Stakeholder Responsiveness of International Organizations. Evidence from the World Bank

Operational International Organizations (IOs) are faced with diverse stakeholders in their work. Three groups of stakeholders in IOs environment are seen as particularly central in the literature. First, the national governments and administrations hope to influence the policies implemented on their shore. Second, corporations frequently seek to impact decisions taken within IOs. Third, civil society actors actively try to shape the policies and operations of IOs. While the literature has extensively discussed the influence of each of the three groups, we lack an understanding of the comparative responsiveness of IOs to these diverse sets of stakeholders. This paper tackles the gap by studying the case of the World Bank. It makes two contributions. First, it compares the respective pathways through which the different stakeholders can affect World Bank decision-making. Second, it combines survey data on World Bank stakeholders' preferences from more than 100.000 respondents from over 100 countries collected between 2012 and 2020 with data on lending patterns from World Bank projects during that time. The results shed light on the alignment of each stakeholder group's preferences with World bank lending patterns and the perceived responsiveness of the World Bank towards the different stakeholders.