiving the support from an active and committed specialist within the bank, but without the kind of institutional buy-in that could mobilize support for the partnership from different quarters of the organization. When the partner organization is as large and as relevant in international development as the World Bank, institutional support would have been the more strategic benefit to obtain.

Conclusion

As World Bank resources ended, the final evaluation stated, “For GISP, effectiveness needs to be considered not only in the carrying out of specific activities but also in the way the Association is comprised and managed, and the role that the World Bank has played” (Fox and Moran 2006, 10).

The impact of the World Bank as a partner in GISP was mixed. At first glance, the organization provided much-needed resources to a partnership that could not have continued to grow and scale up its successes without them. On the other hand, those resources came at a cost to the partnership’s organizational structure, place of work, work program, and potential for the issue of invasive species to move beyond the confines of biodiversity. It would be entirely inaccurate to conclude that GISP ended as a result of the World Bank’s involvement. When the World Bank begun financing GISP the partnership was at a crossroad. It needed then to rectify an important omission from its founding days: invasive species had to be framed as a threat to agriculture, industry, and food security, not just to biodiversity. If the partnership had become a multisectoral initiative, perhaps the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Trade Organization, and the World Health Organization would have been invited and GISP would have been less vulnerable and dependent on an individual champion within one IO.

What I have argued here is that the bank changed the very nature of the partnership by formalizing a secretariat into a hierarchical organization, relocating it to South Africa, and offering compartmentalized support to the partnership from Washington. The fact that the partners were not able to regroup under a new organizational logic may be the fault of the partners. Networks function based on organic interactions. When these interactions are interrupted, the network needs to quickly realign itself or risk dissolving. The bank’s responsibility lies in failing to recognize and support the organic process among the founding partners that had produced GISP’s innovation in policymaking. If GISP was achieving desirable ends through appropriate means, then what would have been the optimal arrangement between it and the World Bank to maintain them? I suggest that the best way to scale up GISP’s initial successes would have been financing the products and processes it had already figured out how to deliver. The World Bank’s mission to promote innovation through partnerships would have been better served by supporting GISP at arm’s length, and not treating it as just another one of its projects.