Recent Posts
Accelerating MDB Reform to Address Today’s Global Challenges
April 3, 2023To better respond to today’s global crises, the MDBs must transform themselves. The MDB Reform Accelerator is mobilizing the evidence-based analysis and strategic outreach needed to ensure MDB reform delivers real results for development, climate, and other global challenges. The world has changed since the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—the world’s first international financial institutions—over 75 years ago. The shared challenges facing humanity have only grown more pressing and existential. From pandemics to climate change to financial distress and the looming public debt breakdown, the [...]
A Dual Evidence Agenda: Delivering Greater Impact for Development and Global Challenges
March 20, 2023The World Bank’s evolution is a large part of the international response to global challenges like climate change and pandemic risks, with significant attention on amounts and sources of money. But less attention is paid to an inconvenient truth: few policymakers and experts know what works to make measurable progress against global challenges. On climate and development, for example, knowledge is sparse; demonstrating that a project or policy’s climate impact is “real, measurable and additional” remains a work in progress. Generating and using evidence is imperative to enhance both the [...]
Reforming the World Bank to Play a Critical Role in Addressing Climate Change
March 17, 2023The current World Bank model focuses on reducing poverty and promoting equitable growth, while considering environmental and social sustainability. Programming of resources is country-driven, and resources are allocated to programs and investments according to priorities of client government authorities. Despite the appeal of this approach and its many benefits, it has left numerous global public goods (GPGs), particularly those related to climate change, underfinanced, undermanaged, and unachieved. The resulting limited levels of investment and programs have significant global cost and, potentially, extreme ramifications. While there has been considerable reflection on [...]
World Bank Investment Projects Aren’t Designed for Crises
March 15, 2023In a recent note, Zack Gehan and I used a database of World Bank projects to examine the association between World Bank project types and environmental review procedures and project preparation times. We found that policy lending projects are significantly faster to design, while projects that undergo the stricter forms of environmental and social screening are slower (these are “Category A” projects where borrowers and the bank need to undertake assessments and agree mitigation measures and “Category B,” which still requires some assessment and mitigation measures). Policy lending takes 107 [...]