Accountability

Democracy in International Organizations: a Supranational Approach.

Posted on by Susanna Cafaro

2013TitleMap-IOPublic opinion’s demand for democracy at a global level has significantly increased in the last decade, due to the number of global challenges affecting humanity as a whole and the growing feeling of transnational interconnectedness generated by the internet. Unfortunately, international organizations are not (yet) equipped for democratic participation of individuals as they are basically intergovernmental.

An institutional formula for global democracy doesn’t exist yet and it’s time to invent it, reframing the very notion of democracy for this space which is not the familiar nation state we know since the Westphalian order.

Of course, we cannot imagine simply transferring what works at the national level – institutions and procedures – given the variety and complexity of organizations at international level. Moreover, we should consider the intrinsically difference of legal orders grounded on the membership of States instead of individuals, where even the basic principle of equality doesn’t fit.

The approach I suggest is grounded in a constructivist method: after deconstructing democracy in three basic components— legitimacy, accountability and inclusiveness—it is possible to reassemble them originally with the aim of their progressive strengthening.

This method will allow a realistic assessment of the level of democracy in international organizations and it will help promoting institutional reforms in line with the expectations of democracy in the global civil society.

A fundamental shift will occur from the typical intergovernmental model towards a more supranational one—as improving legitimacy, accountability, and inclusiveness naturally implies an increasing relationship between individuals and international organizations. The existence of a direct correlation between the role of individuals (or if you prefer of a demos) and the level of democracy appears to me a crucial topic.

I explain more about my reflections on this topic in this article, just released by The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Global Studies

The Global Vote

Posted on by Susanna Cafaro

If you go to The Global Vote, you can pick an election, wherever in the world, and express your vote.

For sure, I will vote on Brexit and on American presidential elections and next year for the French ones…  Why? Because they affect me deeply, even if I live in Italy!

Why should we care about who runs the other countries?

Because to make the world work, we need a world of good leaders. Leaders who consider the needs of every man, woman, child and animal on the planet, not just their own voters.

We, the rest of the world, will achieve this aim by reminding each candidate that we’re here, we care, and we’re watching. We need them to do the right thing for their own country and for the whole of humanity, if they are elected.

By asking each candidate about their international intentions, election after election, that question will eventually become accepted as part of the normal election process for any Head of State or Head of Government. No leader will be able to stand for election unless they have a clear policy for their country’s role in the world and a vision of how they will co-operate and collaborate with other leaders and other populations.

Letting leaders know that we are watching them and evaluating them, we’ll make them pay more attention to the impact they have not just on their country, but on the world.

 The more people vote, the more impact this project will have. Can I ask you to spread the www.globalvote.org link around your own friends, family and networks?

With your help, one country at a time, we can build a world of good leaders. 

This is another great initiative by Simon Anholt, creator of the Good Country Project.

No Man is an Island

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

John Donne

Active Global Citizenship: Making the Climate Convention Work

Posted on by Susanna Cafaro

First published on Vocal Europe

 

We are all shocked because of the floods in Paris and across most of central Europe: from Germany to Belgium to Romania. We are scared for the increased frequency and violence of such exceptional climate events, we are worried for our future and the future of our sons.

Yes, some commentators pointed correctly out that this kind of events – as exceptional as they are – already happened in the past, but everybody agrees that global aggregated data on temperature rise are unprecedented, at least as far as we humans can record.

And no events like natural disasters make us feel more powerless, just victims or scared observers.

Still, an attempt has been done – if not to restore the previous climate conditions – at least to slow down this crazy growth of temperature by limiting the impact of our species on the Earth’s ecosystems, to make it finally sustainable. This is the Paris Agreement on climate change, adopted by consensus on 12 December 2015 by 196 delegations, signed by 177 states and already ratified by 17 of them.

Unfortunately, as ambitious as it is, the Paris Agreement is not enough.

In the text, which is the result of the twenty-first meeting of the Parties (COP21) of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), the member states “…Acknowledging that climate change is a common concern of humankind”, commit to hold “ the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C”.

The goal, so, it is not a correction of the current situation, but just the effort to stop further worsening.

While the convention offers some interesting guidelines to help to reach the goal –subsidiarity, transparency, responsibility – unfortunately it does not provide any real enforcement mechanism nor sanctions in case of infringement. The respect of so important commitments depends solely on the good will of the signatories and on the peer- review mechanism every 5 years.

We know that this isn’t enough, but how could we – the citizens – do something about that?

Well, actually, we can do something.

Through an initiative called “citizens’ climate engagement network” we can all do something.

And I have to thank Joseph Robertson, global strategy director at Citizens’ Climate Lobby for starting this wonderful lab for the empowerment of citizens across the world.

He was right when he wrote to me some days ago: “supranational democracy is underway!”

CCEN could be defined as a new global framework to support and expand direct citizens’ and stakeholders’ engagement in the intergovernmental process, in the surveillance over the States and the way they keep their commitments, in promoting new ideas and ways to stop climate change.

In practice, anybody can host a local working session, to contribute local insights and experiences to the global climate policy process. A toolkit for local sessions is on-line, ready to use. A platform will provide exchanges of views inside this community of engaged citizens. Finally, an Advisory Coalition meets once a month to share insights, think through challenges to meeting the mission of the CCEN, which is to ensure any voice from anywhere with an idea worth sharing can be heard in the global conversation.

The governance is completed by a secretariat and a global team of local networks of leaders, stakeholders and collaborators. The mission is to build a global base of local knowledge, relating to the Paris Agreement, and to bring all the local insight into the COP22 negotiations, making all voices heard. So increasing the legitimacy and the accountability of and the inclusion into the Paris Convention framework.

Representatives from several UN agencies and dedicated NGOs joined the advisory coalition  in their personal capacity, and I’m very glad to be part of it. And the UNFCCC secretariat hosted the initiative in its newsroom. It’s getting big!

What is most relevant in this bottom-up exercise, we learned the lesson that organized citizens may take a stance for global goals, so filling the gaps of global governance. The CCEN is a precious lab. It shows how active global citizenship is possible, as a path towards a more democratic world.

The effort behind this accomplishment could be replicated for other goals, empowering communities of committed people to work together as active global citizens: I think of associations and NGOs promoting human rights, fighting poverty, claiming for women and children’s rights. And these are just examples.

If there is a lesson we can learn from the climate change challenge, it is this sense of belonging to the human family, sharing a “common concern” as humankind.

COP21_participants_-_30_Nov_2015_23430273715-897x494

 

Why Is Supranational Democracy so Difficult to Imagine?

Posted on by Susanna Cafaro

The inadequate attention that international organizations’ statutes  give to legitimacy, accountability and inclusiveness hails from the limited role that IOs played at the beginning of their history and from the subsequent scarce attention to democracy in a setting different from the national state.

In today’s different international context, it is worthwhile to challenge the unsurmountable hurdles stemming from the use of the word “democratic” in connection with an international organization.

Even though there isn’t a generally accepted theory of democracy – or more broadly of supranational democracy – in international organizations, we can examine the possible portability of the individual elements that make up this notion from the state level – for which they were originally created – to the international level. This is the experiment I’m almost obsessed about.

However, two kinds of difficulties arise from the fact that we are not considering a community of individuals, but of nations.

The first obstacle is the difficult applicability of the principle of equality, inherent in the notion of democracy. It is based on the concept of equal dignity for all human beings which leads to ignore and even amend the differences that give some people a “birth right” to succeed. All states are sovereign and therefore equal inside the international community, but this principle is nothing but a fictio. Far from wanting to ignore or minimize the differences, the international community focuses upon the preservation of the status quo, which is attenuated only by the shared goal of the sustainable development and protection of fundamental rights. Even when all the countries will get, as we hope, to share similar levels of prosperity, they would be far from equal. Too many facets help mark the differences: the size of territories, populations and economies, as well as the control over natural resources and the weapon supply.

As a consequence, several organizations agree on the principle that states are differently represented to reflect their different situations. Other ones simply ignore their substantial difference, but special provisions or practices make some States more equals than others.

Important scholar studies try to offer solutions to this dilemma, but there isn’t any adequate diffusion and sedimentation of shared assessments. The reflection on the subject has followed two clearly distinct lines: the statism theory, which sees international democracy as the result of the joint action of the states, as essential building blocks; and the doctrine inspired by cosmopolitanism and transnationality, which is based on the assumption of a global demos.

Even if an international organization achieved the perfect representation of all its members and was thus fully legitimate to act, we couldn’t conclude that it was also, indirectly, fully representative of their citizens. In fact, if some of its member states weren’t democratic, or only partly democratic, they wouldn’t be representative of all their citizens. According to the Democracy Index 2015 of the Economist Intelligence Unit, only 20 countries out of 167 are full democracies.

Such a lack of legitimacy is inevitably reflected on the state’s opinions and stands in the institutions of the IO it is part of and on the overall credibility of the institutions themselves. This is a difficult legal dilemma, that can only be solved if the organizations require their members to be democratic – as the European Union does (even if it should keep a closer eye on their evolutions). It is obvious that in organizations with a universal membership the issue must be labeled as “non permanently solvable”and shelved.

There is so a good point for the cosmopolitan approach: only building on some kind of legitimacy driven directly from the global demos we can overcome the “states obstacles” which are their inequality and their imperfect democratic representation.

Even so, the imperfect representativeness that we assume as inevitable, could be compensated by accountability, which can be fully obtained at the supranational level also by designing and experimenting new legal and institutional forms.

International organizations are not really equipped for substancial legitimacy as they are not for full accountability. New channels and tools need to be imagined to provide that their decisions and lines of actions reflect the values and the will of the people.We need new and fresh ideas, in line with the reality (and the technology) of an interconnected society. 

Unfortunately, we are now accessing the realm of imagination, and here there are two more powerful obstacles.

The first one is the power of the status quo: the resistance of political and economic elites, the power of traditions and cultural heritages and the trite old say “it has always been so”.

The second obstacle lies in the fact that economic and legal minds are not really educated to work with imagination, at least not on a big scale. It’s easy to imagine a new interpretation of a rule or a new financial product, but what about a whole new system? Do we feel really empowered to do that?

We hear almost every day that challenging the status quo, working with imagination, “disrupting” are the new frontiers for entrepreneurs and marketers, but this is also true for those who want to prove themselves on institutional engineering… and maybe change the world, for the better.

A Democracy Index for International Organization?

Posted on by Susanna Cafaro

Democracy indexes are usually for states.

They are designed to assess trends and  level of democracy inside countries.

Democracy is never a yes or no, or maybe it may be a clear no, but never a clear and final yes.  Democracy standards evolve, societal challenges require a continuous update of democratic tools and indicators and citizens should never stop to claim for better and more efficient participatory and accountability tools. Democracy is a work in progress.

Let’s have a look at same of these democracy indexes:

The Economist Intelligence Unit Index of Democracy compiles an annual ranking of countries by democracy level. The index is based on 60 indicators grouped in five different categories measuring electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, government role, political participation and cultural participation.

The Index distinguishes between full democracies and flawed ones, hybrid and authoritarian regimes on the basis of their scores within each category. In 2015, democracies appear to be complete in only 20 of the 167 countries surveyed!

Other interesting indexes and measurements are on other sites, such as the Democracy Barometer, whose theoretical basis is in this chart:

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Many other indexes and rankings deserve a mention. The Bertelsmann Transformations Index on the political and economic development assesses the status of countries in transition, while the Bertelsmann Sustainable Governance Index refers instead to the OECD countries. The Democracy Ranking is based on political and socioeconomic factors; the Democratic Audit, focuses on UK; the Freedom House: Freedom in the World Reports is developed by the American NGO “Freedom House”; the Global Democracy Ranking measures the quality of democracy freedom & other characteristics of the political system) plus the performance of the non-political dimensions  (gender, economy, knowledge, health, and the environment); Polity classifies political systems on a scale between the two extremes autocracy and democracy; the Polyarchy Dataset is based on Robert Dahl’s concept of polyarchy as the Vanhanen’s Index of Democracy; the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project reports aggregate and individual governance indicators for 215 economies;  the V•Dem ratings on 11 different democracy components  for all countries worldwide from 1900 onwards; the Unified Democracy Scores combines measures from 12 other democracy measures (among others Freedom House, Polity, Polyarchy, Vanhanen).

Other ways to measure democracy level may involve the respect of human rights (see among others Amnesty International – Human Rights Reports, or HDR – Human Development Reports (UNDP), or transparency (as Transparency International: Corruption Perception Index (CPI), Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) und Bribe Payers’ Index (BPI)) or the freedom of press and media (as Freedom House). Please note that the list is not complete!

Even if the theoretical approach and the data sets may differ, all these indexes and rankings have something in common: they all refer to states. These parameters can only be used to a limited extent when evaluating an international organization.

There are some good reasons for that: first of all they measure the efficiency of representative democracy, i.e. the electoral system (are there free elections? do all individuals enjoy voting rights? is the electoral process transparent? and so on…)

Second, many indicators refer to human rights and quality of legislation (freedom of press, judicial rights, gender equality, access to education, et cetera).

Finally, some of them evaluate the economic environment: economic freedoms, free competition, inequality.

All of them, so, assume the existence of a demos and a territory of reference and a government responsible for them. They are definitely useful to inform us on how things work, how they evolve over time and how they can be improved.

But still, I think that we miss an important tile in the mosaic of our democratic rights. What if the decisions which have an impact on our rights do not originate from states, but instead from the UN, the IMF, the Eurogroup? Are still the states to blame? and if so, what can we do to address the issue? The Greek crisis offered a powerful example, but should we speak of the UN Security Council listing potential terrorists without any respect for their defence rights?

I have spent some time reflecting on possible indicators to measure democracy in international organizations, once again to assess how things work, how they evolve over time and how they can be improved. The main difference with democracy indicators for states is that they concern only the relationship between citizens and a governance system.

Here is my concept tree:

supranational democracy chart

What I came up with, is a chart based on three core indicators: legitimacy, accountability and inclusion. All the three may , in turn, be split into different substantial elements, in order to explore possible improvements. Only through a prismatic factorization of each of them in their multiple meanings is possible a real assessment of the existing democratic toools as well as a verification of what is really missing.

There is a close relationship between democratic legitimacy, accountability and inclusiveness; several tools serve more than one of these values (you’ll see repetitions in the chart) and transparency serves them all.

What seems interesting to me is that this chart imagined for international organizations works very well for any kind of organization expected to be democratic (even if not all the yellow elements – the practical tools –  would apply, or we could imagine other ones).

 I don’t know how to convert these elements in numeric values in order to build an index, but I’d like very much to join a team to imagine one.

I’m open to suggestions!

 

The Case for Technocracy (and the Case for Democracy!)

Posted on by Susanna Cafaro

International organizations are mostly technocratic institutions. Central banks are definitely technocratic institutions. Many national authorities responsible for supervision and monitoring are inherently technocratic.

It sounds like a bad thing, as technocracy means literally power in the hands of technicians or experts. And experts are selected after the evaluation of knowledge assets and experience. So, basically, if an institution is an example of technocracy, it is not an example of democracy.

Technocracy has old roots as among the most ancient civilizations the power was in the hands of those who had knowledge. It was an assumed truth that knowledge goes hand in hand with wisdom (and sometimes even with divinity!).

Nowadays, there are some good reasons to choose technocracy over democracy, even if it isn’t often the case:

  1. We want that our authority takes not the more legitimate or shared decisions, but the best ones.

This happens when decisions are just too difficult for non-experts, as it happens in the field of monetary policy: deciding which is the right amount of money to print or which is the correct interest rate to keep prices stable in the current circumstances is the result of a knowledge-based approach. Only few people are qualified enough to understand the difficult mathematical reasoning behind this kind of decision.

2. We want independent, impartial decisions.

An antitrust authority under political influence or pressure by public opinion wouldn’t do properly its duty. Similarly to the judiciary, monitoring authorities have to apply rules impartially, in good faith, after a qualified evaluation.

Some international bodies are similarly  committed to super partes evaluation, to focus on the common interest which is not necessarly the interest of the majority. This is the case for the European Commission which interacts regularly with the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament, in charge to  represent respectively the majority of states and the majority of populations, so the Commission offers a different perspective.

Conversely, there is a wrong reason to choose technocracy over democracy, it is the lack of trust in the political elite and the need for a radical change (I think of all the so-called “technical governments” we had in Italy in the past two decades, for instance).

It is a lie we tell ourselves: a minister plays necessarily a political role, no matter where he comes from or how he has been chosen. So, this is just a way to mistify or hide the reasons behind political decisions which are never simply “technical”.

All the organizations whose powers require political discretion, states in the first place (but not just states) cannot be managed as technocracies. Such a choice would turn back the clock to pre-democracy ages, while what we want is to improve our level of democracy.

Moreover, even if the activity of a technocratic authority is not, by definition, democratic, choosing the experts in charge for technocratic decisions – chief officers, board members, central banks presidents – is definitely a political decision, so we expect it to be democratic.

Some international organizations, which still obey to the technocratic model, increased their role over time and should introduce democratic elements to complement the technocratic ones – just like in the EU the technocratic body -which is the Commission- is complemented by the Parliament and the Council.

Finally, how can we trust a technocracy?

All the technocratic institutions show  – or should show  – two basic features to guarantee that their power will not be abused:

  • a clear mandate
  • an accountability framework

They don’t operate in a splendid isolation, they enjoy relevant powers for some good reason. It is up to them to deserve people’s trust using them properly or – if it is the case – to be held responsible for their misuse.

These two elements  – a limited allocation of competences and a duty to be accountable-  reconcile democracy and technocracy, so the two may be an useful completion one of the other.

IS THERE A WAY TO STOP TECHNOLOGIES WHICH BREACH (OR MAY BREACH) HUMAN RIGHTS?

Posted on by Susanna Cafaro

(originally published on ODBMS.org)

The European Parliament voted on Sept. 8 a report presented by the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats focusing on human rights and technology in third countries. In it, the EU Parliament claims that the Union should take a clear stance against those authoritarian regimes which use spying and hacking technologies to violate human rights. In order to do so they should lead in preventing this kind of technologies from falling into the wrong hands.
In the same day, the Parliament amended a Commission’s initial proposal to ban animal cloning to include the cloning of all farm animals, their descendants and products derived from them, including imports into the EU.

What do so different topics have in common?
They expect to have an impact on technology, or the use of technology.

Every year, the level of concern about the possible use of new technology raises exponentially: artificial intelligence, big data, drones, space race, not to speak about genetics or nanotechnologies (and being a lawyer I stop here, I’m sure my little list sounds poor and even silly to scientists).
Could we ever expect to stop technological evolution? And would it be something good?
The answer is clearly “no” to both the questions.
Technologies are the new borders of humanity exploration: pushing the limit to expand knowledge is in our very nature and enhancing human well-being through technological improvement is a moral obligation, especially where it is desperately needed.

But, how could we make sure that knowledge goes hand in hand with wisdom? How to avoid that the final result of this quest is nothing but self-destruction?

We face here two different problems, both difficult to solve: the How and the Who.

I. How the development of new technologies could be scrutinized in order to stop the research addressing wrong goals (goals of destruction of people or planet or control over other human beings)? How to avoid the misuse of technology which could have peaceful and fruitful applications?

II. Who should be in charge to do so?

First of all, an assumption seems inevitable: there isn’t much we can do at national level, not even at continental level. It’s even too easy, nowadays, to move a lab or a factory from one country to another, to shop among legal systems just to find the most accommodating (or the most interested) one. Even without moving, the product or the patent which is the outcome of a research can easily be sold abroad.

About the “how”, I doubt any international treaty could be effective. Too long negotiating processes, too difficult to verify the real implementation. Most of all a lack of flexibility in its content would make it immediately outdated. By the way, how many treaties should we need?

The only way to address the point is in identifying an evaluation body, in charge of screening in “the interest of humanity”.
And here comes the “Who” problem.

I don’t think that academic records or prizes and accomplishments would be enough to choose somebody for such a sensitive position. A clear commitment in the interest of humanity is needed for the members of such a value-centered group.
There are actually some bodies of scientists or experts in the UN, as the Commission on Science and Technology for Development, whose members are appointed by national governments according to a geopolitical distribution.

I am not sure this is the best formula (and I’m not sure to know the best formula), but I think that it should be possible to agree on some basic key points:

  • High profile of members (both ethical and scientific) recognized at global level;
  • Pluralism and diversity (and of course gender equality);
  • A transparent appointing process (by whom? The UN General Assembly? Or involving the same scientific community?)
  • Affiliation with a global organization or agency able to endorse and give authority to recommendations.

I don’t think that such a body should enter into details of single projects, but It could take charge of deep evaluation in areas of concern, to be submitted by states, international organizations or NGOs.
These are nothing but early reflections on a topic which I hope will be developed over the next months and years.

The scientific community – both academic and entrepreneurial- is called to join this debate and to be at the forefront in guaranteeing its own integrity in the interest of humanity.

Why Europe is Losing its Credibility over the Greek Crisis

Posted on by Susanna Cafaro

I will write now something quite subversive: the EU is a reasonably democratic entity.

It is the only international organisation to have a legislative power stemming directly from citizens, with its two-chambers system: the Parliament directly representative of its citizens and the Council, directly representative of governments which are too – at national level – directly representative of their citizens. Its powers are conferred by treaties duly ratified by member states’ parliaments or even through referendum. The legitimacy of EU acts is guaranteed by a judiciary system, composed by national courts and by European judges.

But, not surprisingly, the perceived level of democracy of the European system is now lower than ever.

There is a simple reason for that, which unfortunately is not explained and even less understood by media (and so, of course, by citizens): economic policy is NOT an European competence. And economic policy is what dominates the political debate nowadays.

The compromise agreed on in the Maastricht treaty – never changed since- is that monetary policy is an exclusive competence of the Union, while economic policy is a competence of the member states. Of course a single monetary policy cannot survive with 19 different economic policies. That’s why the Treaty on the Functioning of European Union provides for a coordination of national economic policies – now reinforced through the so called “European semester” and why there are a number of prohibitions aimed at avoiding excessive divergences among national economies (the so-called Stability Pact).

The coordination of national economic policies is a mere intergovernmental procedure, agreed among finance ministers and heads of state and government, without any judiciary control and – even less- democratic guarantees.

Why monetary policy was transferred to the European level, while economic policy remained national? Because budgets remained national.

The EU has a tiny budget (less than 1% of the EU GDP) which cannot allow any deep intervention in the management of crises or the fostering of growth. So, the EU can just recommend such measures to member states.

On top of that, states are not equal.

Not only they differ significantly in size and GDP, but they contribute differently to the EU budget (we have already written about that). And they contribute  differently to the interventions which are outside the EU legal framework, as mostly happened in the management of the Greek crisis.

One of the most dramatic consequences of this crisis – whose extent has yet to be measured – is that many European citizens believe that what happened in the management of the Greek crisis is the normal way of functioning of the EU.

It is not.

I can tell you that Europe is better that that and can do (has done) better than that. It has provided over the years a significant increase of the rights of citizens in many core areas such as consumers’ rights, environmental rights, safety of products, right to move, work, study or be healed in other EU countries and so on.

Pity that nobody explains that, nobody writes about it, nobody takes a stance for minimum democratic standards in the management of coordinated economic policies.

The price Europe is going to pay for the intergovernmental (poor) management of the Greek crisis is a loss of credibility in all the other fields of intervention. Trust will take long years to be (hopefully) restored.

I hope that our politicians and journalists are aware of that.

Accountability, inclusivity, Legitimacy

Supranational Democracy in a Nutshell

Quote | Posted on by Susanna Cafaro

A few days ago I had the opportunity to give a speech about the need for democracy at global level and about what we, as individuals, can do.

I post it here because it summarizes well what is explained in several previous posts:

 

 

 

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Democratizing the Bretton Woods Institutions

Posted on by Susanna Cafaro

On the 15th of November 2008, in the midst of the global financial crisis, the leaders of the G-20 countries met in Washington DC. In the meeting’s final declaration, they committed to reforming the international economy governance – in order to steer their countries out of the crisis, boost economic growth and restore trust – by (among other things) overhauling the Bretton Woods institutions, i.e. the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The structure of the two institutions, created in 1944, had been discussed before, but never so firmly and by such a high-ranking forum.

In fact, the earliest reforms date back to the Seventies and were followed by regional financial crises that had global effects and sparked a debate among academics and politicians alike. New impetus came from the anti-globalization movements – particularly active during the Nineties – that put the Bretton Woods institutions on trial. The claims for more “voice and representation” by the developing countries,especially the emerging ones, whose economic success was fostered precisely by the contested globalization, came later on. These demands were echoed by major international conferences and groups such as the G24.

All this brought about a series of small actions through which the two organizations have begun to rethink their roles and structures.

Two subjects were on the agenda: how to make the Bretton Woods institutions (i) more effective, so that they can successfully face the challenges of development gaps (World Bank) and crisis prevention and management (IMF) and (ii) more democratic and less opaque, so that all their members and stakeholders can have a voice in and be represented, be they large or small, wealthy or not.

As a consequence of the 2008 global financial crisis, each of the Bretton Woods institutions convened groups of wisemen and committees of experts, and so did governments and other international institutions. The results of their work can be found in the Manuel Report; the Report of the Commission of Experts of the President of the United Nations General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System; the Zedillo Report. It’s also worthwhile to mention technical documents such as the FMI governance evaluation document by its Independent Evaluation Office and a series of reports from the civil society like  the 4th Pillar Report

All these debates had, as a consequence,  IMF  quota and governance reforms adopted on December 2010 and not yet in force because of the resistance by the main shareholder of the two organizations: the United States.

I have published – a couple of years ago- an e-book to examine the governance systems of IMF and World Bank and above all what I reckon is the core issue: their decision-making process. My analysis is based on the firm belief that the decision-making process affects the efficiency and also – indirectly – the outcome of the international organizations’ decisions. In other words, their governance systems are bound to influence and shape the results of the actions of the international organizations themselves.

Unfortunately – as the debates and the reforms stagnate – my book and my proposals are still up-to-date. Here they are, in a nutshell:

EIGHT SUGGESTIONS TO IMPROVE DEMOCRACY AND EFFICIENCY
IN THE BRETTON WOODS ORGANIZATIONS

  1. Separate IMF and World Bank (autonomous memberships and attributions of shares, different quota formulas);
  2. Introduce a double majority (of states and votes) in the decisional bodies (Boards of Governors, Executive Boards and Ministerial Committees);
  3. Entrust Ministerial Committees with a role of political guidance similar to the one currently played by the G20, eventually foresee their possibility to meet (also) at head-of-state level;
  4. Rethink constituencies to reflect – when possible – regional integration and cooperation gatherings, as a first step towards multilevel governance;
  5. Give Executive Directors the only status of international officials and guaranteed independence while national interests will be reflected and balanced in Ministerial Committees;
  6. Give the Board of Governors the power to appoint and collectively dismiss the Executive Boards;
  7. Envisage membership of international organizations;
  8. Give civil society an advisory role, by publishing on the Internet the first drafts of policy and strategy documents and collecting comments and reactions. The final version of all documents should reflect in the motivation how and why decisions were made.

On all of these points I could speak for a long, if you are interested you can read it all in my book.

PS Good news: José Antonio Ocampo just released a paper about a reformed architecture for the international monetary system. The debate is officially re-opened!