The European Union, the World Bank and the Policymaking of Aid: Cooperation Among Developers

The EU and its member states are collectively the most generous donor worldwide, while the World Bank is the most important multilateral institution in development lending. Both institutions have become crucial players in the shaping of development promotion multilaterally, cooperating towards reaching the MDG. Notwithstanding the fact the EU-cum-MS are the main contributor to the Bank, very little research has explored the EU-WB cooperation in the policymaking of development. An investigation on the nature, evolution and impact of the interaction between these two actors in development polices, The EU, the World Bank and the Policymaking of Aid is intended as a first step towards filling such gap. The two institutions, a political union and a development bank, are formally independent from one another, pursuing distinct objectives which may occasionally fall in the same remit. Their memberships are partially overlapping, but neither institution has a legal standing in the other’s governing bodies. Coordination between EU Executive Directors at the WB Executive Board has increased across time, but no consensus has been reached on compacting existing seats into fewer EU-homogenous constituencies yet. The book traces the roots of such an improved coordination, delving into the dynamics of informal bargaining at the World Bank’s Board, and exploring the extent to which these practices have so far been relied on as a substitute for an enhanced role of the Union at the World Bank’s Board. The book argues that coordination and cooperation between them have grown in substance to a level that makes it imperative to explore their shape, determinants and implications, under both theoretical and policy lenses. Empirical references, based on a Survey, in depth interviews and field work, are by and large a recurrent feature of the volume, an ineludible task for a virtually untouched subject. The analysis is nonetheless explicitly set to serve three main theoretical goals. First, the book originally conceptualizes the EU-WB set of accountability ties as a hybrid form of delegation, pointing to the need of fertilizing PA models with insights from implementation and business literatures, to endogeneize the behavior of ‘external stakeholders’ in the explanation of inter-organizational dynamics. Second, through an investigation on the EU-World Bank relations and policies over the course of two decades (1990-2010), the book advances new hypotheses to understand key dynamics at work in the interaction between two partially overlapping multilateral systems, thus contributing to the literature on ‘intersecting multilateralisms’. To this effect, it incorporates and critically reviews insights from the IR institutionalist and constructivist literatures. Far from disclaiming the relevance of institutional analyses of inter-organizational cooperation, the results of the investigation on the EU-World Bank cooperation point to the importance of a constant dialogue between the constructivist and rational choice approaches in the IR literature, by specifying the conditions under which either approach is most effective to analyze IOs interactions across time and space. Third, the book unpacks multilateral performance through an innovative framework, which conceptualizes both the EU’s performance at the Bank and with the Bank in the field, in three major areas, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.