A Window for Reform of the World Bank President Selection Process: A Three-Year Term

Peter Goodman's article in today’s Washington Post (Wanted: World Bank President: Experience Required) suggests that the U.S. administration has learned an important lesson from recent events: the right experience and qualifications matter. In our survey of development community views on the selection process, majorities of the more than 600 respondents considered knowledge of development, effective management, international organization experience, and political and diplomatic experience to be “very important” to success in the job (in that order). Most judged a fifth criteria, experience in banking and finance, to be "somewhat important." (Two of the people identified in Peter’s article as "chief contenders under serious consideration" -- former U.S. Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick and Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmitt -- are among nine scored in our survey. (Find out how they are doing and share your views )The most striking result of the survey for me is the broad support for reform of the selection process. Even though more than half of the respondents identify themselves as Americans, fully 85 percent of all respondents either agree or strongly agree that "the U.S. prerogative to name the World Bank president and the European prerogative to name the head of the IMF should be replaced by a selection process that is open, competitive and merit-based without regard to nationality.”My previous post with David Wheeler focused on the practical challenges of implementing these desirable principles. The question is: How do we get from the current arrangement to a selection system that increases the chance that a qualified individual with broad legitimacy will be selected as the president of the bank?Goodman’s article makes clear that the U.S. administration plans to propose a single American candidate. Our survey--and my informal contacts with non-American diplomats and members of the bank board from other countries--suggest that there is a real desire for the U.S. to initiate a reform of the selection process for future World Bank presidents.Indeed, there is a broad international consensus in favor of such reforms. A 2005 CGD working group report, The Hardest Job in the World: Five Crucial Tasks for the New President of the World Bank, prepared for then-incoming president Paul Wolfowitz, included reform of the governance of the bank itself among its key recommendations. Specifically, the report urged that the new president

Ask the governors of the Bank to formalize a credible, rule-based, transparent mechanism (as with private sector boards) for choosing the bank’s president.

Our report cited a 2001 joint report to the bank and IMF boards, originated by working groups set up by each institution, that outlined one possible mechanism. The report was then endorsed by both boards as guidance for future selection processes. In broad terms, the 2001 report advocated the creation of an eminent persons group that would develop a slate of candidates and provide assessments of each candidate to boards of the IMF and the World Bank, who would maintain responsibility for approving a presidential candidate.This would be a big advance over the current arrangement. It does not speak directly to the question of whether the president of the World Bank must be an American and the head of the IMF a European, neatly side-stepping that contentious issue.But such an approach is unlikely to be developed and implemented in the current crisis atmosphere surrounding the unscheduled departure of Paul Wolfowitz. At the same time, other World Bank member countries and a large majority of the Americans who care about international development are clearly eager for progress on the reform of bank governance. Some of these countries--especially the big emerging market economies such as Brazil, India, and China--will be reluctant to give a five-year term to a Bush administration appointee negotiated with the Europeans and presented to other members of the board as a fait accompli. We have here the possible outlines of a compromise: The U.S. could proceed with the nomination of a single U.S. candidate for consideration by the board, with the clear understanding--in advance of proposing a specific individual--that the nominee will serve for the balance of Paul Wolfowitz’s uncompleted term, that is, for three years. The new president, who would commit in advance not to seek a second term, would have one central task besides keeping the trains running on time: to work with other members of the bank and with the U.S. administration to devise a reformed selection process for his successor that is broadly acceptable to the bank’s shareholders--the nations of the world.Such a figure would need the trust of the U.S. president, and generous helpings of all of the skills and experience identified in our survey. She or he would play a role much like that of Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia, who presided over the transition from Soviet Communism to a more open, market-based system; or of Ernesto Zedillo in Mexico, who put in place the reforms that ended 30 years of one-party rule by the PRI.It's hard to know now what the resulting new governance of the World Bank would look like. I for one believe that it would be best for the bank, for the U.S. and for development if Washington continued to play a prominent role. Whatever the outcome, the reforms called for in the 2001 report endorsed by the bank and IMF boards would finally be underway, the U.S. government would be free to focus on other urgent problems, and President Bush could claim initiating reform of the World Bank governance to make it more legitimate as an important part of his legacy.It's one idea: a three-year term for the next president of the World Bank--with a commitment to reforming the selection process in a way that would establish the legitimacy of his successor. What do you think?