Enforcing, Managing, Legitimating? How World Bank Bureaucrats Can Foster Compliance with Aid Agreements

The literature on International Organizations (IOs) has increasingly focused on the policy influence of international bureaucracies. Research has demonstrated that international bureaucracies can influence the design and implementation of the policies of IOs. However, international bureaucrats vary in regards to their influence on compliance of member states with IO demands. We comparatively assess the influence of different staff members tasked with supervising development projects at the World Bank. We do so by applying existing compliance perspectives to international bureaucrats. First, we hypothesize that there are variations between international bureaucrats regarding their stringency or leniency in enforcing international agreements. Second, we argue that international bureaucrats vary in the extent to which they are able to help member states to build the capacity to implement international agreements. Finally, we posit that some international bureaucrats are more able to foster the legitimacy of international agreements in the view of national actors. Through these three pathways, we argue, international bureaucrats can influence the compliance with IOs demands. We test these arguments using a novel database on the background and tenure of more than 3000 World Bank bureaucrats, which we link to evaluations of the compliance of member states in more than 1000 projects as evaluated by the Independent Evaluation Group. The findings have implications for the larger literatures on international bureaucrats on the one hand and compliance with international agreements on the other hand.