Twenty-five years ago today, the answer to the question, “Where do we go if we are harmed by the World Bank?” changed from nowhere to the Inspection Panel.
We live in an ever changing and more complicated world, where corporations have investors, managers, shareholders, and oversight from all over the world, and operations are owned and financed by a sometimes opaque web of players, like multinational corporations, banks, pension funds, individual investors, government funds, and development banks such as the World Bank. With so many actors involved, it can sometimes be unclear where communities can go when they are harmed by business activities.
The avenues created at development banks provide one crucial avenue for communities to seek remedy, and have inspired others to follow in their footsteps. Now, 25 years after the World Bank created the Inspection Panel, there is growing recognition that there is a need to ensure the right to remedy — and this means having a place for communities to seek justice when they may be harmed. This week, we celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Inspection Panel, the first accountability mechanism. But why?
As we’ve seen, the operations and activities of corporations and businesses can cause harm even when purporting to do good.
Twenty-five years ago, communities facing forced evictions, destruction of their environment, or loss of their cultural heritage had nowhere to turn. Development banks, such as the World Bank Group, have enjoyed absolute immunity against any lawsuits (though that may be changing).
Enter the Inspection Panel.
Growing out of pressure from NGOs, including CIEL, and seeing harms stemming from large mega-dams like Narmada in India, the World Bank finally took the first step to providing an avenue for accountability: They established the Inspection Panel to receive complaints from communities impacted by operations and to hold the bank accountable for its role in those harms. This remains an important moment because, for the first time, communities had somewhere to go when they were harmed. And it led to much more.
Accountability mechanisms are important…
Accountability and access to remedy are broader than courts and include a wide variety of judicial and non-judicial avenues, be it through human rights institutions, independent accountability mechanisms, local institutions, or project-level offices designed to hear grievances. Without these avenues, communities around the world often have nowhere to go, as project proponents operate with impunity.
Development banks’ accountability mechanisms have proven critical for our partners in communities around the world — from those protecting water for millions of people in Chile to those fighting for indigenous rights in Panama, from those defending land and the right to participate in Nicaragua, to those struggling to recover their environment and their livelihoods within the Cauca River basin in Colombia. They have led to remedy for some communities and sparked major changes in how the banks do business.
But they’re still not perfect.
The Inspection Panel set the stage and started the trend that has expanded not only to other banks, but also to the frameworks governing business and human rights.
But despite this progress, challenges remain. As CIEL and partners laid out in Glass Half Full? The State of Accountability in Development Finance, even with the accountability and grievance mechanisms that look the best on paper, remedy can be hard to come by.
It is hard for communities to know where to seek remedy because basic information about who is financing a project, or that an accountability mechanism even exists to hear their grievances, is not guaranteed. And even when a community does become aware of these avenues, it may be too late to file a complaint.
When communities are able to find information and file a complaint, it can be a lengthy process, riddled with even more information gaps. And in many places around the world, there is the ever-present fear that doing so will result in retaliation and reprisals.
So with our celebration of 25 years of accountability comes the knowledge that the journey continues, as does the work to improve the mechanisms themselves and the institutions’ response to them. Mechanisms do not exist in a vacuum and have to evolve and respond to changing landscapes. As the investment landscape has expanded, so has the need to ensure adequate avenues for justice. As we have strived for ways to ensure people and their rights are respected over the last 25 years, our vision for accountability mechanisms has evolved.
Accountability gaps remain.
While we celebrate, we also recognize that an accountability gap remains. These mechanisms are critical, and in order to be truly effective, they must be allowed to continue their work in a way that does not compromise their independence and that leads to real redress. This means that the institutions that house them and created them must respond to and act upon their findings.
Too often, institutions ignore the findings of their accountability mechanisms and don’t take responsibility for harm reported. Instead, they divest from the companies doing work on the ground that impacts communities, and then repeat the same mistakes in new operations. This needs to change. If institutions truly want to help people, they must listen to the findings and conclusions of their accountability mechanisms.
Twenty-five years on, the need for stronger accountability has only increased as an expanding field of investors finance major operations around the world that are likely to affect communities. As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first accountability mechanism, we also look to the future, to where accountability and redress can and should be, and we continue our work to help communities around the world have the avenues and the ability to get justice.
CIEL was there at the beginning, and we’re happy to celebrate accountability today and every day.
Happy 25th! Here’s to the evolving era of accountability and an ever-expanding movement working to ensure access to justice for communities!
By Erika Lennon, Senior Attorney
Originally posted on November 14, 2018
Recommendations to Strengthen Accountability at the World Bank
Joint CSO Submission on Update of the Inspection Panel’s Toolkit
After 25 years, the World Bank is undertaking a review of the Inspection Panel and its “toolkit” to consider revisions to strengthen its ability to deliver on its promise of accountability. As part of that process, the Board Committee had a limited consultation during which it accepted comments from civil society to aid in their decision making process. CIEL and partners submitted joint comments in October 2018 on how to strengthen the Inspection Panel and provide greater accountability and remedy for affected communities.
Statement from Civil Society Organizations to the Board
Following the initial review process, the World Bank Board approved several new additions to the Inspection Panel’s toolkit, including formalizing an advisory role and improving the ability to share information with requesters. However, as no agreement was reached on dispute resolution, monitoring, or extending the time to file a request, all of which would improve the Inspection Panel’s ability to fulfill its mandate and provide remedy to affected communities, the Board extended the time for review of the Panel’s “toolkit.” Civil society groups around the world are calling on the Board to celebrate 25 years of accountability by ensuring that, at the end of the review, the Panel has all the tools it needs to once again be a leading independent accountability mechanism and to provide real accountability and remedy to affected communities.