Argues that the Bank has become involved in too many issue areas and initiatives. There are significant tensions in trying to be a Bank, a social development agency, a Knowledge Bank and a Global Issues Bank all at the same time. Includes comments from Bank staff, parliamentarians and NGOs on how to resolve this (February 2001).
Analysis
WB/IMF roles
Analysis
IMF Governance Update
Information on processes and opportunities for influencing the IMF’s governance structures.
WB/IMF roles
Analysis
Overstretched and Underloved: World Bank faces strategy decisions
Argues that the Bank has become involved in too many issue areas and initiatives. There are significant tensions in trying to be a Bank, a social development agency, a Knowledge Bank and a Global Issues Bank all at the same time. Includes comments from Bank staff, parliamentarians and NGOs on how to resolve this.
IFI governance
Analysis
IMF Governance Update
Information on processes and opportunities for influencing the IMF's governance structures.
WB/IMF roles
Analysis
Structural Adjustment for the IMF
Examines representation and power issues relating to the IMF’s Board, staff and management. Identifies and discusses reform proposals.
Conditionality
Analysis
New Development Tools or Empty Acronyms?
The reality behind the Comprehensive Development Framework and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (2000).
WB/IMF roles
Analysis
A Crisis Of Identity? Conflicting Roles For The IMF
Two forces for change have converged on the IMF in recent years. The first is in relation to the financial crisis that swept across the globe in 1997 and 1998. The second has arisen from the pressure for debt cancellation to be linked to poverty reduction objectives and the acceptance that structural adjustment policies have failed to achieve lower levels of poverty.
WB/IMF roles
Analysis
Comments on the paper “Making The IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (EVO) Operational&
The Bretton Woods Project welcomes the establishment of an EVO.
Private Sector
Analysis
Assessing the IFC: for private gain or poverty reduction?
Bretton Woods Project contribution to compilation of analysis and case studies by a range of NGOs. (September 2000).
Conditionality
Analysis
The IMF’s Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility: What Role for Development?
Although it has sought to adapt, the Fund still has particular difficulties in dealing effectively with low income countries. The introduction of ESAF was an important attempt at adaptation but its programmes are still too short term, the scale of support is often too small, and the policy conditions laid down are too blinkered.
Conditionality
Analysis
What Role for the Multilateral Institutions, Donors, and NGOs in the New Framework for Poverty Eradi
This paper considers how the relationships and roles of intenational and national non-governmental organisations, donors and the multilateral institutions are likely to change as a result of new initiatives to put poverty reduction and country ownership at the centre of the development process (2000).
WB/IMF roles
Analysis
Policing the Policemen - the case for an independent evaluation mechanism for the IMF
Briefing outlining the case for an independent evaluation unit for the IMF and setting out the outlines the principles on which it should function (1998).
Featured briefings
6 April 2023
World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings 2023
5 April 2023
The IMF at the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: The need for governance reform
As the world celebrates the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is time the IMF’s shareholders use the opportunities provided by the anniversary and growing calls for reforms to the international financial architecture to redesign the IMF’s governance structures and programmes to ensure they are consistent with the commitments outlined in 1948 and with international human rights law.
5 April 2023
The global financial architecture and the international debt crisis: An urgent call for reform
Influence of unreformed international financial institutions and creditor interests in debt solutions in low- and middle-income countries plagued by delay and ineffective when undertaken.