This book offers a sound and thorough study of NGO campaigns around the world and provides a critical appraisal of the greening and increased transparency of the World Bank. The authors deliver one of the few careful and systematic evaluations on this highly emotional and polemical topic.
Peter M. Haas, Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
This book provides a fascinating and complex analysis of the potential and pitfalls of the process of engagement between civil society, the World Bank, and governments during the last two decades. It brings together a range of excellent case studies, based on firsthand experience and primary research, of the worldwide struggle to make the World Bank's lending policies more answerable to the communities that the policies are supposed to serve.
Gita Sen, Professor of Economics and Social Sciences, Indiana Institute of Management, Bangalore & Research Coordinator, DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era)
International coalitions and networks of civil society are becoming increasingly relevant in today's global order. This study of advocacy mechanisms highlights the significance and processes of enduring Southern constituency rootedness and accountability.
Rajeesh Tandon, Executive Director, Society for Participatory Research in Asia and Chairperson, CIVICUS
Is the World Bank an immutable monolith or a more responsive institutional partner capable of sincere dialogue with its diverse stakeholders and critics? The Struggle for Accountability provides the first comprehensive evaluation of the struggles, setbacks, and limited victories of World Bank officials and their activist critics. Fox and Brown provide a valuable window into a complex set of relationships that has real relevance to today's efforts to link local realities to global policy reform.
Raymond C. Offenheiser, President, Oxfam America
This is a timely, high quality volume that integrates a very carefully reasoned intervention in important policy controversies that with a sophisticated appreciation of connections to ongoing theoretical debates in the social sciences. While explaining how the Bank's environmental policies have responded to external lobbying groups, it simultaneously helps illuminate questions of organizational learning, transnational civil society, and the institutional character of NGOs.
Peter Evans, Chancellor's Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
The search for accountability in international institutions is a keytopic in today's global agenda. This work provides a variety ofuseful and important examples of efforts to increase transparency andaccountability in World Bank operations.
Dr. Alvaro Umaña, Chairman, World Bank Inspection Panel
