Saturday, November 05, 2011
World Bank needs anti-graft policies
Even as India has been gripped by the debate on the Jan Lokpal Bill and the high-profile scandals that triggered it, multilateral organisations such as the World Bank are similarly grappling with their own anti-corruption strategies and need to do more to build institutional capacities in their client countries, according to an independent evaluator.
This week the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) of the World Bank Group said in a just-released assessment of the World Bank's 2007 governance and anticorruption (GAC) strategy that the Bank had focused more on strengthening its own capacities and improving its standing among key stakeholders rather than on strategic issues facing client countries.
Specifically the Bank needed to address fiduciary and governance risks, measurement of governance results, and help foster the demand for good governance, said the report by the IEG, an independent body reporting to the Board of Executive Directors of the World Bank rather than Bank management.
On a positive note, the IEG report said the Bank had tripled the number of countries in which it aimed to support institution-strengthening projects for good governance, and had also increased use of governance and political analysis in project design.
However looking forward to the second phase, Ali Khadr, Senior Manager at IEG, said the Bank would need to “address the key findings of this evaluation if [it] is to more effectively help countries overcome deep-seated governance challenges such as civil service dysfunction, capture of natural resource rents, or political-institutional barriers to market entry and improved service delivery.”
Speaking to The Hindu, Navin Girishankar, a lead evaluation officer and the main author of the IEG study, said that on the one hand there is a need to foster demand for good governance by helping improve the government responsiveness to pressures through greater transparency and more disclosure policies, Mr. Girishankar suggested. The Indian experience, including the Lokpal bills, might dovetail with this type of strategy.
Such measures could be accompanied by policies to further build governance capacity, including in the budget process and for better management of extractive industries. In these regards, the IEG evaluation suggested that the Bank itself could use better instruments, new metrics to improve knowledge of what works on the ground in terms of anti-corruption, Mr. Girishankar added.
This week the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) of the World Bank Group said in a just-released assessment of the World Bank's 2007 governance and anticorruption (GAC) strategy that the Bank had focused more on strengthening its own capacities and improving its standing among key stakeholders rather than on strategic issues facing client countries.
Specifically the Bank needed to address fiduciary and governance risks, measurement of governance results, and help foster the demand for good governance, said the report by the IEG, an independent body reporting to the Board of Executive Directors of the World Bank rather than Bank management.
On a positive note, the IEG report said the Bank had tripled the number of countries in which it aimed to support institution-strengthening projects for good governance, and had also increased use of governance and political analysis in project design.
However looking forward to the second phase, Ali Khadr, Senior Manager at IEG, said the Bank would need to “address the key findings of this evaluation if [it] is to more effectively help countries overcome deep-seated governance challenges such as civil service dysfunction, capture of natural resource rents, or political-institutional barriers to market entry and improved service delivery.”
Speaking to The Hindu, Navin Girishankar, a lead evaluation officer and the main author of the IEG study, said that on the one hand there is a need to foster demand for good governance by helping improve the government responsiveness to pressures through greater transparency and more disclosure policies, Mr. Girishankar suggested. The Indian experience, including the Lokpal bills, might dovetail with this type of strategy.
Such measures could be accompanied by policies to further build governance capacity, including in the budget process and for better management of extractive industries. In these regards, the IEG evaluation suggested that the Bank itself could use better instruments, new metrics to improve knowledge of what works on the ground in terms of anti-corruption, Mr. Girishankar added.
Labels: anti-corruption, World Bank
# posted by Narayan Lakshman @ 7:20 AM 
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