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On the sidelines of the World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings 2019, the Center for Global Development (CGD) and the Bretton Woods Committee (BWC) will co-host this expert panel to discuss the future of the World Bank under its new president, David Malpass. What should top his agenda? What are the most important and urgent issues in the development landscape and what is the role of the World Bank in addressing these challenges? Join us to hear from this panel of global thought leaders offering recommendations for the future of the multilateral system.
With Jim Kim’s abrupt departure from the World Bank, there has been a swirl of commentary on questions of legacy, the best of which aim to answer the question, “how is the bank doing?” For large multilateral institutions like the World Bank, that’s a frustratingly difficult question to answer. Seemingly objective measures like volume of financing or sectoral targets are simplistic and bring their own value judgements about what the institution should be doing. Annual reports give us a narrative about institutional performance, but a heavily biased one.
In 2019/2020 donor governments are anticipated to pledge up to $170 billion to various multilateral organisations as part of their replenishment cycles. This unusual bunching of replenishments of some of the largest organisations in 2019 provides an opportunity to think more coherently about multilateral funding and to address key systemic problems, such as overlapping mandates and under-funding of some parts of the system.
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