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  The World Bank, human rights, and organizational legitimacy strategies: The case of the 2016 Environmental and Social Framework

Cabrera Ormaza, M. V., & Ebert, F. C. (2019). The World Bank, human rights, and organizational legitimacy strategies: The case of the 2016 Environmental and Social Framework. Leiden Journal of International Law, 32(3), 483-500. doi:10.1017/S0922156519000268.

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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0922156519000268 (Publisher version)
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 Creators:
Cabrera Ormaza, Maria Victoria, Author
Ebert, Franz Christian1, Author           
Affiliations:
1Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Max Planck Society, ou_3029158              

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 Abstract: While civil society groups have been urging the World Bank to integrate human rights concepts into its policies, borrower countries have increasingly made the case for flexibility and deference to domestic standards in the implementation of bank-funded projects. This article analyses how the World Bank has navigated these conflicting legitimacy demands in the context of its 2016 Environmental and Social Framework (ESF). Drawing on insights from organizational sociology, we focus on practices of decoupling, which allow organizations to correspond to legitimacy demands by different audiences while not having to substantially adjust their core activities. The labour and indigenous peoples’ safeguards serve as cases in point. Specifically, the article argues that the Bank has decoupled its discourse concerning the ESF from the framework’s actual content by making statements about the ESF’s coherence with key human rights concepts which, upon closer scrutiny, do not fully correspond to its actual requirements. The article also shows how the design of the ESF furthers a decoupling of relevant requirements from its actual implementation. In particular, the confined scope ratione personae of the relevant safeguards and the discretion granted to the Bank’s staff and the borrower to add meaning to undefined key concepts may render their human rights-related requirements in a number of cases inconsequential. By and large, the decoupling practices identified regarding the Bank’s ESF entail problematic effects for the normativity of relevant human rights concepts and may, in the long run, undermine the Bank’s legitimacy as a whole.

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Language(s): eng - English
 Dates: 2019-06-242019
 Publication Status: Issued
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Title: Leiden Journal of International Law
Source Genre: Journal
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Publ. Info: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press
Pages: - Volume / Issue: 32 (3) Sequence Number: - Start / End Page: 483 - 500 Identifier: ISSN: 0922-1565
CoNE: https://pure.mpg.de/cone/journals/resource/963017571079