Corruption fighters united
Beginning today, the World Bank is hosting a major gathering on global anti-corruption efforts, called the International Corruption Hunters Alliance. The event will include dozens of national law enforcement officials and fraud investigators, as well as top officials from Interpol and the International Criminal Court. Last week, the Bank did a bit of its own ...
Beginning today, the World Bank is hosting a major gathering on global anti-corruption efforts, called the International Corruption Hunters Alliance. The event will include dozens of national law enforcement officials and fraud investigators, as well as top officials from Interpol and the International Criminal Court. Last week, the Bank did a bit of its own corruption-hunting, announcing that it was forbidding several companies accused of fraud from working with the World Bank for specified periods.
Corruption has been a major focus at the Bank for more than a decade now, and it's easy to forget that for years, the word was all but verboten at Bank headquarters. Corruption wasn't a focus for the Bank's officials or major shareholder countries, who knew that plenty of their Cold War allies receiving Bank loans had dirty hands. The conspiracy of silence began to end after the Cold War, as the strategic imperative of covering up for these regimes weakened. Sebastian Mallaby has argued that key shift came under World Bank president James Wolfensohn:
The World Bank used to avoid all mention of corruption, believing it should stay out of "politics." This was absurd: The bank had long been telling borrowers how to structure their budgets -- a clearly political subject -- and corruption can't be separated from the bank's development mission. Then, with the arrival of the bomb-throwing Wolfensohn, things began to change. Wolfensohn denounced the "cancer of corruption" in 1996; and the bank's even bomb-happier chief economist, the Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz, gave speeches attacking the narrow economic understanding of development and proclaiming the centrality of politics.
Beginning today, the World Bank is hosting a major gathering on global anti-corruption efforts, called the International Corruption Hunters Alliance. The event will include dozens of national law enforcement officials and fraud investigators, as well as top officials from Interpol and the International Criminal Court. Last week, the Bank did a bit of its own corruption-hunting, announcing that it was forbidding several companies accused of fraud from working with the World Bank for specified periods.
Corruption has been a major focus at the Bank for more than a decade now, and it’s easy to forget that for years, the word was all but verboten at Bank headquarters. Corruption wasn’t a focus for the Bank’s officials or major shareholder countries, who knew that plenty of their Cold War allies receiving Bank loans had dirty hands. The conspiracy of silence began to end after the Cold War, as the strategic imperative of covering up for these regimes weakened. Sebastian Mallaby has argued that key shift came under World Bank president James Wolfensohn:
The World Bank used to avoid all mention of corruption, believing it should stay out of "politics." This was absurd: The bank had long been telling borrowers how to structure their budgets — a clearly political subject — and corruption can’t be separated from the bank’s development mission. Then, with the arrival of the bomb-throwing Wolfensohn, things began to change. Wolfensohn denounced the "cancer of corruption" in 1996; and the bank’s even bomb-happier chief economist, the Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz, gave speeches attacking the narrow economic understanding of development and proclaiming the centrality of politics.
The Bank’s efforts have plenty of shortcomings, and there have been notable controversies along the way. But as many of those on the frontlines of the fight descend on World Bank headquarters, it’s worth taking a moment to recognize how far the institution has come.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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