What is the World Bank without international travel?

BURLINGTON, Vt. — For years, the World Bank was known for liberal travel policies, high expenditures, and business class allowances. Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought international travel to a virtual standstill, those concerns have swung in the opposite direction: Can an institution known for jet-setting expertise still function? “In the beginning, everybody thought this is a six-week nightmare. Then we thought it was a three-month nightmare, and now we see it is a much longer term. So we have to see how we are working,” Axel van Trotsenburg, the World Bank’s managing director of operations, told Devex. While World Bank staff have been almost entirely consumed by the institution’s effort to deliver a rapid and large-scale emergency financial response to the pandemic, the bank’s leaders are in regular conversation about how the institution will have to adapt its business model to the constraints imposed by COVID-19, van Trotsenburg said. “An incredible amount of work is happening, and what we are talking about also is how this will transform work, but also project preparation, supervision, and so on,” he said. The pandemic challenges the bank’s standard business model in fundamental ways. The organization is known for its ability to deliver international expertise to client countries around the world, but also deploys international supervision to the projects it finances to ensure they uphold standards and achieve their original goals. Van Trotsenburg noted that a recent decentralization process undertaken by the bank under President David Malpass has been a “blessing in disguise” in light of the pandemic. That effort was widely seen as a reversal of former President Jim Kim’s reform process, which pulled thematic expertise out of the bank’s regional operations and created a new system of “global practices.” “That ability to come and look and offer advice and make a report is something the World Bank has done ever since its first loan to France after the World Bank was set up.” --— Paul Cadario, distinguished fellow, University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs Today, roughly 53% of the bank’s operational staff are now located within client countries, he said. In the East Asia region that number climbs to 80%. “That helps enormously to have your task management, your country director, your whole machinery out there, and that is excellent for delivery,” he said. Despite that decentralization, officials in the World Bank’s client countries still turn to the institution for international expertise when they face choices about how to implement development projects or choose between different policies. “That ability to come and look and offer advice and make a report is something the World Bank has done ever since its first loan to France after the World Bank was set up,” said Paul Cadario, a distinguished fellow at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and a retired World Bank senior manager. “There is no other organization that combines expertise and financial support around the world the way the World Bank has,” he added. While the bank’s presence within countries means that its staff often possess strong local knowledge and good relationships with government counterparts, ministry officials tend to value the institution for its ability to connect them with internationally experienced experts who can tell them how others have approached their problems. “The typical thing you get from a finance minister is — ‘I don’t need local expertise on my problem. I need best practice. What is the cutting edge stuff that fixes this, and can you get it for me,’” said a former World Bank official who left the institution last year and requested anonymity to speak about a previous employer. “You can set up Zooms and stuff like that to cover that, but the truth is this all becomes a lot harder,” the former official added. When the World Bank chooses to finance a project in a client country, that involves multiple forms of consultation — including with civil society groups and affected communities — and due diligence at the outset, but also regular supervision to observe what is happening in implementation, how it compares to what was agreed, and to help borrowers meet their goals. “While the decentralization process is fine, that mix of presence 365 days a year and presence every four to six months to see how things are going and to decide what to do next, is really important,” Cadario said. Civil society groups have raised concerns already about whether bank-funded projects are engaging in the necessary consultations and outreach to marginalized communities in the institution’s fast-track response to COVID-19. “Obviously, in the current times consultations are not being held in person, but what could these consultations look like to make sure that people are engaged in helping to design the COVID response projects in their countries?” asked Rachel Burton, social inclusion director at the Bank Information Center, a group that tracks multilateral development banks. “The bank wants to do good projects, where communities don’t get harmed, but it’s a hell of a lot harder when you can’t travel for things, to keep an eye on them.” --— Anonymous former World Bank official Even with increased proportions of staff based in client countries, many of the governments in those countries are still shut down. That new reality has forced the bank to think about new ways of providing supervision and evaluation, including the use of drones and other technologies for things like damage assessment, van Trotsenburg said. “This is an enormous challenge. But I also think this is a huge opportunity to think differently about the work program,” he added. That opportunity might also come with risks. “How many of these things are going to turn into inspection panel cases?” the former official worried, referring to the bank’s independent accountability mechanism that hears complaints about harm caused by projects. “The bank wants to do good projects, where communities don’t get harmed, but it’s a hell of a lot harder when you can’t travel for things, to keep an eye on them,” they added. As the pandemic drags on, some worry the ability for institutions such as the World Bank to carry out significant portions of their work from a distance could have diminishing returns — even when it comes to assisting countries with their response to COVID-19. “A lot of that work has been done virtually, but to do that requires an existence of social capital,” said Cadario. “I would be concerned that a long period without travel robs the bank and its clients from the opportunity to work together to build knowledge and to build trust, all of which I think are fundamental to the bank’s mission,” he added. If the restrictions necessitated by the pandemic do linger, an organization like the bank that relies on strong international relationships could face another, more straightforward reality too, according to Gregory Chen, policy lead at the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, which is housed within the World Bank. “People change jobs,” he said. “The world moves on and changes … so I think there’s a bit of a glide path down where we could go on this absence of international travel for quite a while, but I think given the natural attrition and change in our clients and in the markets where we work we’d need to get back there at some point to be as effective as we were in the past,” Chen added.