1. Millennium Development Goal 8 was “Global Partnership for Development.” Sustainable Development Goal 17 is “Partnerships for the Goals.”
2. In 1969, during a visit to the United States, then prime minister of Canada Pierre Elliott Trudeau said to the Americans, “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.” This has become an often revisited phrase to describe the nature of close-knit relationships between small neighbors and big nations (Mulcahy 2000). In the case of partnerships, it also partly captures the experience of small organizations that partner with a large bureaucracy.
3. The World Bank Group is comprised of five organizations: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the International Development Association, the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, and the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. The first two agencies have historically been the ones involved in developing public-private partnerships, and therefore this book focuses on their specific experience and results, although I refer to the World Bank or simply “the bank” throughout the book for the sake of brevity.
4. A similar story can be told about other international organizations (IOs). While the historical relationship between business and the UN has been characterized more by animosity than by cooperation, today most UN agencies, regardless of their mandates, have set up a special unit to secure partnerships with the business sector. The Global Compact is perhaps one of the best-known examples of the growth of this phenomenon of business participation in governance with the UN (Thérien and Pouliot 2006). The World Bank has forged partnerships with the same NGOs that not much prior had denounced the financier’s lending practices. For example, in 1992 the World Bank clashed with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) over conservation and development initiatives in the Brazilian Amazon (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Yet at the 2002 summit in Johannesburg, the government of Brazil, the WWF, and the World Bank announced the Amazon Region Protected Areas Partnership, which aimed to conserve biodiversity by tripling the number of protected areas in the Amazon (Andonova 2007).
5. According to the World Bank, shared governance requires that “partners have established a governing body to provide strategic direction and oversight of the program. . . . If such a body exists—whether it is called a board, a consultative group, a program council, or a steering committee—its responsibilities should encompass generally accepted governance functions, including strategic direction, management oversight, risk management, and evaluation, as laid out in a program charter or other constitutive document of the program” (World Bank 2011). This is the stricter version of the definition of partnerships the bank uses. Without the requirement of shared governance, the bank stated it was involved in more than two hundred global partnerships (World Bank 2010b).
6. Stephen Linder (1999) offers a helpful review of the multiple meanings of “partnership” in contemporary discussions. His taxonomy reveals usages that vary from privatization disguised as partnering to actual power-sharing structures.
7. This is the year the bank joins the first initiative that fits with the definition of partnership detailed earlier in the chapter. The first such partnership was the International Comparison Program, which was founded as a joint venture between the United Nations Statistical Division and the University of Pennsylvania, with financial support from the Ford Foundation and the World Bank. A second partnership was not launched until 1972. This was the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), founded by eleven state actors, six IOs, and three foundations as initial members.
8. The drafters of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) purposely designed a framework agreement that allowed national governments to interpret how to best implement its articles (Glowka, Burhenne-Guilmin, and Synge 1994). This was a concession to the developing countries that did not want to sign a treaty that would have committed their resources to strict targets or time frames (as in the case of the Convention on International Trade on Endangered Species, or CITES).
9. To the extent that the Global Environment Facility (GEF) can fit within the working definition of partnerships here, it was a public-public kind (among three IOs), but not a public-private one.
10. Although the U.S. government was active in the drafting and negotiations of the CBD, President George H. Bush declined to sign it during the Rio Summit. President Clinton signed the convention in 1993, but the Senate never ratified it. Consequently, the United States remains an “observer” to Conference of the Parties meetings of the CBD. NGOs have long lamented this defeat and the United States’ status as the only country in the world that failed to join the convention: “As a CBD ‘observer,’ our nation’s delegations have no official voice—we cannot directly engage in key negotiations or final decision-making” (Defenders of Wildlife and the Centre for Biological Diversity 2008, 1).
11. In Requiem for Nature, John Terborgh (1999) suggests a role for existing domestic armed forces to protect biodiversity, or the creation of “internationally financed elite forces within countries” (199). There are, of course, some serious implications to providing weapons to countries with extensive records of human rights abuses or authoritative regimes.
12. Richard Leakey also made headlines when, during the 2003 World Parks Congress, he denied there were any indigenous people living in his homeland of Kenya.
13. There is a deep divide in the domestic public administration literature between authors who question whether public and private spheres should ever be combined in mixed governance arrangements or whether their respective values, goals, and motivations mean they should always function separately (Box 1999; Terry 1993, 1998).
14. For example, the Action Agenda of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development stated that “both public and private investment have key roles to play in infrastructure financing, including through development banks . . . [and] mechanisms such as public private partnerships” (United Nations 2015, 24).
15. In this case, leverage is expressed as the ratio of total project costs to bank commitments through public-private partnership mechanisms.
16. Biermann and colleagues (2009) develop a typology of different types of governance fragmentation (synergistic, cooperative, and conflictive) and evaluate their respective costs and benefits, particularly in the case of climate change.
17. The World Bank found that 90 percent of all global and regional partnership programs were in three sectors: environment, health, and agriculture/rural development (World Bank 2011a). However, as discussed in the next chapter, not all two hundred partnerships assessed by the bank correspond to the more restrictive criteria of this study.
18. A study on media coverage conducted by Legaganeux and colleagues (2018) compared biodiversity to climate change issues and found that since 2000, “CC media coverage was 3.3 times greater compared to BD and reached up to eight times greater in 2016” (3). The authors believe there is a systemic “biodiversity communication deficit.”
19. An exception to this functionally driven trend has been Börzel and Risse (2005).
20. For the World Bank, outputs refer to the specific activities and products of a development investment, while outcomes refer to the medium- and long-term impacts of that investment (Leeuw and Vaessen 2009).
21. My question focuses on the consequences rather than the causes of the partnership model. For a review of the literature on the emergence of transnational partnerships, see Schäferhoff, Campe, and Kann (2009). Explanations are generally divided in two groups: functionalist (changes in the structure of global governance created vacuums that partnerships were able to fill) and incentive-based (IOs seekt resources, transnational corporations look for access to public tenders, new markets, or social legitimacy, and NGOs hope to influence global politics). In addition to these explanations there is a normative argument to be made as to why partnerships, as opposed to other forms of governance, emerged. For example, in light of the global spread of neoliberalism, partnerships seem to fit “changing understandings” of appropriate forms of governance (Bernstein 2005).
22. This theoretical proposition is empirically supported by responses to a survey on the World Bank/World Wildlife Fund Alliance for Forest Conservation and Sustainable Use: many bank staff feared this manipulation by a large NGO for its own subsidiary purposes. It is also a fear the bank has recognized by installing safeguards to protect it against reputational risks when it partners with civil society and business actors (World Bank 2000, 2002a).
1. A public good is nonrivalrous and nonexcludable in consumption. As Kaul, Grunberg, and Stern (1999) point out, there are very few pure global public goods. Impure public goods, such as club goods and common-pool resources, are more prevalent in the global commons. In either case, the market alone does not provide for their sustainable consumption, and states have to coordinate to ensure they are not overconsumed and depleted. This caution applies to many environmental issues, including biodiversity. Kaul and colleagues (1999) propose that global public goods have the added concern of providing equally for all beneficiaries. To qualify as a true global public good, its provision must be quasi-universal: across generations, state borders, socioeconomic groups, and gender. This definition is a demanding one for state coordination and suggests an important role for IOs that can facilitate consultations, negotiations, monitoring, and follow-up operations in countries.
2. The Parliamentary Network of the World Bank is a policy dialogue fora between parliamentarians and the World Bank.
3. This is one of the reasons why I have bracketed this study between 1992 and 2012, and I have not extended the timeline for biodiversity partnerships examined in the following chapters. Infrastructure partnerships, often called P3s or PPPs at the World Bank, bear little resemblance to the type of partnerships examined in this book. Infrastructure partnerships are also uniquely defined by the bank as “a long-term contract between a private party and a government entity, for providing a public asset or service, in which the private party bears significant risk and management responsibility and remuneration is linked to performance” (World Bank 2017a, 1).
4. DGF funding calculations are based on an internal review of global and regional partnership programs (GRPPs) (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2011).
5. This includes all the partnerships in the Independent Evaluation Group’s (IEG’s) 2011 stocktaking in addition to a curated list of partnerships that received Development Facility Grant (DGF) funding and qualify as regional or global partnerships using IEG criteria.
6. The UK was one of the pioneers of domestic partnership arrangements. In 1992, the conservative government of John Major established the Private Finance Initiative as a vehicle to finance capital projects without increasing taxes. The emphasis was on the financial benefit of public-private partnerships. A typical project might have a private sector actor building a hospital and then renting the facilities to the government. This was billed as a win-win scenario since it facilitated private profit and allowed the government to “increase public investment through higher capital spending while maintaining a tight fiscal stance” (Allen 2001, 23). Canada arrived at the public-private partnership model a decade later. Around 2000 there were frequent references to initiating public-private deals to build roads, bridges, and hospitals. The province of British Columbia was at the forefront of these initiatives. Quebec and Ontario soon followed suit. The Canadian model of public-private partnerships copied the British example and involved a concession arrangement whereby the public entity would solicit bids for private actors to build and operate a hospital or road for a number of years and the government would retain final ownership of the property at the end of the concessionary period. In both British and Canadian cases, the virtues of public-private partnerships were couched in terms of performance management, competition, and avoiding peaks in public spending (by spreading the cost of new infrastructure across the life of a concession) (Christensen and Lægreid 2011). This is the language of the new public management literature, and the underlying principle is that the private sector is consumer-oriented and generates better-quality services than the government (Ruppert 2010).
7. Interview with World Bank staff, Washington, DC, April 2011.
8. While the GEF calls the Earth Fund a public-private partnership, it operates similarly to a trust fund. Earth Fund dollars are disbursed to GEF agencies, which then use the funds to support environment-related initiatives. While the original draft of the Earth Fund (then called the Public Private Partnership Initiative) called for the involvement of the private sector in making decisions relating to funds disbursement, the Earth Fund involves private actors only in an implementation role. There is no shared governance (van den Berg and Volonté 2011).
9. The first step of the policy cycle of a global program is “identifying and defining an issue that requires global action: Initial research, analysis, awareness-raising, and advocacy, as needed; identifying alternative strategies to address the issue” (Lele 2002, annex B). Therefore, the bank’s policy is to define, analyze, formulate responses, and even conduct advocacy around the organization’s view of the biodiversity problem before partners are sought out to jointly deploy resources toward it. Because of this order of actions, it becomes particularly important to ensure that the partnership, once formed, has a formal governing body through which other partners can counter or support the bank’s initial vision of the biodiversity problem,
10. Examples include bilateral agencies such as the Danish International Development Agency, Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (German Technical Cooperation Agency), the UK Department for International Development, the Canadian International Development Agency, and so forth.
11. This OED Evaluation of Global Programs at the World Bank by Lele (2002) also distinguishes between institutional versus operational partnerships. The former involves dialogue or advocacy among actors while the latter generate specific products or services. Since this inquiry examines biodiversity conservation approaches, it finds operational partnerships to provide more substantial information. Consequently, this book refers only to operational types of partnerships.
12. That said, the different categories of partnerships are not mutually exclusive. Those partnerships that implement activities on the ground have decision-making authority that might have aspects of regulating or steering the behavior of other actors.
13. Much of the world’s biodiversity exists within forests.
14. The biodiversity unit identified these to include significant biodiversity financing and programmatic focus.
15. The remaining six fail to meet the criteria for the following reasons:
16. Sources: Project documents, annual reports, partnership précis, partnership websites, evaluation documents, and interviews (Coral Reef Targeted Research 2009a, 2009b; Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund 2007a; Forest Trends 2010; Global Environment Facility 2005; International Finance Corporation 2004, 2007, 2008; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005; PROFOR 2002; World Bank 2002a, 2002b, 2006, 2007, 2009b, 2009c, 2010a, 2011; World Bank/World Wildlife Fund Alliance 1999). Interviews with partnership staff including executive directors, advisors and grant managers; World Bank staff including from the Development Grant Facility, Concessional Finance and Global Partnerships office and the Independent Evaluation Group, task team leaders, program managers, senior operations officers, sector specialists, sector managers, knowledge management specialists, and archivists; International Finance Corporation staff including investment officers and partnerships officers; independent evaluators of World Bank partnerships; several national and international NGOs, US State Department; USAID and UNDP.
17. IEG’s evaluation states that the bank’s task team leader responsible for overseeing the GISP grant did not think it was appropriate for the bank to take a seat on the board since the financial support to the partnership would be temporary (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009, 62). Nonetheless, GISP has continued to receive financing from the bank. For instance, the latest annual report states that the bank funded a project on mainstreaming gender into invasive alien species management that was co-executed with GISP, and continues to apply for further funding (Global Invasive Species Program 2009, 3)
18. Interview with WWF staff, Washington, DC, October 2008.
19. “Limited” because the private financial intermediaries do not form part of the governing body.
20. Endemic species are those that are prevalent in only a particular geographic area, rather than present in various regions around the world.
21. As I discuss in chapter 4, a bank evaluation of CEFP criticized the decision to focus on environmental protection without sufficient attention to the poverty conservation nexus (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2007). The term “hotspot” is a visible Conservation International “trademark” and, as Kenneth MacDonald (2010) points out, the approach adopted by CEFP provides this international NGO added visibility and recognition.
22. Furthermore, according to the 2007 evaluation by the World Bank, “the majority of the program’s financing has been awarded to international NGOs, including CI” (21), rather than to local civil society groups.
23. Socialization has been defined as a process through which actors are induced to adopt ground rules (Rieth and Zimmer 2004, 11).
1. Democratic engagements have a number of inherent risks in addition to opportunities for both the partnership and the beneficiaries. Irvin and Stansbury (2004) review the literature and identify costs and benefits, along with ideal conditions for beneficial community participation in natural resource management.
2. This is developed in specific theoretical terms in the next chapter.
3. A 2004 World Bank evaluation cautioned about the dangers of placing partnership secretariats within the bank or other IOs since the partnership manager reports to the IO and the partnership’s board. This creates a dual chain of command within the same managerial line.
4. This is what deep ecologists call the “scientific objectification of nature” (McLaughlin 1993, 13).
5. I use the term “the people” here in the civic sense.
6. As I noted in the previous section, private partners have been largely NGOs, headquartered in North America or Europe, that frame biodiversity as a global rather than a local public good to be protected. This might provide a first hint as to why a more pluralistic view of conservation is not emerging from bank partnerships. The next chapter ties such hints together into a theoretical explanation.
7. It would be worthwhile exploring why UN agencies are willing and able to attract business actors to conservation initiatives.
8. Greenwashing by large conservation NGOs has received considerable attention (Clapp and Dauvergne 2005; MacDonald 2008; MacDonald 2010). Comparatively less has been written on land grabs in which developing country governments, assisted by international conservation NGOs, increase their power by taking land for protected areas and displacing rural communities living on these lands (as MacDonald [2008] describes, based on her own experience working in Conservation International).
9. If the bank promotes a neoliberal agenda, it seems odd that the organization has not attracted business actors as natural partners. This may be partially explained by the smaller role that business and markets have had in the biodiversity conservation regime compared to the climate change regime. However, Pattberg and colleagues’ (2012) assessment of World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) partnerships confirms a broader trend in this direction. Andonova (2018) probes the involvement of different types of actors in health partnerships and also finds that businesses and NGOs have had limited participation compared to governments, IOs, and foundations. This pattern of limited participation by business actors requires further research.
10. Why this particular conservation recipe is so rigidly applied across the globe and remains resistant to change is a fascinating question, but it lies outside the limits of this book. Michael Lewis’s (2003) Inventing Global Ecology provides an ideational and disciplinary explanation. Roderick Neumann’s (2001) account of terrestrial ordering in Africa suggests structural reasons.
11. The term “involvement” itself is vague and gives the reported statistic little meaning.
12. The more inclusive criteria of partnerships used by the bank recognize any project donor as a partner. This makes its relationship with the GEF and all the trust funds that the bank manages on behalf of bilateral donors count as partnerships. Applying this more relaxed criterion would mean that partnerships account for 42 percent of all biodiversity investments (World Bank 2006, 7).
1. This echoes in part the work by March and Simon (1958) on bureaucratic politics and bounded rationality, given the constraints of an organizational environment.
2. Daniel Nielson and Michael Tierney (2005) caution against applying the principal-agent model to the relationship between the bank and developing country governments. They argue that to do so stretches the boundaries of the principal-agent model beyond utility since the bank cannot fire a developing country government as it can a staffer, an NGO, or a firm that it employs as an agent.
3. It should also be noted that those communities in close proximity to the biodiversity areas that partnerships try to protect routinely contribute in-kind resources to partnership activities when they are called on to provide services in the implementation stage. These resources are most often free labor and opportunity costs. For example, Wilke and colleagues (2001) write that while “local communities incur opportunity costs from foregone access to forest resources within protected areas and yet seldom obtain financial compensation from the park or reserve, they have little incentive to conserve biodiversity within the protected area and have considerable incentive to intensively exploit protected resources for quick, illegal and likely unsustainable pay-off” (702). Yet neither this nor the impact that partnership activities will have on these communities is considered adequate reason to include them in the decision-making processes of the partnership at the executive level.
4. A critique of transaction cost approaches is their focus on opportunistic behavior based on a particular conception of human nature (Ghoshal and Moran 1996). However, viewing human nature as the cause of opportunism may very well catalyze the problem. When controls over contracts are enforced with significant vigilantism, it can promote the kind of distrustful environment that fosters opportunism. In other words, starting a partnership with distrust and devising contracts anticipating agent slippage may exacerbate the conditions for opportunism that contracts were supposed to remedy.
5. Oliver E. Williamson (1993) finds that transaction cost economists have been more successful at focusing on core issues, such as the dynamics of delegation, and lacked peripheral vision that can account for variation.
6. In this context, evidence of partnerships acting with the autonomy that self-governance provides may also count as evidence of slippage if they are not following the Bank’s policies.
7. Based on Darren Hawkins and co-editors’ (2006) comprehensive volume on delegation in international organizations, Tim Büthe (2007) summarizes agent autonomy as “the possible range of actions the agent can take contrary to the principal’s interests, net whatever mechanism the principal may have put in place to control the agent” (861). The second part of the equation corrects the first. In the absence of a principal acting as corrector of potential slack, we can expect ample room for agent autonomy. Hence it is of interest to analyze why and under what conditions a principal would eschew its expected role of controlling its agents. I propose that when IOs are principals, their organizational traits (bureaucratic culture) can be the main culprit of this outcome.
8. The bank recognized the burden of additional requirements and started to allow certain middle-income countries to be subject to their own national safety provisions instead of the bank’s safeguards. This move generated support from those who wanted to improve the speed of loan preparation at the bank and reduce the burden on borrowing clients; it also generated considerable backlash from civil society actors worried about declining social and environmental standards (Ferranti 2006).
9. Socialization moves in two directions (Feldman 1976). Hence it should not be a surprise to see elements of mutual influence between the bank and at least some of its partners. The literature on NGO-IO socialization has focused more on how NGOs influence the bank and less on how the bank shapes NGOs in its own organizational image. I hope that this research project’s perspective on the bureaucratic influence of the bank on its partners contributes to balancing the analysis of socialization.
10. Therefore, a large conservation NGO that is delegated authority to implement partnership activities need not ever behave opportunistically (as principal-agent theorists might anticipate) to promote its own institutional agenda.
11. Weber creates a typology of four different types of rationality: goal, value, affectual, and traditional (habitual). I only refer to the first two for the purposes of this research. The first two are also the central concepts of Weber’s theory on the logic of social action (Weber 1947).
12. The benefits of these organizational traits are stability, efficiency, and “objectivity” (a legal-rational order commands authority). The challenges identified by Weber are many, but most relevant for this inquiry are those related to how bureaucracies undermine democracy.
13. This is despite statements on the growth of advisory services and its role as a global knowledge broker or convener of stakeholders, for example.
14. This statement is based on interviews with two current and former task team leaders of environmental projects, a staff member of the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, and an external evaluator of World Bank projects. Interviews were conducted in Washington, DC, and New York City in 2010 and 2011.
15. Abbott and Snidal (2009) describe the current international system as “transnational new governance” and contrast it to a pre-1990’s system they call “international old governance.” The authors theoretically describe IOs as orchestrators of transnational public and private actors and normatively advocate that IOs are particularly well suited for this role in the current transnational new governance system. In Abbott and colleagues’ (2012) framework, IOs act as principals (now orchestrators) and non-state actors such as business firms or NGOs act as the agents, or intermediaries between the IO and third parties, which are called targets.
1. Interview with World Bank staff, Washington, DC, September 2011.
2. Interview with senior CEPF staff and World Bank staff, Arlington, Virginia, and Washington, DC, September 2011.
3. Interviews with CEPF staff members, Arlington, Virginia, September 2011.
4. Interview with World Bank staff, Washington, DC, and CEPF staff, Arlington, Virginia, September 2011.
5. Interview with three World Bank staff, Washington, DC, September 2011.
6. Interview with World Bank staff, Washington, DC, September 2011.
7. Interview with World Bank staff, Washington, DC, September 2011.
8. Interview with World Bank staff, Washington, DC, September 2011.
9. This includes: “Assist grantees and the CEPF Secretariat in receiving and processing grant applications, ensuring compliance with CEPF policies, and facilitating on-time and accurate grantee and portfolio reporting and monitoring” as well as organizing seminars for exchanging experiences between grantees, and looking for additional donor funding (Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund 2011).
10. Interview with senior CEPF staff, [Arlington, Virginia, September 2011.
11. This despite Conservation International’s own role as fiduciary trustee of CEPF, regional implementation team, and grant recipient on the ground.
12. This ratio is better than CEPFs global average. In 2010, 54 percent of grants were awarded to international organizations and 46 percent to domestic ones (Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund 2010).
13. The three exceptions were relatively smaller grants to the University of Western Ontario in Canada, Duke University in North Carolina, and the Rainforest Alliance in New York City (CEPF 2012).
14. There is a logical framework tool (the matrix described here) and a logical framework approach, which is a process used to arrive at this matrix.
15 . For example, Kilby (2004) argues: “In development practice, the new managerial focus and search for certainty has been realized through the tool of the logical framework analysis and its variants in the form of results-based management frameworks (CIDA 2002) and objectives-oriented project planning (GTZ 1997)” (210).
16. Interview with bank staff, Washington, D.C, September 2011.
17. For example, the Stop TB Partnership, one of the largest in the bank, receives regular stakeholder complaints about delays in purchasing and distributing vaccines that result from the bank’s procurement procedures (World Bank 2011b).
18. Interview with CEPF staff, Arlington, VA, September 2011.
19. There is a larger tension playing out throughout the bank, which partnerships showcase. Domestic pressure on donors to curtail development assistance results in pressure on the bank to rely more heavily on results, or evidence-based disbursements.
20. A format of the letter to be received from the national focal point is included in the partnership’s operation manual.
21. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this excellent observation.
22. Seligmann and Conservation International, like most the five largest international conservation NGOs and their presidents, are also well connected to media celebrities, who champion their missions. Harrison Ford was the most visible personality in Conservation International fundraising events, hosting private dinners for CEPF and possible future partners interested in supporting the expansion of CEPF’s work.
23. Interview with staff from Canadian Executive Director’s office, October 2011.
24. These include the Atlantic Forest, California Floristic Province, Cape Floristic Region, Caribbean Islands, Caucasus, Cerrado, Chilean Winter Rainfall-Valdivian Forests, Coastal Forests of Eastern Africa, Eastern Afromontane, East Melanesian Islands, Guinean Forests of West Africa, Himalaya, Horn of Africa, Indo-Burma, Irano-Anatolian, Japan, Madagascar and Indian Ocean Islands, Madrean Pine-Oak Woodlands, Maputaland-Pondoland-Albany, Mediterranean Basin, Mesoamerica, Mountains of Central Asia, Mountains of Southwest China, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Philippines, Polynesia-Micronesia, Southwest Australia, Succulent Karoo, Sundaland, Tropical Andes, Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena, Wallacea, Western Ghats, and Sri Lanka.
Myers published on hotspots jointly with the president of Conservation International, Russell Mittermeier (Mittermeier et al. 2004; Myers et al. 2000).
25. Various international conservation NGOs sell their particular approach as the most effective means to conservation. The WWF promotes the “Global 200,” based on representativeness of habitats. Bird Life International promotes 218 “Endemic Bird Areas” using the rationale that birds are the most valuable indicators of biodiversity. The WWF and the IUCN promote 234 “Centers of Plant Diversity” and argue that vascular plants are the best indicators of biodiversity. The Nature Conservancy promotes 805 “Ecoregions” (Kunich 2003).
26. There are divisions within the World bank over conservation approaches. The IEG and some environmental task team leaders see room for more people-centered approaches, while other task team leaders in the Environment Department accept that trade-offs are inevitable. The line seems to fall mainly along disciplinary boundaries, with field biologists and ecologists relying more heavily on the conservation side of the equation.
27. This might include policies such as ecoagriculture, which challenges the conventional wisdom that communities’ agricultural production will have a detrimental effect on conservation and ecosystem services.
28. The first comment is from a participant from Sierra Leone, where CEPF implements conservation activities. It was made in a Q&A discussion session following a presentation by CEPF executive director Patricia Zorrita, during the Civil Society Forum of the World Bank and IMF annual meetings in September 2011. The second comment is from an NGO participant during the same Q&A session and in follow-up interview with the author in September 2011.
1. Interview with GISP’s Executive Director during 2003–2011, Sarah Simons, December 2011.
2. Interview with Sarah Simons, December 2011.
3. Interview with Harold Mooney, November 2011.
4. Interview with Sarah Simons, December 2011.
5. Bank financing continued until 2010, but in much smaller amounts and targeted toward the delivery of specific training workshops rather than to cover the secretariat’s core costs.
6. At this time the focus shifted from developing the science of invasive species to creating management tools to deal with them.
7. The Nature Conservancy joined the partnership after the first phase.
8. Interview with Sarah Simons, December 2011.
9. Interview with Sarah Simons, December 2011.
10. Comments from Lynn Jackson in response to GISPs External Evaluation Report (2006).
11. Interview with Sarah Simons, December 2011.
12. Interview with Alan Fox, co-author of GISPs final external evaluation, December 2011.
13. Interview with Alan Fox, December 2011.
14. Interview with Sarah Simons, December 2011.
15. Interview with Alan Fox, December 2011
16. Interviews with Alan Fox, and Sarah Simons, December 2011.
17. For comparison, it is worth mentioning that when the World Bank supported an earlier partnership called the Global Integrated Pest Management Facility, it introduced an operational policy (OP 4.09) on pest management (World Bank 1998). Yet in the case of GISP there was no such effort to integrate the partnership with the bank’s portfolio. A comparison of situational variables vis-à-vis the constant of the bank’s bureaucratic culture would need to be analyzed to explain the divergent outcomes between these two partnerships. However, the report from the bank’s independent evaluation group may provide a hint. It stated that the bank’s experience with the OP for pest management “revealed that without proper guidance, training, resources for staff, and country buy-in, introducing an operational policy on IAS could run the similar risk of stifling investment in such critical sectors as agriculture and aquaculture” (World Bank Independent Evaluation Group 2009, 34).
1. In the organizational management literature, some of the main benefits of networking include “risk sharing; obtaining access to new markets and technologies; speeding products to market; pooling complementary skills; safeguarding property rights when complete or contingent contracts are not possible; and acting as a key vehicle for obtaining access to external knowledge” (Powell, Koput, and Smith-Doerr 1996, 116).
2. For example, in 2011 Meg Whitman became CEO of Hewlett-Packard, and had the company’s intranet feature a red button as part of her “bureaucracy buster” rule. Any employee who identified unnecessary processes was to report them by clicking on the red button (Hardy 2012).
3. Interview with Augusta Molnar, October 2010.
4. Interview with Patrick Kipalu, September 2011.
5. Historical and cultural forces appear to have influenced the discipline of American field ecology, and the resulting preference of scholars and practitioners for peopleless parks. In his book Inventing Global Ecology, the environmental historian Michael Lewis (2003) traces the influence of late nineteenth-century cultural dialogues in the United States on the importance of conquering a wild frontier and entering the empty wilderness. The “wilderness” occupied a central place in the American imaginary: “a place of solitude and sacredness where a new self could emerge” (69). This conceit of wilderness had an impact on the kinds of scientific theories that were formulated by early U.S. ecologists, such as Frederic Clements. His climax theory has become disputed by many, but, according to Lewis, it is still deeply entrenched in popular environmentalist thinking. Clements posited that all ecosystems have a natural climax stage, which is their optimal status. Disruptions such as fires, logging, or grazing will distress the ecological system until such time as it is left on its own to regenerate and regain its natural climax.