Partnerships are being promoted as a desirable, and in some cases optimal, model of coordinated governance, but, as the preceding chapters illustrated, they are also failing to deliver on their promise. In the case of World Bank partnerships, they are failing to fulfill the three core purposes for which they were set up. I began this inquiry by investigating how the bank understood partnerships and partners since the early days of the Pearson Commission Report of 1969. Although the World Bank’s conception of partnerships has evolved, they have been consistently justified as vehicles for realizing more democratic, innovative, and financially sustainable outcomes.
These are governance values that need to be operationalized before we can assess the extent to which partnerships actually delivered on them. To this end, chapter 2 developed proxy measures and applied them to the twelve biodiversity partnerships that fit a strict set of criteria for public-private partnerships launched by the bank between 1992 and 2012. The results were disappointing. Partnerships have been largely driven by partners from Western and developed economies, even though most of the world’s biodiversity exists in developing countries. Most of the twelve partnerships focused on the global dimension of biodiversity conservation rather than on local conservation priorities. Most partnership secretariats were located outside the bank yet were always hosted by large international conservation NGOs. In most cases the World Bank retained control of partnerships’ executive boards by reserving for itself the position of chair. These boards relied on a less inclusive, shareholder model of governance and maintained strong executive functions over the partnership. In terms of innovation, the twelve partnerships overwhelmingly favored the traditional command and control approach to conservation. Even those initiatives that, like the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), were explicitly created to enable community participation, on closer inspection showed a policy bias in favor of command and control approaches: they directed local beneficiaries to implement traditional conservation activities through specific eligibility criteria in a grant mechanism. While some have criticized particular partnerships on some of these counts, the findings presented here suggest a systemic set of pathologies in World Bank–sponsored partnerships that is in need of explanation. In brief, why do international organizations, which have become the most important entrepreneurs of global partnerships, fail to foster initiatives that produce the sort of good governance values for which they were set up?
In chapter 3, I engaged critically with the principal-agent model, a dominant analytical framework for many scholars of international organizations (IOs), to explain the behavior of these global institutional actors. A principal-agent account raises more questions than answers. It provides a limited theoretical explanation, and similarly constrains policy prescriptions that flow from its assumptions. I proposed a complementary theoretical approach, one based on Weber’s analysis of bureaucracies, that highlights the tension between goal-rational versus value-rational behavior. Democracy and innovation are ultimate values in addressing environmental problems. Could an organization like the World Bank, which operates on technical and instrumental logic, be able to create partnerships that promote governance values? Joining a growing number of IO scholars who leverage insights from sociological institutionalism, I posited the need to investigate institutional partners from the inside out. When the bank joins a partnership, its institutional weight is such that it becomes important to explain how its own organizational logic influences the logic of action of partnerships, and thereby their conduct and performance. In contrast to the more traditional applications of the principal-agent model, and inspired by newer rationalist scholarship, my analysis focused on the principal rather than the agent to explain why partnerships do not turn out as planned. The World Bank, like most IOs, is a bureaucratically organized public administration. It is important to examine what kind of partners such organizations make.
The case of CEPF, examined in chapter 4, showed that large bureaucracies undermine democracy and promote policy stagnation rather than policy innovation when they reproduce the same instrumental logic of action within their partnerships. The case of the Global Invasive Species Program (GISP), discussed in chapter 5, similarly demonstrated that bureaucratic hierarchy, rules, and silos can, despite the best efforts of individual bank staff, derail a pioneering partnership in global environmental policy. Yet from the bank’s point of view, these two partnership cases are very different. They are polar opposites in the “lessons learned” category. Why is CEPF considered an exemplar of best practices and GISP rated a highly unsatisfactory partnership, if neither fulfilled the partnership’s promises to advance democracy and achieve innovation? It is illuminating to unpack the reasons why the bank considers GISP a failure and what influence, if any, the bank had on getting to such suboptimal outcomes, according to its own accounting of the facts. CEPF was able to efficiently deliver many operational outputs, such as timely financial disbursements with adequate reporting, yet it did so at the expense of intrinsic values, such as real participation or policy innovation in conservation governance. GISP failed on both counts, neither achieving desired outputs nor sustaining democratic and innovation values. However, before the bank became its main source of funding, GISP had successfully promoted global policy innovation by elevating a previously absent issue to the focus of its work and had incorporated a large number of stakeholders into its awareness-raising and management activities. Unfortunately, bureaucracy and innovation have long been seen as operating at cross-purposes. “It has become a commonplace among behavioural scientists that the bureaucratic form of organization is characterized by high productive efficiency but low innovative capacity” (Thompson 1965, 1). The case of GISP confirms this view.
It should be noted that domestic infrastructure partnerships have had similar experiences in this regard. Although these are contractual relationships rather than the cogovernance arrangements of the type analyzed in this book, they too must balance multiple goals—and in their case align public control with private performance. One of the main critiques of public-private partnerships of this type is that the private sector focuses on output and efficiency, while issues of equity and access are relegated to secondary concerns or forgotten altogether. Therefore the public actor must maintain safeguards to protect the broader public good. The question is how much and what kind of government control is required to ensure the private contractor delivers a project best suited to all users. Some scholars have argued that government bureaucracies overstep their remit and create a climate of excessive control limiting the performance of the contractor. For example, in a review of twenty years of public-private partnerships in Canada, Matti Siemiatycki (2015) notes that “while PPP projects have been designed by some of Canada’s leading architects, to date no project procured by a provincial PPP agency has been awarded the country’s top commendation for architectural quality, the Governor General’s Medal” (358).
It is important to remember that the expectation that the private sector would be more consumer-oriented and create better-quality services than the government served as the rationale for promoting public-private partnerships among many new public management scholars. Therefore the failure to achieve design excellence by Canada’s top architects working in public-private partnership arrangements is particularly problematic. These poor results might well be understood in the context of bureaucratic logics of action. As the “Ontario Association of Architects explains in a public letter outlining their position on PPPs, ‘the existing process is geared for predictability, minimizing risk, and producing satisfactory (but not exceptional) results’” (quoted in Siemiatycki 2015, 358).
The bank’s self-assessment of the two partnership cases examined in the previous chapters relies on metrics that reflect the bank’s concerns with operational outputs rather than the partnership’s ability to enable democracy and innovation as ultimate outcomes. In Weber’s terms, the logic of the bank’s assessment rests on goal-based rationality rather than value rationality. I am not implying that partnerships need not implement activities that deliver on their desired short-term outputs. My argument is that when the bank cites good governance values as justifying the drive to partner, then a fair assessment needs to reflect back on this original intent and consider the extent to which the bank’s partnerships have supported those values. Furthermore, as the bank has repeatedly stated, it is participation that leads to ownership of development outcomes and to sustainability of results. In other words, the successful implementation of partnership activities and the realization of good governance values should be mutually supportive and reinforcing goals. In practice, it is self-defeating to prioritize measurable operational outputs at the expense of curtailing democracy or innovation outcomes.
The absence of a “values frame” in bank partnerships highlights a central finding of this inquiry: partnerships, despite stated intentions to the contrary, are treated by the bank as offshoots of itself and become susceptible to the same pathologies of bureaucratic traits. These inherited organizational characteristics inhibit partnerships from realizing their original raison d’être. Extending Barnett and Finnemore’s (1999) original proposition, I have argued that the organizational logic of the bureaucratic IO that becomes a partner is contagious. The effect of the World Bank becoming involved in partnerships is also pathological because the bank explicitly sought out a new organizational form to deliver what it could not achieve on its own. The bank has been very explicit about its search for new organizational forms to address the provision of global public goods:
Demand for new organizational forms is spawning global programs. The growing popularity of global programs reflects the concern that established international organizations and the governments that constitute them lack the capacity to address these complex, multilayered, and increasingly multisectoral issues by themselves. (World Bank 2004a, 5)
Weber argued that bureaucratic spread was inevitable. Even those who tried to escape it would in the end form organizations that became bureaucracies themselves, driven by competition and a search for efficiency (Gerth and Mills 1946). In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber (1958) laments the inescapable grip of the iron cage of bureaucracy, where the rationalist order will triumph devoid of the values prized by the human spirit. The World Bank creates partnerships in a global governance environment that sanctions them as appropriate modes of governance and lends legitimacy to institutions that promote them. However, because these partnerships are created in the shadow of a bureaucracy, the global governance environment comes to accept a bureaucratic version of what was supposed to be distinctly different modes of governance. The partnerships as means supersede the ends. If IOs do not recognize this trap, and keep partnerships too close to their form of organization, partnerships may simply become mechanisms for the further bureaucratization of global problems.
To illustrate this argument on the spread of IOs’ bureaucratic form of organization, this book identified specific ways in which World Bank’s bureaucratic principles leach into partnerships. This has not been entirely bad news. Yet it is certainly not entirely good news either. As David Beetham (1996) has written, “Bureaucracy is something we all love to hate” (1). Weber argued that its survival and spread are explained by its many positive attributes. When Weber developed a theory of bureaucracy, he identified several positive attributes over preceding forms of organization. For example, bureaucratic organizations derived their authority from rational action, rather than from charisma or tradition. This makes bureaucracies objective and driven to maximize efficiency. Three main attributes enable rational performance: hierarchy, rules, and clear divisions of labor (Jain 2004).
It is clear that the operational efficiencies of CEPF, for example, were in part a result of adhering to a set of predictable, objective, and verifiable rules and procedures, which were themselves the product of more than sixty years of experience in delivering development assistance. Bureaucracies are efficient at managing known tasks that have become routinized. In the case of GISP, the ability of a single technical specialist within the World Bank to champion the cause of a small global partnership was the product of job specialization and institutional compartmentalization. This enabled a small organization of dedicated scientists to receive significant financial assistance, enjoy the reputational credit of being in partnership with the World Bank, and assume a leading position as the clearinghouse institution for information on invasive species under the Convention on Biological Diversity. In both partnership cases, the gains are not minor, and they were a product of bureaucracy.
Despite the superiority of bureaucracy to other forms of organization, Weber lamented that the bureaucratic search for efficiency could become an end in itself and displace social values. Robert Merton, the famous American sociologist who developed an extensive research program on the relationship between means and ends, called this “goal displacement.” He said that this occurs within bureaucracies when the “instrumental and formalistic aspects of the bureaucratic role become more important than the substantive one, the achievement of the main organizational goals” (Merton 1968, 316). This is what chapter 3 referred to as a bureaucratic pitfall, where means could become a dominant concern over ultimate ends. This explanation fits well with the empirical results of World Bank partnerships. If form needs to follow function, then what is the best organizational form of social collective action to promote democracy and innovation? The organizational logic of partnerships may be a good fit for realizing these values. Global partnerships are typically considered intervening variables, a junction in the road where two or more players meet, and where “things happen” or do not happen, as has been argued (Biermann et al. 2007). Yet the organizational logic of partnerships is not dissected in the literature. They are treated as black boxes. Partnerships as entities in their own right have eluded the critical drive to unpack and look inside the box. But what if partnerships were not simply a metaphor for cooperation but an actual vehicle for governance? What action could we expect from this particular form of organization (Thompson 2003)?
Since partnerships are created for their agency, as vehicles to achieve what multilateral actors would not otherwise do on their own, a useful line of inquiry is to examine whether their organizational logic lends itself to the desired outcomes. Just as the particular organizational logic of bureaucracies affects the specific outcomes they are most likely to achieve, so does the logic of the network form of organization affect partnership outcomes. Grahame Thompson (2003) examines the distinct logic of networks in relation to hierarchies and markets and states that they are based on a combination of features, including “the idea of non-reciprocal gift giving, the non exchange involved in an excessive energy dissipating set of relationships, and a non-instrumental or non-cumulative notion of trust” (233). Paul Adler (2001) stresses the importance of trust, and points to the relative advantage of partnerships over hierarchies and markets to use that trust to produce innovation. He writes, “Hierarchy and market are relatively more effective for the governance of low-knowledge–intensity transactions where efficiency, rather than innovation, is critical. . . . The more effective approaches rely on long-term partnership style relationships based on ‘goodwill’ trust” (225). Hence the distinct organizational features of partnerships make them suitable for achieving broader values than those realizable through authoritative decree or impersonal exchange in a market (Powell 1990). The organizational logic of partnerships moves our analysis beyond the market and hierarchy dichotomy. Networking itself can generate innovation.1
In “The Management of Innovation,” Tom Burns and G. M. Stalker (2003) argue that “the form of management is properly to be seen as dependent on the situation the concern is trying to meet” (45). Form should follow function. This book has shown that when the World Bank fosters partnerships but fails to recognize this difference between form and function, bureaucratic administration successfully imposes its requirements, to the detriment of the functions that the partnerships were set up to achieve. Mechanistic or bureaucratic management systems are appropriate for stable conditions. Partnerships intended to enable democratic and innovative outcomes operate in changing conditions that cannot be defined a priori (Burns and Stalker 2003). Partnership management systems need to be designed organically. Gareth Morgan claims that our images of organization are heavily influenced by a mechanistic notion that is consistent with bureaucratic management. The word organization comes from the Greek “organon,” a tool or instrument. Yet there are many ways to organize. If we can conjure up new images of organization and experiment with metaphors of organizations as living organisms or brains rather than machines, we can move beyond our overreliance on bureaucratic management (Morgan 1986).
Bureaucracies are not all the same. Some may have greater or lesser levels of impact on partnerships. Extensive organizational studies have been done on the relative weight of different bureaucratic attributes and institutional functioning. Studies have found that the two most important variables in determining the degree of Weberian style bureaucratization are the size and the age of the organization. Derek Pugh conducted one of the first such studies in the 1960s. The size of the organization was the most important variable in determining job specialization, formalized control, and standardization of routines. The aging organization also became more structured and mechanistic (Pugh 2003). With more than 10,000 employees, and seventy-five years since its founding, the World Bank would come out on the heavily bureaucratized end of the Pugh continuum. Size and age are not on the bank’s side.
Looking at the organizational attributes of different types of partners is a fruitful avenue of research for scholars interested in the substantive contribution of partnerships to global governance. If bureaucratic rationality runs at cross-purposes to democracy and innovation, then IOs like the World Bank need to devise ways to avoid their institutional character from crowding out achievement of the desired goals of their partnerships or get out of the partnership business altogether. Earlier I started to identify some ways in which organizations could escape the logic of bureaucratic rationality. Investigating the literature from disciplines beyond international relations provides some suggestions for IOs that require further exploration. For example, in business, realizing innovation through partnerships is critically tied to profit, and therefore receives extensive attention. There have been many case studies of organizational strategies that large companies deploy to harvest the creative potential of smaller ones without smothering them. Cisco spins in small companies with complementary or competitive products, Thermo Electron spins along small companies on the periphery of their core business, and Xerox has relied on a spin-out approach (Onassis and Bishop 2001). There is a degree of reflexivity in business firms about the effects of bureaucratic effects on innovation. The concern over bureaucratic dysfunction is always palpable.2 Business models that have thrived confirm that a key element to their success has been their ability to circumvent the bureaucratic rationality of the firm. Even business classics like Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace (MacKenzie 1998) have tapped into this line of thinking and prodded readers to think of alternative forms of organization that are not based on hierarchy, rules, and procedures to enable innovation and productivity.
Two of the best-known historical exemplars of American firms that were able to set up successful innovation organizations in parallel to the main corporation are Xerox and Bell. Malcolm Gladwell (2011) wrote about the development of the computer mouse at Xerox PARC. He disputed the myth that Steve Jobs stole the mouse from Xerox after a visit to the company’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). What Gladwell claims is that different organizational characteristics are conducive to different skill sets. Whereas Xerox PARC was set up to foster creativity and new products, it was not designed to commercialize those products. This suggests that several organizational forms are required to take a product from conception through development to market. Each organizational form is good at one particular aspect of a business process. One organization is good at formulating the vision, another at developing it, and another—like Apple—at adapting it for a mass audience. In Gladwell’s examples, no one owns the revolution. Being able to understand the strengths and limits of one’s organizational characteristics is vital for promoting innovation. Xerox understood its corporate limits and created PARC, which sat three thousand miles away from Xerox’s headquarters in Rochester, New York, and was directed by physicists with little interference from the corporation. As Gladwell writes, “Xerox’s managers didn’t always make the right decisions [but] Xerox, to its great credit, had a PARC—a place where, a continent away from the top managers, an engineer could sit and dream” (52). The bank would be able to claim similar credit if it recognized its organizational limits and let its partnerships become distinct entities.
Narain Gehani, a researcher and vice president at Bell Labs for more than twenty years, reinforced this point in his book, Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel. He writes that “for most of its 80 year history, Bell Labs was kept at arm’s length from the rest of the company” (Gehani 2003, 122). This generated very different organizational cultures and allowed Bell Labs to thrive and develop into an innovation success story (although it also created challenges for coordination with business units). The design of the original Bell Labs building, with corridors that ran seven hundred feet long, was conceived so as to “avoid fixed geographical delineation between departments” (Gertner 2012, 77). Gertner observed that the flat organizational structures, whereby junior researchers would have to coordinate directly with the top scientists in their fields, countered the influence of hierarchy. Avoiding bureaucratic dysfunction was very much in the minds of those looking for optimal organizational design for innovation. This book has developed a case for IOs to similarly examine their impact on partnerships. Like Bell Labs, World Bank partnerships need autonomy to achieve desirable outcomes.
Another approach to keep bureaucratic dysfunction from curtailing innovation and enable bottom-up participation in partnerships is to create channels that give users a direct say over products. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel (2005) notes how software and information markets have developed rich user-centered innovation communities. Invoking lead innovation theory, von Hippel argues that user innovation forms the basis of future commercial products in many technological spaces. Lead users have two main characteristics: they are ahead of market trends because they live in closest and continuous interaction with the product (an example is surgeons’ daily use of specific medical equipment) and they stand to gain from product innovation. Some industries have recognized the potential and started providing the lead users with toolkits to develop new products. This has worked well in such industries as software security and surgical equipment, where lead users have developed and freely shared their innovations. In natural resource management, those living closest to biodiversity-rich areas are the functional equivalents of lead users in commercial enterprises. Because they live in close and continuous interaction with the resources, they are the first to become aware of changing natural cycles that require adaptation, and they have the most to gain from appropriate responses. Those most dependent on environmental services may be reasonably conceptualized as biodiversity lead users and may potentially produce the most innovative management responses. The World Bank would be well advised to take a page from von Hippel’s examples of different industries’ experiences and create avenues for community resource users to design biodiversity interventions through partnerships. Of course, doing so would require trust, and not just trust in certain partners that, like Conservation International, can best emulate the bank, but trust in partners whose local knowledge and social capital exceed anything the bank could offer on its own.
I have examined the potential for achieving democracy, innovation, and new funding through partnerships because this is the justification for their existence. However, there are also normative reasons underpinning broad social purposes to orient organizational action (Katz and Georgopoulos 1971). The democratic creed is foundational to the larger social context in which the World Bank operates. Hence any standard of legitimacy requires that partnerships reflect this social value. Innovation is also valuable when existing approaches are not producing the desired outcomes. There is a strong case for enabling both more democracy and more innovation in response to traditional biodiversity conservation approaches, which have been heavily contested because they are seen by many as violations of the rights of local populations (as discussed in chapter 4) and have also been largely ineffective in halting biodiversity loss. “There is a myth that there are no people in these areas, and parks can be created without disruption to people’s livelihoods and ignoring their rights over the land,” says Augusta Molnar of the NGO Rights and Resources Initiative.3 Cordoning off land to prevent human intrusions entails displacement of populations that inhabit those areas. Patrick Kipalu, a Congolese staff member of an NGO that promotes democracy in development, said, “When conservation organizations come to the DRC the people fear for their land.”4 John Nelson, of the Forest Peoples Program, estimates that between 150,000 and 200,000 people in the Congo Basin have become conservation refugees after large tracts of land for biodiversity conservation and carbon offsets were sealed off to human populations (Martinez 2011). When partnerships promote the creation or expansion of unsustainable conservation areas devoid of people and view doing so as a marker of their success, they fail on both democracy and innovation metrics.
Promoting conservation with development—in essence, the core of the concept of “sustainable development”—has triggered significant backlash and conflict between two increasingly polarized camps that partnerships need to navigate. In ecological anthropology, two ideal-type versions of human nature are debated: the ecologically noble savage, construed as an inherent steward of biodiversity, versus Homo devastans, who is “biologically programmed to destroy non-human nature” (Balee and Erickson 2006, 10). These dialectical views of human-nature interactions give rise to deep-seated normative commitments in conservation policy.5 Many conservationists call the sustainable development approach misleading: a promotion of mere slogans that distracts from the core concern of protecting biodiversity against degradation from human intrusion. There is a widespread suspicion that local populations cannot be trusted to be responsible stewards of the environment in which they live (Chapin 2004). Some argue that the focus on local priorities can be too parochial for a global biodiversity conservation program because local populations lack a wider vision of critical conservation priorities based on such considerations as species, ecosystem, and genetic variance on a global scale (Noss 2010). To conservationists, command and control policies are at least procedurally democratic. A World Bank task team leader of CEPF has defended strict conservation and said that the bank and large international conservation NGOs are “very aware that establishing new protected areas may reduce access to resources for poor communities,” but she said further that “protected areas are national commitments and international and local NGOs work with local field staff.” Hence, she suggested, “Don’t cancel your subscription to WWF just yet” (MacKinnon 2011).
These are deeply political conversations about values and broader socioecological purposes that require deliberation through participation, representation, and empowerment of stakeholders to pass a democratic legitimacy test. When partnerships simply impose a command and control recipe, they negate rather than redress democratic deficits in global environmental governance. If partnerships are socially embedded and promote broader values, conservation approaches will have to respond to a procedural and substantive test of democracy to be regarded as legitimate. Global conservation partnerships could democratize conservation governance if they became more inclusive and developed a willingness to experiment.
If partnerships are set up to improve democracy and innovation, yet they do not, why does the World Bank continue to pursue these kinds of partnerships? As Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell (1983) have written, “As an innovation spreads, a threshold is reached beyond which adoption provides legitimacy rather than improves performance” (148). If public-private partnerships have become a gold standard of good governance, not having them raises a question for the organization: Why are they not pursuing partnerships like all other IOs? Is the bank’s pursuit of partnerships merely symbolic isomorphism (Glynn and Abzug 2002)? A key direction to explore in future research beyond the World Bank is whether the pursuit of global partnerships has become an end in itself, beyond improving democratic or innovation deficits, which was their original purpose.
There is a normative bias against “going it alone.” The norm of partnering has become established in global governance, and the bank routinely justifies its initiatives in terms of the number of partners they involve. Some authors find that IOs promote partnerships to reinvigorate their missions (Bäckstrand 2006; Ivanova 2003). Abbott and Snidal (2010) recommend that IOs become orchestrators and encourage these organizations to pursue partnerships. Given a new global order that has moved beyond traditional multilateralism, they say, partnerships provide IOs a new organizational role that will mitigate further fragmentation and incoherence in the system. However, in light of the limits that the bureaucratic structures of IOs place on partnerships, is it normatively desirable for these organizations to become orchestrators of global governance? There are at least two pitfalls to such a prescription. First, partnerships may become vehicles for the bureaucratization of global problems if they remain mere projects of IOs and are not separate and distinct enough to develop the organizational form that best suits their function. Second, IO bureaucracies that emphasize form over function and delegate initiatives to a trusted managing partner run the risk of enabling this partner to abuse its agency slack. Such opportunistic partners can use the initiative for individual, subsidiary purposes rather than for the provision of global public goods. This is a warning that both World Bank staff and scholars have raised before. In an internal survey of staff involved in the World Bank/World Wildlife Fund Alliance, bank staff stated that a lesson learned from this partnership was: “The WWF has its own agenda, it is not interested in the Bank’s agenda except to influence it” (Lele et al. 2000, 119). Also, the alliance contributes to the WWF’s institutional mission by giving it “political clout” and helping WWF’s “fundraising.” Bank staff said that it was “unclear” or “unlikely” that the alliance would contribute to the bank’s own institutional mission of poverty alleviation and sustainable development (Lele et al. 2000, 117).
Ken MacDonald similarly argues that international NGOs like Conservation International forge partnerships such as CEPF not out of financial need but in order to legitimize their institutions as key actors in environmental governance. Insofar as a conservation NGO like Conservation International derives most of its operating budget from business partnerships and sponsorships, the alliance with the World Bank serves a different purpose: to promote one of its well-known brands (“ecosystem hotspots”) and increase its visibility in the multilateral institutional environment (MacDonald 2010). In such cases, partners would be more accurately conceptualized as orchestrators of the IO.
This brings us to another underexplored area of the partnering phenomenon in global governance. Perhaps because of a prima facie distrust of the for-profit sector, scholars have scrutinized businesses’ incentives to form public-private partnerships but have not applied the same zeal to scrutinizing the NGO sector (Elsig and Amalric 2008). With some exceptions, the literature on the influence of NGOs in global governance has focused on their role in shaping and changing state actors’ behavior, and usually in a positive direction, such as promoting human rights or bans on land mines (Keck and Sikkink 1998).
A useful tool to further theorize the influence of NGOs as managing partners of World Bank partnerships is Michael Lipsky’s concept of street-level bureaucrats (1971, 2010). Lipsky defines them as the individuals who work in the field and on the front lines of their given agencies. They are those “who interact directly with citizens in the course of their jobs, and who have substantial discretion in the execution of their work” (3). Some examples include teachers, policemen, and social workers. The core of his argument is that these street-level bureaucrats have significant discretionary power in interpreting the nature of the problem they face and the resources that need to be allocated in the name of their particular agencies. This argument mirrors the one advanced by Barnett and Finnemore (1999) on the power and pathologies of IOs but moves it one step down the chain of delegation. An analysis of NGO managing partners as street-level bureaucrats would focus on the private goals that these actors take into the field and that differ from the World Bank’s mandate.
Potentially, the more bureaucratized the organization that undertakes partnerships, the greater the opportunity for smaller partners to take advantage of the disconnect between bureaucratic form and function, and to use the partnership to promote subsidiary purposes. This may be more likely in cases where the IO is large and resource-rich, like the World Bank. It takes as much staff time to monitor multimillion-dollar loans as it does to monitor small partnership funds. The IO may devote its administrative budget to the more financially significant investments and leave its street-level bureaucratic agents to carry out substantive partnership decisions in the field.
So, who really makes biodiversity policy in practice? Leonard Seabrooke and Eleni Tsingou (2009) draw on a linked ecology approach to suggest the following: “Given that actors in public and private sectors interact, and that there is a great deal of traffic between the two as actors move through revolving doors, work on authority and delegation that sees policy as dictated by who is in command, or what the organizational culture dictates as appropriate, may miss policy operates as practice” (3).
In practice, the disconnect between means and ends is obvious. For example, when a project writing school in a corridor of the tropical Andes teaches rural communities how to conceptualize conservation needs in ways that match the required sections of donors’ project documents and is paid for this effort out of partnership funds disbursed under the rubric of “civil society empowerment,” a substantive misalignment of partnership means and democratic ends seems obvious. If ever there was a strong case for the need to actually empower civil society, it is in this corridor, often referred to as the “global epicenter of biodiversity,” where so many land claims, livelihood rights, international border disputes, extractive industries’ activity, and conservation needs meet. If ever there was a place in need of policy innovation, it is in this corridor.
This book has focused on the organizational conditions that create such disconnects between IOs’ partnership promise and practice. This disconnect has produced the selective inclusion of actors, policy stagnation, and sluggish financial returns in biodiversity conservation. If IO partnerships have the studied effect in biodiversity, what can we say about their impact in other areas? Despite their mixed record of performance, partnerships continue to be promoted as an instrument of choice by international bureaucracies who spearhead most of these global initiatives (Pattberg and Widerberg 2016). Until now, we have known little about what kind of partners these IO bureaucracies make. Resistance to IO bureaucracy is often futile because bureaucrats have a hard time letting go of control and distrust partners who do not abide by familiar policies and procedures. Scholars and practitioners who advocate partnerships as a means of overhauling the architecture of global governance need to be selective in their support, and insist on carefully analyzing who will govern and how in such arrangements. The stakes are high. A rapidly deteriorating global environment urgently requires more effective and equitable institutions to govern the Anthropocene.