Market-led policy approaches increasingly used to deal with both climate and health emergencies are failing to protect those most vulnerable.
Briefings
Rights
Analysis
Repairing harm caused: What could a reparations approach mean for the IMF and World Bank?
It is time for the IMF and World Bank to understand their own responsibility and decolonise their approach.
Knowledge
Analysis
Ease of Doing Business – what does it conceal?
As India has risen in the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business rankings, it has seen other key development indicators slip.
Gender
Analysis
Keeping the IMF accountable to women's rights and gender equality at the national level
New IMF gender guidance opportunity for civil society to keep its staff to account.
Finance
Analysis
Bretton Woods at 75
BWP publishes essay series reflecting on the legacy of 75 years of IMF and World Bank policies and power.
Gender
Analysis
The World Bank and gender equality: Development Policy Financing
This briefing analyses the World Bank's Development Policy Financing from a critical gender perspective.
IFI governance
Analysis
The Bretton Woods Institutions and the second crisis of multilateralism
At 75, the World Bank and IMF face a crisis of multilateralism in no small part of their own making as failed economic policies have resulted in skepticism of the international order they helped to create.
Environment
Analysis
Low-carbon infrastructure, sustainable finance, and people-focused development
This briefing emphasises the interdependence between the SDGs and the Paris Climate Agreement, in terms of ensuring that all new infrastructure is climate resilient and aligned with the low- or zero-carbon pathways required to avert catastrophic climate change – which would render achieving the SDGs impossible.
Land
Analysis
The highest bidder takes it all: The World Bank's new scheme to privatise land in the Global South
World Bank Enabling the Business of Agriculture rankings prescribe land privatisation at the expense of family farmers, pastoralists, and Indigenous Peoples.
Finance
Analysis
Debt and gender equality: How debt-servicing conditions harm women in Africa
As debt crises across the African continent continue to soar, concerns are raised about the gendered impact of debt-servicing conditions imposed by international financial institutions.
Social services
Analysis
Gender-Just Macroeconomics II
BWP's Gender and Macroeconomics project launches a booklet on Gender-Just Macroeconomics; the World Bank’s privatisation push
Conditionality
Analysis
The IMF and Gender Equality: Operationalising Change
Latest IMF guidance on gender issues raises more questions than answers as it opens the door to impact assessments and alternative macro policies.
Featured briefings
27 September 2023
Financialisation and human rights in the Middle East and North Africa
This briefing explains how the IMF and World Bank have driven the financialisation of MENA states, and the pervasive negative effects this has had on the region’s societies and economies.
19 July 2023
The Bretton Woods Observer: Summer 2023
3 July 2023
Civil Society calls for rethink of World Bank’s ‘evolution roadmap’ as part of wider reforms to highly unequal global financial architecture
Joint civil society briefing paper highlights concerns with the World Bank’s Evolution Roadmap, and provides a series of recommendations for a Roadmap that prioritises people, participation and the planet over profit and economic growth.