This chapter explores the role of three global economic institutions (GEIs) in contemporary economic governance: the International Monetary Fund, (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). GEIs are key components of global economic governance, and their activities are central to the pursuit of accountability, efficiency and equity in the global economy. The impact of GEIs on states and societies is complex and widely varying assessments of the performance of these organisations can be found in the literature. Given the absence of theoretical consensus on the roles and functions of GEIs, the first part of the chapter examines competing perspectives on international organisations.

Chapter 3 covers the period in the 1970s and 1980s when the military regime finished its big dams and their reservoirs filled. During this time, the rise of international environmentalism pressured the military government’s dam builders to undertake environmental impact studies and design environmental mitigation programs. This chapter argues that the environmentalism that the military regime’s energy sector practiced was deficient and narrowly organized around two goals. The first was protecting power plant infrastructure from environmental threats such as sedimentation. The second was to showcase environmental care without fundamentally altering project designs or slowing down construction. For example, the military regime funded environmental impact studies, but did so belatedly, after committing to particular high-impact dam sites, and followed the studies’ recommendations selectively. Most dramatically, the military regime carried out animal rescue missions, which it hoped would showcase its environmental consciousness. These actions were “pharaonic environmentalism”: protection measures designed to bolster the image of the military dictatorship as a regime that could build durable mega dams while simultaneously protecting the environment.

In 2015, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty Philip Alston stated that the World Bank treats “human rights more like an infectious disease than universal values and obligations” because of its understanding of what constitutes political interference. The World Bank’s interpretation, replicated by the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) in the development finance regime complex, has shaped how activists hold the Banks to account. This chapter examines how the international accountability norm emerged through contestation with the World Bank and spread to be taken as given for the MDBs, as distinct from international human rights and environmental elemental regimes. It then documents how activists seek to protect human and environmental rights through the banks’ international accountability mechanisms as quasi-legal processes with implications for the banks’ culpability. Although there is an increasing recognition of some rights such as free, prior and informed consent and labour, the banks continue to view these as internal standards not legal obligations. The chapter then examines the extent to which the norm needs to be backed by hard law to be enforced, with efforts by the banks to maintain their international organisation immunity given legal claims as to their implication in human and environmental rights abuses.

This chapter describes the IMF and the World Bank, the two big international financial institutions created after World War II to stabilize the global economy. The two have similar goals and mechanisms but work with different instruments and in different contexts. Both pool the resources of their members and use the money it raises to make loans to governments with specific needs. The IMF lends to countries experiencing critical balance-of-payments problems. It makes short-term loans of foreign currencies that the borrowing country must use to finance the stabilization of its own currency or monetary system. As a precondition to the loan, the Fund generally requires that the borrower change its policies in ways that the Fund believes will enable monetary stability in future. The World Bank makes longer-term loans to pay for specific projects related to development or poverty reduction. Most Bank loans are tied to a particular project undertaken by the borrowing government. The Bank and the Fund are twinned institutions in the sense that they share a common origin and many structural features, but their practices and purposes are very different. As a result, they contrast each other in ways that are useful for exploring the mix of law and politics in global affairs.

One aspect of the currently prevailing view on corruption is the emphasis on quantifications of corruption, which have been used to research its causes and effects, and to gauge progress of anti-corruption reforms around the world. This chapter is dedicated to these measures. Corruption country scores are an example of so-called Global Performance Indicators and assume that by taking the right initiatives, countries can improve their ranking in a given Global Performance Indicator. However, the available measures of corruption are not well suited to assess changes of corruption over time. A more general conclusion also emerges from this chapter. In studying social phenomena using quantitative techniques of analysis, it is considered to be important to draw a sharp line between the definition of a concept, which should come first, and attempts at measuring it, which should be conditional on the chosen definition. However, when measures of social phenomena are successful, they take on a life of their own and contribute to an ossification of the concept they refer to. Consideration of the extent to which the prevailing concept of corruption and its most popular measures have shaped each other also provides a good angle to discuss corruption more generally.

In 2020, the World Bank established the Dispute Resolution Services (DRS) to address complaints related to its projects through meditation, fact-finding, and similar methods. This chapter evaluates how the DRS should improve the right of access to remedy for project-affected people. First, the chapter identifies the legal and policy standards against which the DRS must be evaluated. The right of access provided by the Bank through the Inspection Panel’s compliance review process has three pillars: accessibility, effectiveness, and independence. Since the DRS aimed to enhance this right, drawing from best practices in dispute resolution, it must offer greater protections for affected people than the Panel process. Second, the chapter suggests improvements to the DRS. To increase accessibility, the Bank should enhance procedural protections and participation opportunities for affected people. To increase effectiveness, the Bank must clarify the minimum threshold for acceptable remedies and provide mandatory verification of party agreements. To increase independence, the Bank should offer more options for sequencing compliance review and dispute resolution processes.

This chapter focuses on the approach of the Indonesia-based Tanoto Foundation as a Global South-originated philanthropy with a far broader Asian and even global perspective, and on how it leveraged partnerships for impact. Now into its fortieth year of operations, the Tanoto Foundation has shown how philanthropy that is originated in the Global South is able to engage in knowledge exchange via global communities of practice to help create regional platforms to inspire collaboration. The pandemic has illustrated the importance of an evidence-based approach in the Global South whose results can be measured before they are scaled up and where collaboration is critical. Indonesia is a case in point, having suffered from natural disasters in the midst of the pandemic, challenging both humanitarian relief and disaster recovery. To help meet these challenges, the Foundation partnered with local (district) and national (ministry) government bodies, international development organisations, business entities, and philanthropic organisations both local and overseas. Successes in responding to the pandemic included the harmonisation of data-collation methodologies at the national level and the sharing of newly codified knowledge from the Foundation’s work. This chapter details how Tanoto Foundation built its internal institutional capacity, and maximised its impact by leveraging multiple relationships that can amplify resources, capacity, and knowledge.

Quantitative research has grown to be part of the standard methodological portfolio for comparative lawyers. Large-sample quantitative studies search for correlations between legal institutions and socioeconomic outcomes, while indicators have become important tools of governance. Such initiatives, however, have been criticised for unduly simplifying complex legal realities, possibly betraying an ideological bias, and then hiding it under a cloak of quantitative data. This chapter argues that much of this critique misses the point. While it is important to be sceptical of indicators’ ability to describe reality, quantitative methodologies are part of a wider turn towards a flexible form of global governance, in which the accurate description of reality is not essential. Instead, they reflect a version of reality created for a specific purpose, which participants acting in a given regulatory space agree is not ‘real’. This lack of reality, though, is irrelevant: what matters is that the specific version of reality created by the indicator serves its institutional purpose. We must recognise it as a particular form of quantitative knowledge that, regardless of its accuracy, is constantly used instrumentally, and may open new spaces for politics, contestation, and resistance that are overlooked by the more traditional, accuracy-focused critique.

This chapter examines China’s role and approach in the reforms of global financial governance. It investigates both the reforms of the traditional Bretton Woods institutions that the United States dominates, and the initiation and development of the new financial institutions that China leads, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the New Development Bank (NDB) and the Multilateral Cooperation Center for Development Finance (MCDF). It finds that China, by walking on two legs, commits to correcting and improving the unsustainable elements of the existing world order, rather than decoupling from it. The success of China’s multilateralism lies in its advocating for the principle of ‘extensive consultation, joint contribution, and shared benefits’, its adherence to high and feasible standards, and its use of a teleological perspective in legal interpretation. As a major driving force behind Chinese multilateralism, China needs to maintain the image of a self-restrained and benign power in international cooperation, while being assured that only an appropriate norm-taker makes a respected norm-maker.

This chapter focuses on the debates about development, human rights, and ‘basic needs’ that defined much of the push to craft a decolonized international law during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In particular, it considers the emergence of the international right to development, and the relation between international human rights and poverty-reduction strategies like the ‘basic needs’ approach in New International Economic Order-related discussions, against the background of the rise of neoliberalism and organized human rights movements during the 1970s and early 1980s. It does so partly through a close reading of the two reports produced by the ‘North-South Commission’ chaired by former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. Despite its overarching commitment to a renewed form of ‘global Keynesianism’, the Brandt Commission expounded a broadly rights-friendly approach to development that absorbed many of the neoliberal assumptions then on the rise. When US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dismissed the Brandt Commission’s recommendations at the ‘North-South Summit’, held in Cancún in October 1981, the moment signalled the end of the struggle to cultivate an international law of development that would live up to the ideal of an international law of decolonization.

Political science has long claimed that African political systems are dysfunctional because they are too embedded in social and material relations. This assumption informed the rise of the World Bank’s good governance agenda in the late 1980s. This chapter situates this technocratic vision of how to fix African politics in a longer ‘epistocratic’ political tradition that emphasises the knowledge-based, epistemic dimensions of governance. In this context, the Lagos model, developed first in Lagos state, southwest Nigeria, and then extended to nearby Oyo and Ekiti, was celebrated by donors as an example of ‘home grown good governance’, where governance reforms were not imposed by donors through conditionality but actively adopted by the government itself. By tracing how this domesticated version of the good governance agenda was contested in the twenty-first century electoral competition, this book re-evaluates the social, material and epistemic dimensions of good governance. This chapter offers a brief overview of the history of good governance in Nigeria. It then considers the methods and methodologies we can use to study competing conceptions of good governance, connecting the empirical study of politics ‘on the ground’ to more theoretical debates in political theory, before summarising the key contributions of the book.

In 2005, voters in Zimbabwe performed their civic duty in the seventh election since 1980. The preceding three years were crucial to understanding the 2005 election. Many sources of violence existed in this intervening time, influenced by the referendum vendetta, the continuing land reform process, and the apparent bitterness engendered by the 2000 and 2002 election outcomes. It was crystal clear that Zanu PF’s first weapon of choice in elections was stick rather than carrot. Zanu PF viewed MDC voters as minors and Western stooges and its own supporters as adults of unquestionable loyalty and obedience. State patronage and state-sponsored violence had always taken centre stage before, during and after elections. The violent May 2005 Operation Murambatsvina was a largely state-sponsored campaign (with support from some businesses) to stifle dissent and independent economic and political activity in the country’s urban areas. The main victims of Murambatsvina were younger and unemployed, whom state security agents saw as potential recruits for social unrest. The extent of Zimbabwe’s poor human rights record was exposed by new information technology and increased reporting. As Zimbabwe prepared for the 31 March 2005 parliamentary election, Zanu PF’s campaign was decidedly violent and anti-Western.

This chapter considers the theory’s implications for the significant issue of accountability in global governance. My reasoning may appear to suggest a fundamental tension between performance and accountability: If avoiding the thorniest obstacle to performance requires curtailing state influence in the policy process, international institutions presumably cannot be both effective and accountable. I argue, however, that if we embrace a more expansive understanding of how accountability may be institutionalized, no such tradeoff arises. This is because the same factors that nurture policy autonomy make institutions more likely to adopt a variety of modern accountability structures – what I call second-wave accountability (SWA) mechanisms – that primarily benefit and empower non-state actors. Once in place, moreover, SWA mechanisms can themselves deliver performance gains by revealing operational problems, improving the quality of decision-making, and boosting policy compliance. I provide two forms of empirical support for these claims: (1) statistical evidence based on novel data on the spread and strength of SWA mechanisms; and (2) a qualitative plausibility probe focusing on institutions in the issue area of economic development, where many SWA mechanisms were pioneered.

This chapter considers the main forms of investment treaties, exploring some leading examples such as the Energy Charter Treaty, the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement and the Comprehensive Trans-Pacific Partnership. It also discusses the role of some global organizations in facilitating international investment, notably the World Trade Organization and the World Bank.