Abstract
Due to a growing public awareness, in the last 40 years environmental impacts of development projects financed and supported by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have come into view. Since then, the member states have pressured both organizations to implement environmental concerns. We analyze the reactions of the World Bank and the IMF’s bureaucracies towards their principals’ demands. To reveal if, and to what extent, the observed reactions of both bureaucracies towards environmental integration can be assessed as organizational learning, we develop in a first step a heuristic model that allows for a distinction between different levels of learning (compliant and non-compliant, single-loop and double-loop). In a second step we describe the efforts of the bureaucracies of the World Bank (from the 1970s until today) and the IMF (from the 1990s until today) to integrate environmental protection into their activities. Due to our interest in the quality of the organizational changes, we finally analyze if and to what extent the bureaucracies’ reactions to the new external demand qualify as organizational learning. Furthermore, we discuss which factors helped or hindered organizational learning.
Highlights
International organizations are important actors of global governance
We examine each period using our theoretical model and analyzing if and how the reactions of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) qualify as organizational learning according to external demands to implement environmental concerns
We focus on the World Bank and the IMF because both have some similarities and, as past experience has shown, these are two powerful international economic organizations whoseactivities have had a strong influence on the environment
Summary
International organizations are important actors of global governance. This is especially true for the. The member states of the Bretton Woods institutions have reacted to the public pressure and requested the bureaucracies of both international organizations to address environmental issues more adequately. (1) theoretically, we want to introduce a model of organizational learning that allows us to assess whether changes occur on a rather formal institutional level or if external demands to integrate environment requirements change international organizations’ guiding assumptions and beliefs. We open the organizational learning debate for international organizations which—despite sharing some similarities—differ in many ways from individual-based organizations as their members are both individuals in international bureaucracies and states as formal members according to international law [6]. We examine each period using our theoretical model and analyzing if and how the reactions of the World Bank and IMF qualify as organizational learning according to external demands to implement environmental concerns. We summarize our findings and shed some light on factors and conditions that hinder or foster learning in international organizations
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