Exploring the economic ramifications of climate change, this chapter features insights from financial experts such as Sara Jane Ahmed, Managing Director and V20 Finance Advisor of the CVF-V20 Secretariat. It discusses the adverse effects on GDP growth, inflation, debt, and credit ratings, particularly in vulnerable economies. The chapter highlights the crucial role of financial markets, insurance, and climate finance in addressing these challenges. Innovative financing solutions such as Green Bonds and pre-arranged and trigger-based financing, including loss and damage finance, are explored as means to build economic resilience. The importance of sustainable economic policies and international cooperation is emphasised, with case studies from countries successfully integrating climate resilience into their economic planning. The chapter calls for increased investment in climate adaptation and mitigation to safeguard economic stability and promote sustainable development.

When Roberto Dañino, former World Bank General Counsel, arrived in the institution, he found a department perceived to be at the verge of ‘marginalization’ – a dire state he diagnosed and soon attributed to the rigid ‘culture’ of legal practice. In tracing Dañino’s efforts to ‘make the department relevant again’, we get a glimpse of the situated, material, embodied institutional life of international law: the changes Dañino instilled were not manifested in formal legal sources but in the introduction of new cultural codes, professional prototypes (the ‘how to’ lawyer) and technical routines of risk management. In the domain of international institutional law – often oriented towards abstraction, comparison, or aspiration – such prosaic legal practices tend to be underplayed. This chapter signals two productive entry points for a turn to practice: (i) a focus on the shared and contingent criteria of competence – the ‘social grammar’ – that mark professional postures and performances, and (ii) a heightened attention for the practices of relationality, translation, and materiality through which law is composed – the string of ‘people and things’ that it assembles. This methodological orientation to professional scripts and material routines also offers a perspective on ‘critique’ that differs from familiar structuralist modes of analysis and intervention.

The fiscal burden of government interventions in the rural economy had created growth but led the economy to the brink of crisis. When India implemented full-blown economic reforms in 1991, many assumed these would sideline social policy. This chapter shows that liberalisation pushed social policy up the political agenda. Efforts to enable an ‘exit policy’ for ailing firms by loosening restrictions on retrenchment under chapter VB of the Industrial Disputes Act failed due to opposition from organised labour. The controversy created an opening to strengthen - or at least maintain - existing ‘social safety nets’ to support the project of economic transformation. The Government of India used a World Bank loan initially intended to support the ‘exit policy’ to maintain the rural social policies that had been introduced or expanded in the 1980s, as part of what Finance Minister Manmohan Singh described as macroeconomic adjustment with a ‘human face’. The chapter shows that political regionalisation and the intensification of multi-level electoral competition in the 1990s encouraged subnational social policy innovation and worked against the retrenchment of existing social policies.

This chapter empirically analyzes how portfolios of external finance impact aid agreements. The chapter integrates data on external debt and foreign aid to establish a comprehensive picture of developing countries' portfolios of external finance, demonstrating that these have become less reliant on traditional donors over time. The analysis tests if a greater share of finance from Chinese or private sources is associated with favorable terms from traditional donors, using measures of aid volume, infrastructure project share, and conditions attached to World Bank projects. The findings indicate that as countries draw a greater share of their external finance from nontraditional sources, they are more likely to receive aid on preferred terms. The relationship is stronger for countries of strategic significance to donors and, especially, those with higher donor trust.

This chapter focuses on the Ethiopian government's successful use of debt-based financial statecraft. It examines Ethiopia's shift from heavy reliance on traditional donor aid to borrowing from Chinese lenders and issuing a debut international bond. Using interviews with government and donor officials, it highlights how this diversification of external finance allowed the Ethiopian government to obtain more favorable terms in aid agreements, including lenience from donors on governance issues, flexibility on economic monitoring, and donor support for the government's state-led approach to development. When Ethiopia's financing options later narrowed, the government's bargaining leverage with donors declined, further corroborating the role of alternative finance in aid negotiations. The chapter underscores the importance of donors' perceptions of Ethiopia's strategic value and donors' trust in the government for their willingness to accommodate the Ethiopian government's preferences.

This chapter explores the role of three global economic institutions (GEIs) in contemporary economic governance: the International Monetary Fund, (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). GEIs are key components of global economic governance, and their activities are central to the pursuit of accountability, efficiency and equity in the global economy. The impact of GEIs on states and societies is complex and widely varying assessments of the performance of these organisations can be found in the literature. Given the absence of theoretical consensus on the roles and functions of GEIs, the first part of the chapter examines competing perspectives on international organisations.

Chapter 3 covers the period in the 1970s and 1980s when the military regime finished its big dams and their reservoirs filled. During this time, the rise of international environmentalism pressured the military government’s dam builders to undertake environmental impact studies and design environmental mitigation programs. This chapter argues that the environmentalism that the military regime’s energy sector practiced was deficient and narrowly organized around two goals. The first was protecting power plant infrastructure from environmental threats such as sedimentation. The second was to showcase environmental care without fundamentally altering project designs or slowing down construction. For example, the military regime funded environmental impact studies, but did so belatedly, after committing to particular high-impact dam sites, and followed the studies’ recommendations selectively. Most dramatically, the military regime carried out animal rescue missions, which it hoped would showcase its environmental consciousness. These actions were “pharaonic environmentalism”: protection measures designed to bolster the image of the military dictatorship as a regime that could build durable mega dams while simultaneously protecting the environment.

In 2015, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty Philip Alston stated that the World Bank treats “human rights more like an infectious disease than universal values and obligations” because of its understanding of what constitutes political interference. The World Bank’s interpretation, replicated by the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) in the development finance regime complex, has shaped how activists hold the Banks to account. This chapter examines how the international accountability norm emerged through contestation with the World Bank and spread to be taken as given for the MDBs, as distinct from international human rights and environmental elemental regimes. It then documents how activists seek to protect human and environmental rights through the banks’ international accountability mechanisms as quasi-legal processes with implications for the banks’ culpability. Although there is an increasing recognition of some rights such as free, prior and informed consent and labour, the banks continue to view these as internal standards not legal obligations. The chapter then examines the extent to which the norm needs to be backed by hard law to be enforced, with efforts by the banks to maintain their international organisation immunity given legal claims as to their implication in human and environmental rights abuses.

This chapter describes the IMF and the World Bank, the two big international financial institutions created after World War II to stabilize the global economy. The two have similar goals and mechanisms but work with different instruments and in different contexts. Both pool the resources of their members and use the money it raises to make loans to governments with specific needs. The IMF lends to countries experiencing critical balance-of-payments problems. It makes short-term loans of foreign currencies that the borrowing country must use to finance the stabilization of its own currency or monetary system. As a precondition to the loan, the Fund generally requires that the borrower change its policies in ways that the Fund believes will enable monetary stability in future. The World Bank makes longer-term loans to pay for specific projects related to development or poverty reduction. Most Bank loans are tied to a particular project undertaken by the borrowing government. The Bank and the Fund are twinned institutions in the sense that they share a common origin and many structural features, but their practices and purposes are very different. As a result, they contrast each other in ways that are useful for exploring the mix of law and politics in global affairs.

One aspect of the currently prevailing view on corruption is the emphasis on quantifications of corruption, which have been used to research its causes and effects, and to gauge progress of anti-corruption reforms around the world. This chapter is dedicated to these measures. Corruption country scores are an example of so-called Global Performance Indicators and assume that by taking the right initiatives, countries can improve their ranking in a given Global Performance Indicator. However, the available measures of corruption are not well suited to assess changes of corruption over time. A more general conclusion also emerges from this chapter. In studying social phenomena using quantitative techniques of analysis, it is considered to be important to draw a sharp line between the definition of a concept, which should come first, and attempts at measuring it, which should be conditional on the chosen definition. However, when measures of social phenomena are successful, they take on a life of their own and contribute to an ossification of the concept they refer to. Consideration of the extent to which the prevailing concept of corruption and its most popular measures have shaped each other also provides a good angle to discuss corruption more generally.

In 2020, the World Bank established the Dispute Resolution Services (DRS) to address complaints related to its projects through meditation, fact-finding, and similar methods. This chapter evaluates how the DRS should improve the right of access to remedy for project-affected people. First, the chapter identifies the legal and policy standards against which the DRS must be evaluated. The right of access provided by the Bank through the Inspection Panel’s compliance review process has three pillars: accessibility, effectiveness, and independence. Since the DRS aimed to enhance this right, drawing from best practices in dispute resolution, it must offer greater protections for affected people than the Panel process. Second, the chapter suggests improvements to the DRS. To increase accessibility, the Bank should enhance procedural protections and participation opportunities for affected people. To increase effectiveness, the Bank must clarify the minimum threshold for acceptable remedies and provide mandatory verification of party agreements. To increase independence, the Bank should offer more options for sequencing compliance review and dispute resolution processes.

This chapter focuses on the approach of the Indonesia-based Tanoto Foundation as a Global South-originated philanthropy with a far broader Asian and even global perspective, and on how it leveraged partnerships for impact. Now into its fortieth year of operations, the Tanoto Foundation has shown how philanthropy that is originated in the Global South is able to engage in knowledge exchange via global communities of practice to help create regional platforms to inspire collaboration. The pandemic has illustrated the importance of an evidence-based approach in the Global South whose results can be measured before they are scaled up and where collaboration is critical. Indonesia is a case in point, having suffered from natural disasters in the midst of the pandemic, challenging both humanitarian relief and disaster recovery. To help meet these challenges, the Foundation partnered with local (district) and national (ministry) government bodies, international development organisations, business entities, and philanthropic organisations both local and overseas. Successes in responding to the pandemic included the harmonisation of data-collation methodologies at the national level and the sharing of newly codified knowledge from the Foundation’s work. This chapter details how Tanoto Foundation built its internal institutional capacity, and maximised its impact by leveraging multiple relationships that can amplify resources, capacity, and knowledge.

Quantitative research has grown to be part of the standard methodological portfolio for comparative lawyers. Large-sample quantitative studies search for correlations between legal institutions and socioeconomic outcomes, while indicators have become important tools of governance. Such initiatives, however, have been criticised for unduly simplifying complex legal realities, possibly betraying an ideological bias, and then hiding it under a cloak of quantitative data. This chapter argues that much of this critique misses the point. While it is important to be sceptical of indicators’ ability to describe reality, quantitative methodologies are part of a wider turn towards a flexible form of global governance, in which the accurate description of reality is not essential. Instead, they reflect a version of reality created for a specific purpose, which participants acting in a given regulatory space agree is not ‘real’. This lack of reality, though, is irrelevant: what matters is that the specific version of reality created by the indicator serves its institutional purpose. We must recognise it as a particular form of quantitative knowledge that, regardless of its accuracy, is constantly used instrumentally, and may open new spaces for politics, contestation, and resistance that are overlooked by the more traditional, accuracy-focused critique.