The Demise of Accountability at the World Bank?

Recent trends at the World Bank are precipitating a shift from rules-based accountability to people affected by Bank projects to a more flexible and discretionary approach to addressing social and environmental risks and impacts. These trends, evident in both safeguard policies and accountability processes, are predominantly a response to changes in the development finance landscape in which the Bank, once the centerpiece, now competes with a range of prominent new actors. As the Bank strives to recast itself as an attractive lender to governments and public-private partnerships, there are emerging signs that it will sacrifice its system of accountability to project-affected people that it has built - albeit on wobbly foundations, and imperfectly - over the past three decades. This Article examines the trend away from clear policy entitlements and protections for project-affected people towards negotiated risk management, redress in the case of harms, and analyzes what it means in practice for the protection of human rights in cases of displacement.

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