Diagnostics of Climate Change: How International Organizations Balance Country Interests and Organizational Culture

Climate change has been elevated to a core priority for international financial institutions—if their commitments on paper are to be believed. Yet it is unclear how IFIs actually incorporate climate-change concerns in their everyday operations. Scholarship on organizational hypocrisy, for instance, suggests that the organizational culture may be too sticky to accommodate new demands from external stakeholders. The tension between venturing into new policy domains and staying true to organizational culture, norms, and procedures manifests in the analytical work of IFI bureaucrats. In this article, I thus study one core diagnostic that assesses climate change risks and potential for development: the World Bank Group’s Country Climate and Development Reports (CCDRs). Launched in 2021, the World Bank has published 71 CCDRs to date; they identify main pathways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and climate vulnerabilities in low- and middle-income countries. These diagnostics build the basis for countries’ funding applications, including lending programs from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank projects. I analyze these CCDRs with text-analytic methods and pair the data with information on project lending and IMF loans. In particular, I examine to what extent the CCDRs represent a departure from the organizational culture of these institutions and/or whether they are consistent with the priorities of recipient countries as expressed in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement. Empirically, the findings will have important implications for how international organizations address 21st-century existential threats; theoretically, this research contributes to long-standing debates on international organizations’ adaptive potential and institutional change.