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Values in Translation

Stanford University Press

Contents

Foreword Mark Goodale................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments.......................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction..........................................................................................................11 Behind the Curve: Institutional Resistance to Human Rights..........................................................232 Political and Legal Constraints: The Board of Executive Directors and the Articles of Agreement.....................513 Bureaucratic Obstacles: A Clash of Expertise Within the Organizational Culture......................................754 Reconciling Interpretive Gaps: Economizing Human Rights.............................................................1075 Conclusion..........................................................................................................133Notes.................................................................................................................157Bibliography..........................................................................................................169Index.................................................................................................................183

Chapter One

WHY IS IT SURPRISING that human rights has been such a marginal issue at the World Bank? If the institution is a bank, after all, why should we expect it to incorporate human rights norms into its activities? There are a number of reasons the Bank's approach to human rights (or lack thereof) appears counterintuitive.

Over the past two decades, the Bank has been a leader in promoting particular development issues that it has interpreted as central to a mandate of poverty reduction. These issues include environmental sustainability, which the Bank began to interpret as a core objective during the 1980s after decades of grassroots activism, growing evidence of the environmental costs of Bank-sponsored projects, and its own need to develop alternative rationales for an interventionist development mission (Rajagopal 2003, 113–27; see also Wade 1997). Although the Bank has taken pride in serving as a norm setter among development agencies on the environment, why hasn't it taken the initiative to serve as a leader on standards relating to human rights?

Compared to other international institutions and aid agencies, the Bank stands as an outlier in terms of its approach to human rights. For instance, the United Nations Development Programme has begun to implement a rights-based approach (UNDP 2005), while the Bank's implicit human rights work has been criticized by development experts as rhetorical and ad hoc (Uvin 2004). The Bank's approach also stands in contrast to that of many private financial institutions. Because of a concern for their public image and the reputational and legal risks of committing human rights abuses, some corporations are beginning to take steps toward becoming more socially responsible by adopting such tools as human rights impact assessments. In fact, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Bank's private-sector arm, has openly adopted a human rights agenda as part of a risk management approach, under a market-based operational logic. This approach translates international human rights norms for the business community by defining potential human rights violations as strategic risks, which may damage a company's reputation, threaten its profits, and lead to possible litigation. 1 However, the IFC's selective engagement in human rights has been subject to criticism by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Moreover, civil society organizations and internal advocates have pressed the Bank to integrate human rights considerations into projects and programs. One would expect the Bank to have been swayed by this pressure, as well as by the growing trend of corporations and development agencies to address human rights more openly. Yet it has not been so swayed. In this chapter, I elaborate on the external and internal pressure on the Bank over the past two decades to adopt a human rights agenda.

External Pressure International Organizations and Aid Agencies

Over the past two decades, international organizations and aid agencies have increasingly recognized an interdependence between human rights and development. There are several reasons for this change of thinking: (1) the end of the Cold War, which brought a sense of missionary zeal; (2) the failure of structural adjustment programs and a greater emphasis on good governance and democracy; and (3) the redefinition of development as more than economic growth (Uvin 2007, 597). As evidence of this growing consensus, the 1993 Vienna World Conference Declaration affirmed, "Democracy, development and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms are interdependent and mutually reinforcing.... The international community should support the strengthening and promoting of democracy, development and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms in the entire world" (para. 8). The United Nations' 2000 Millennium Summit and its 2005 World Summit reiterated this declaration and spurred the adoption of new policy frameworks among bilateral and multilateral agencies.

The United Nations has been leading the way in incorporating human rights concerns into development policies. In 1990, it began promoting a human development approach, which offers an alternative view of development to the neoliberal paradigm of the Washington Consensus. This approach defines development as not only generating economic growth but also distributing its benefits equitably, and it promotes a conception of well-being that goes beyond the economic. It is applied in the UN's Human Development Reports, published annually by the UNDP since 1990 (see Fukuda-Parr 2003). The UN has since begun mainstreaming human rights in all of its activities, as announced in the 1997 report "Renewing the United Nations: A Programme for Reform." As part of this effort, the UNDP (which is not hampered by the political prohibitions that exist in the Bank's Articles of Agreement) adopted a rights-based approach to development (UNDP 2005).

Many bilateral and multilateral aid agencies have followed the UN's lead and adopted human rights policies or a rights-based approach to development. A recent study conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) compares the Bank's approach to those of other donor agencies. It found that the Bank stands on one end of a continuum, which classifies methods of integrating human rights into development strategies (Piron and O'Neil 2006). The methods range from a rights-based approach and human rights mainstreaming to human rights dialogue and human rights projects, and finally to implicit human rights work (2006). Most agencies (including the European Commission, UNICEF, and many bilateral agencies) fall within the three middle categories-human rights mainstreaming, dialogue, and projects-while the Bank falls within the last category of implicit human rights work. When a working draft of the OECD study was presented to Bank staff in April 2006, the deputy general counsel...