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Main Authors: María Victoria Cabrera Ormaza, Franz Christian Ebert
Format: Artículo científico
Published: International Labour Organization 01/09/2019
Online Access:https://researchrepository.ilo.org/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/The-World-Bank-human-rights-and/995380892102676
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author María Victoria Cabrera Ormaza
Franz Christian Ebert
author_facet María Victoria Cabrera Ormaza
Franz Christian Ebert
María Victoria Cabrera Ormaza
Franz Christian Ebert
contents The World Bank, human rights, and organizational legitimacy strategies: The case of the 2016 Environmental and Social Framework María Victoria Cabrera Ormaza Franz Christian Ebert While civil society groups have been urging the World Bank to integrate human rights concepts into its policies, borrower countries have increasingly made the case for flexibility and deference to domestic standards in the implementation of bank-funded projects. This article analyses how the World Bank has navigated these conflicting legitimacy demands in the context of its 2016 Environmental and Social Framework (ESF). Drawing on insights from organizational sociology, we focus on practices of decoupling, which allow organizations to correspond to legitimacy demands by different audiences while not having to substantially adjust their core activities. The labour and indigenous peoples’ safeguards serve as cases in point. Specifically, the article argues that the Bank has decoupled its discourse concerning the ESF from the framework’s actual content by making statements about the ESF’s coherence with key human rights concepts which, upon closer scrutiny, do not fully correspond to its actual requirements. The article also shows how the design of the ESF furthers a decoupling of relevant requirements from its actual implementation. In particular, the confined scope ratione personae of the relevant safeguards and the discretion granted to the Bank’s staff and the borrower to add meaning to undefined key concepts may render their human rights-related requirements in a number of cases inconsequential. By and large, the decoupling practices identified regarding the Bank’s ESF entail problematic effects for the normativity of relevant human rights concepts and may, in the long run, undermine the Bank’s legitimacy as a whole. 10.1017/S0922156519000268 DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/S0922156519000268 publication.journalArticle
format Artículo científico
id ilo_995380892102676
institution Organización Internacional del Trabajo (OIT)
publishDate 01/09/2019
publisher International Labour Organization
spellingShingle The World Bank, human rights, and organizational legitimacy strategies: The case of the 2016 Environmental and Social Framework
María Victoria Cabrera Ormaza
Franz Christian Ebert
The World Bank, human rights, and organizational legitimacy strategies: The case of the 2016 Environmental and Social Framework María Victoria Cabrera Ormaza Franz Christian Ebert While civil society groups have been urging the World Bank to integrate human rights concepts into its policies, borrower countries have increasingly made the case for flexibility and deference to domestic standards in the implementation of bank-funded projects. This article analyses how the World Bank has navigated these conflicting legitimacy demands in the context of its 2016 Environmental and Social Framework (ESF). Drawing on insights from organizational sociology, we focus on practices of decoupling, which allow organizations to correspond to legitimacy demands by different audiences while not having to substantially adjust their core activities. The labour and indigenous peoples’ safeguards serve as cases in point. Specifically, the article argues that the Bank has decoupled its discourse concerning the ESF from the framework’s actual content by making statements about the ESF’s coherence with key human rights concepts which, upon closer scrutiny, do not fully correspond to its actual requirements. The article also shows how the design of the ESF furthers a decoupling of relevant requirements from its actual implementation. In particular, the confined scope ratione personae of the relevant safeguards and the discretion granted to the Bank’s staff and the borrower to add meaning to undefined key concepts may render their human rights-related requirements in a number of cases inconsequential. By and large, the decoupling practices identified regarding the Bank’s ESF entail problematic effects for the normativity of relevant human rights concepts and may, in the long run, undermine the Bank’s legitimacy as a whole. 10.1017/S0922156519000268 DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/S0922156519000268 publication.journalArticle
title The World Bank, human rights, and organizational legitimacy strategies: The case of the 2016 Environmental and Social Framework
url https://researchrepository.ilo.org/esploro/outputs/journalArticle/The-World-Bank-human-rights-and/995380892102676