Elegantes Telefax - JAV der TUB - TU Berlin

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ing and selection seems to be working better with competitive procedures, but there
is a focus on US and Anglo academic institutions sharing the same preferences in
development policy. The autonomy delegated to the President grants him considerable
discretion in setting up the internal structure, organizational set up, budgetary
procedures, promotional and personnel policies (Kapur 2002). The Presidents have
used this discretion to change the organizational structure, particularly the relationship
between the country departments and the technical/sectoral departments, and to
change personnel. 6
The use of checks and balances as an instrument for control by the principals has
been limited to the creation of the regional development banks. The potential role of
creating internal organizations with competing and/or overlapping tasks was not used
by the principals. Kapur (2002) assesses that the relatively high autonomy the World
Bank attained by reliance on US and international capital markets has been gradually
undermined by introducing the IDA which increased leverage of parliaments and the
NGOs, particularly in the US.
IV.
THE INCLUSION OF ENVIRONMENTAL OBJECTIVES
IN THE GOVERNANCE OF THE WORLD BANK
The inclusion of environmental goals, the introduction of rules supporting these
goals and the implementation of these rules is then subject to the general principalagent
constellation. There has been research on both steps of the process of changing
the agent’s behavior, but with an emphasis on the efforts of mitigating negative
environmental effects via the introduction of corresponding policy changes and their
implementation into the mainstream of project and sectoral lending. The changes in
the other direction, designing environmentally beneficial projects and their development
and structural composition over time have been the focus of presentations of
the World Bank and its environmental staff and only recently the result of academic
research (Nielson and Tierney 2003; Gutner 2002).
The first topic concerns the process of introducing environmental objectives into
the activities of the World Bank. Here, one of the important observations made in the
literature is that the environmental objectives received relatively low priority among
the borrowing countries and in the beginning among the MDB principals as well. The
establishment of the Office of Environmental Affairs has been granted to initiative of
the President of the World Bank in 1970 with the support of the US Executive Direc-
6 Cf. Rich (2002) on the Strategic Compact in 1996/97.