Beyond Accountability? Human Rights, Global Governance, and the World Bank Inspection Panel

Abstract

This paper seeks to move beyond the usual accountability framework of human rights law, focusing on one case of the World Bank Inspection Panel (WBIP) to consider other aspects of the relationship between human rights and international organisations in global governance. In particular, the paper makes two novel analytical moves. First, it conceptualises international organisations such as the WBIP as complex assemblages comprising diverse elements, thereby drawing attention to the manifold practices that connect the innumerable actors involved in constructing, processing, and contesting a WBIP complaint. Second, the paper widens the frame to examine the dynamics of authority at play between the various actors in a WBIP case. In this perspective, human rights appear not so much as a fixed set of standards against which WBIP seeks to hold the World Bank accountable for its actions, but rather as one among a number of vocabularies of authority deployed by the sundry entities in a range of complex interactions. As such, human rights are continually constructed, defined, and distinguished from other modes of discourse and practice in the making (and unmaking) of global governance.