World Bank Partnerships and the Promise of Democratic Governance
The World Bank promotes public private partnerships as vehicles for democratizing environmental governance. This article presents an overview of their constitution in the World Bank, including what the Bank as an organization identified as their promise, and investigates what its partnerships for biodiversity conservation achieved. The article focuses on the institutional design of partnerships' governance structures, and assesses their democratic quality based on their potential to enable inclusion and empowerment of stakeholders. It examines nine global biodiversity partnerships between the World Bank and non state actors from 1992 to 2008 and analyses the extent to which they have fulfilled the principled expectations expressed by the Bank. I find that partnerships have been organized through institutional arrangements that fail to promote inclusiveness and empowerment, which are minimum normative inputs for democratic decision making in natural resource management. This suggests that World Bank partnerships are not sufficiently well poised to fulfil the democratic promise. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment