This book focuses on the legal challenges and opportunities for International Financial Institutions in the post-crisis world. It includes contributions from academics, practitioners and Bank staff. The contributions cover a broad array of issues, included governance reform and constitutional framework of IFIs, privileges and immunities, responsibility of international organizations, issues related to fragile and conflict-affected states, climate finance, and the recent financial crisis. The book is organized in three main areas, namely (i) Law of International Organizations: Issues Confronting IFIs; (ii) Legal Obligations and Institutions of Developing Countries: Rethinking Approaches of IFIs; and (iii) International Finance and the Challenges of Regulatory Governance.

The World Bank Legal Review is a publication for policy makers and their advisers, attorneys, and other professionals engaged in the field of international development. It offers a combination of legal scholarship, lessons from experience, legal developments, and recent research on the many ways in which the application of the law and the improvement of justice systems promote poverty reduction, economic development, and the rule of law. In keeping with the theme of the World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development, and following the success of the World Bank Group’s Legal Forum on “Law, Equity, and Development” in December 2005, volume 2 of The World Bank Legal Review focuses on issues of equity and development. The volume draws together some of the key ideas of the Legal Forum, including articles by many of its distinguished participants, and explores the role of equity in the development process, highlighting how legal and regulatory frameworks and equitable justice systems can do much to level the playing field in the political, economic, and sociocultural domains, as well as how they can reinforce existing inequalities. Consistent with the interdisciplinary nature of this endeavour, Law, Equity and Development contains work by academics and practitioners in law, criminal justice, economics, human rights, social development, cultural studies, and anthropology.

Sustainable poverty reduction and equitable economic development rest on the firm foundation of the rule of law. On the domestic front, countries must engage in legal reform in order to maximize the benefits of globalization, increase efficiency in business transactions, improve the way governments deliver essential services, and facilitate access to an effective justice system. Internationally, new rules are needed to face global threats such as money laundering, destabilizing capital movements, communicable diseases, and attacks on the environment. The first volume of The World Bank Legal Review: Law and Justice for Development is the result of the World Bank’s unique experience with legal and judicial innovations and research around the world. It will be of interest to policy makers, attorneys, international development professionals, and anyone interested in the role of law and justice in the multi-faceted struggle to relieve poverty and improve living standards in developing countries.

The newly adopted post-2015 development agenda is centered on 17 sustainable development goals to be reached by 2030. This volume of the World Bank Legal Review looks at how law and justice systems can support the financing and implementation of these goals, including the role of the rule of law and economic and social rights. The contributors, including legal scholars, development practitioners, and financial experts, analyze the goals, explore ways in which they can be achieved, and examine ways that recent relevant law and justice programs have worked. A wide array of topics are covered, from the legal aspects of collecting and monitoring vital data, to improving legal identity programs, to creating innovative health care regulation, to legal and judicial reform, to providing private sector†“financing of public education projects to the provision of global public goods. Additionally, a special section on Europe looks at financial crisis management, enforcement of court decisions and the workings of the European Court of Justice. The opportunities and challenges of the 2030 agenda are many. This volume looks at both from multiple perspectives, demonstrating how sustainable development can go forward in a way in which everyone benefits.

The fourth volume of the World Bank Legal Review contains essays that examine how innovations in law, and efforts to empower the poor, can help achieve development objectives.

The World Bank's Lawyers provides an original socio-legal account of the evolving institutional life of international law. Informed by oral archives, months of participant observation, interviews, legal memoranda, and documents obtained through freedom-of-information requests, it tells a previously untold story of the World Bank's legal department between 1983 and 2016. This is a story of people and the beliefs they have, the influence they seek, and the tools they employ. It is an account of the practices they cling to and how these practices gain traction, or how they fail to do so, in an international bureaucracy. Inspired by actor-network theory, relational sociologies of association, and performativity theory, this ethnographic exploration multiplies the matters of concern in our study of international law (and lawyering): the human and non-human, material and semantic, visible and evasive actants that tie together the fragile fabric of legality. In tracing these threads, this book signals important changes in the conceptual repertoire and materiality of international legal practice, as liberal ideals were gradually displaced by managerial modes of evaluation. It reveals a world teeming with life—a space where professional postures and prototypes, aesthetic styles, and technical routines are woven together in law's shifting mode of existence. This history of international law as a contingent cultural technique enriches our understanding of the discipline's disenchantment and the displacement of its traditional tropes by unexpected and unruly actors. It thereby inspires new ways of critical thinking about international law's political pathways, promises, and pathologies, as its language is inscribed in ever-evolving rationalities of rule.

The World Bank and Sustainable Development: Legal Essays collects works from the past ten years by David Freestone, former Deputy General Counsel and Senior Adviser at the World Bank. The essays offer a unique perspective founded on the author’s years of experience at the World Bank. They cover a wide-range of topics, including the Bank’s Sustainable Development and its Climate Change agendas as well as its project based Environmental and Social Safeguard policies, highlighting the evolution of the pioneering role of the Bank’s Inspection Panel.

This book seeks to think differently about what we recognize as "global institutions" and how they could work better for the people who need them most. By so doing, the contributions show that there is a group of institutions that influence enough people’s lives in significant enough ways through what they protect, provide or enable that they should be considered, together, as global institutions. The United Nations, the World Bank, the internet as well as private military and security companies leave a heavy footprint on the social, political and economic landscape of the planet. We are all aware in different ways of the existence of these global institutions but their importance in achieving change in the twenty-first century is often underestimated. In this book, contributors seek to explain what associations exist between change in global institutions and the reduction of poverty and inequality as well as the achievement of security and justice. The work makes sense of processes of change and identifies the most significant obstacles that exist, offering suggestions for future action that will be of interest to students and scholars of global institutions.