The World Bank, a renowned international organisation with a goal to end poverty, is looking for a new president. The chosen candidate will have a strategy for dealing with the pandemic-related crises in human progress. Non-Americans and climate change deniers are not required to apply, as reported by The Guardian.
Scandalous anachronism
By all accounts, the US has already made up its mind about who it wanted to run one of the two bodies established at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944.
Rajiv Shah, who runs the Rockefeller Foundation and was formerly the head of the US agency for international development (USAID) is the hot favourite to take over from the departing David Malpass.
The idea that the White House should have the right to appoint the president of such an important organisation is a scandalous anachronism.
But that has how it has been since the Bank and its sister organisation, the International Monetary Fund, were created as the second world war was drawing to a close.
A deal was done in which the Europeans got to pick the managing director of the IMF, while the Americans got the Bank.
Much has happened in the intervening eight decades, not least the growing share of the world economy accounted for by emerging and developing countries.
Climate crisis
No question, Mottley would give the World Bank the direction it has lacked in recent years.
Certainly, the Bank needs to start punching its weight in a way it hasn’t under Malpass.
A report prepared for the G20 group of developed and developing countries found that with a less conservative approach, multilateral development banks could increase their lending by hundreds of billions of dollars.
Being handpicked by Donald Trump for the job was one reason Joe Biden would have denied him a second term.
The other was that he was seen as insufficiently exercised by the threat posed by the climate crisis, if not an outright climate-change denier.
Core development
It might be assumed that developing countries would be pleased by such a prospect.
In fact, they are alarmed by it for two reasons.
The first is concern the Bank will be diverted from its core development agenda.
The emerging world certainly wants more cash for climate mitigation and adaptation but not if it is at the expense of finance for energy, transport, schools and hospitals.
If the focus on the climate crisis starts to crowd out other issues, the result will be further fragmentation of the multilateral system, with poor countries increasingly tempted to borrow from China’s rival to the World Bank – the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank.
Anti-poverty agenda
Malpass was not the disaster some of his detractors imagined when he was appointed by Trump, although that’s large because he didn’t do very much.
It is now time to rethink both the way the Bank operates and whether the multilateral institutions are fit for purpose.
The immediate task is to appoint the right person to run the Bank, which means someone with a development plan.
The pandemic has put the anti-poverty agenda back by years.
More fundamentally, an overhaul of the Bretton Woods system is long overdue.
Developed nations are adamantly opposed to the creation of new multilateral institutions, but they must realise that attempting to address the issues of the 2020s with institutions designed in the 1940s has little chance of success. Winning the war on climate change entails also winning the war on world poverty. To do that, new organisations, new strategies, and a fresh sense of urgency are needed.
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Source: The Guardian
