The World Bank, Democracy, and the Fight Against Corruption

Hey everyone! Just wrapped up my sixth week at IFES, and I get to shake it up a (tiny) bit here!

This week, we headed into DC proper to attend the Justice and the Rule of Law Global Forum at the World Bank headquarters! For two days, myself and my two supervisors got to listen to speakers like foreign cabinet officials, UN ambassadors, diplomats, and international legal experts who focus on promoting the rule of law and strengthening democratic accountability. One of the first speakers was Sir Oliver Hart, a Nobel laureate and Economics professor at Harvard.  We listened to a panel of international development experts who focus on West Africa and efforts to increase judicial independence and trust.

The forum also had a number of smaller breakout sessions that we could attend (inbetween the copious amount of coffee breaks they afforded us -- I had been staying away from caffeine successfully for months, and sadly that streak has now crashed and burned), so we divided them up and I, third espresso of the day in hand, attended an anticorruption seminar that featured prosecutors, defense lawyers, and academics from Eastern Europe and the Balkans. One of the standout speakers to me was Laura Stefan, an anti-corruption expert and lawyer who was able to talk about her efforts working with prosecutors in Romania to create dedicated anti-corruption task forces within their offices. A big theme was “localizing” day-to-day efforts of rooting out corrupt practices. For example, a massive national drive to root out corrupt actors in government may certainly work, but it alone runs the risk of passing over sub-national and municipal corrupt actors. Stories about corrupt legislators in a national assembly regularly capture citizens’ attention, but what about local agencies that interact with people on a day-to-day basis? Such localized instances of corruption don’t make the news as often as national stories, but the harms of corruption on a smaller scale may have much more immediate and direct impacts on everyday citizens than we care to admit. And so, efforts to similarly localize the fight against these actors and institutions have become a new focus in areas like the Post-Soviet states which saw rapid liberalization and privatization of massive industries that had — and sometimes continue to have — close relations with government actors. Because sure enough, not all of those bad actors were confined to the RSR’s Great National Assembly or Serbia’s National Assembly.

I felt like sessions and speakers similar to the anticorruption one I attended formed the real glue of the conference. It was of course exciting to listen to high-level government officials talk to the room-at-large about efforts to combat corruption in their home countries and in international institutions. However, these smaller sessions gave us a LOT more face time with lawyers and advocates who were on the ground and actually doing work with stakeholders, government agencies, and ordinary citizens. And since I’m still figuring out what I want to do after school, these were the sessions that I felt showed how lawyers and advocates for justice and democracy can make (relatively) concrete steps that don’t just involve passing national bills or mobilizing billions of dollars over a yearslong period. Instead, pushing for change in local institutions might be the solution, or at least part of it.

With that, until next week!

Hank