Multilateral Organizations as Morally Response-Able

Abstract

Global Poverty, Ethics and Human Rights: The Role of Multilateral Organisations. By Desmond McNeill, Asuncion Lera St. Clair. New York: Routledge, 2009. 192 pp., $39.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-44594-8). Who is responsible for the persistence of extreme poverty in the world? International organizations (IO) are, according to the authors of Global Poverty, Ethics and Human Rights , not necessarily because they have caused it (although in some cases they have contributed to the conditions of extreme poverty) but because they are mandated to ameliorate conditions of extreme poverty. And yet, they fail. Why is this the case? The answer to this question is found in the analysis of four case studies. These cases include two of the perhaps most important global development organizations, the World Bank (WB) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), as well as two less studied IOs, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). This is an ambitious comparative study about discourse (or lack thereof) within IOs on ethics and human rights as it relates to poverty. Building on the authors' earlier scholarship on ideas and material resources as influences on multilateral organizations, the book addresses the ethical and moral dimension of IOs. At the heart of it is the issue of global justice and the role played by IOs in responding to it. The authors ask “Why cannot organizations with global scope and global mandate—such as the World Bank and the UNDP—more explicitly act, and be proud to act, as promoters of global justice?” One major obstacle, according to the authors, is resistance by state governments within these organizations; thus, the structure of the IOs poses a hindrance to bringing about global justice. While the book is structured so that each chapter analyzing the cases can be read independently (thus, enabling the reader interested in only one or two cases to go straight to the source), the comparative analysis (although not systematically uniform) of several IOs …