Legitimation and Accountability: How the World Bank Reacts to Public Pressure

Over the course of the past few decades, public legitimation pressure on the World Bank has been mounting. The Bank has been criticized for ineffectiveness, its ignorance of human rights and environmental concerns, and for a lack of democratic accountability. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, this criticism even erupted in mass protest and violent street turmoil. While recent research has begun to examine the causes of such public protest, the determinants of public legitimation discourse at large, and the legitimacy beliefs of individuals, we know fairly little about how international organizations, such as the World Bank, react to public legitimation pressure. In this contribution, we take up this question and analyze whether the World Bank has reformed its accountability mechanisms as one possible legitimation strategy. Most generally, we ask whether changes in the Bank’s accountability mechanisms are the result of public protest and legitimation pressure. More specifically, we provide, first, an analysis of public protest against the Bank and public legitimation discourse about the bank to map legitimation pressure on the Bank since the 1990s. Second, we use these data as our explanatory variable and trace how the Bank’s management perceived this external critique, whether it reacted to it, and whether these reactions resulted in stronger accountability mechanisms.