The World Bank’s current reform efforts are approaching a critical point during the Annual Meetings in Marrakech, Morocco, from October 9 to 15, 2023. The Bank should use this moment to adopt meaningful changes that enable it to tackle the twin challenges of global development and climate change and reflect voices of stakeholders from around the world. The recent consultations conducted by the World Bank, including the regional ones conducted in Africa in July, represent a significant step forward. But they also spotlight crucial issues that demand an unwavering attention by all stakeholders.
During these consultations, the World Bank gathered input from a wide range of stakeholders from the Global South, including civil society, academia, foundations, think tanks, the private sector, and other development partners. It is imperative for the upcoming Annual Meetings to ensure the integration of critical insights derived from these consultations into the final reform document.
The report of the World Bank‘s Development Committee (DC) unveiled during the Spring Meetings in April represents a substantial improvement over the previous Evolution Roadmap and had already addressed some of the serious concerns voiced during the consultations. Notably, the DC’s report unequivocally underscores that the Bank’s enhanced mission must be accompanied by an increase in its financial capacity, although the concrete measures proposed still fall far short of the substantial firepower required for the expanded mission. Moreover, the DC’s report also reiterates that addressing the challenges of climate change should not come at the expense of poverty reduction. Additionally, the previous shift of focus from low-income countries (LICs) toward middle-income countries (MICs), a notable feature of the Evolution Roadmap, has significantly diminished in the DC’s report. The World Bank’s proposed mission “to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity by fostering sustainable, resilient, and inclusive development” also puts reducing inequality and fostering inclusion –two key demands from the consultations –at its core.
It is imperative to underscore that the effective execution of these commitments is inextricably linked to the Bank’s capacity to augment its lending prowess. Therefore, shareholders must promptly undertake resolute measures to bolster the Bank’s financial strength. In this context, the announcement by Chancellor Olaf Scholz that his government would invest in hybrid capital is an important step in the right direction. This investment can unlock up to $2 billion in additional lending capacity. Looking ahead, this has the potential to significantly boost the World Bank’s lending capacity, particularly if the German government engages in diplomatic efforts to persuade other stakeholders to do the same. In addition to the aforementioned concerns, these consultations have highlighted crucial issues that merit the World Bank’s focus at the upcoming Annual Meetings, and by gauging their frequency of mention, we have pinpointed three pivotal areas that should be integrated into a revised World Bank reform document.
Fighting Corruption and Strengthening Governance: The persistent challenges of poor governance and widespread corruption in LICs and MICs continue to hinder progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Participants in the Bank’s consultations have rightly called upon the institution to prioritise combating corruption as a cross-cutting issue in all interactions with national governments. Some suggest making participation in initiatives like the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and the Open Government Partnership (OGP) mandatory for borrowing countries. As the World Bank seeks to increase its financing capacity, it should advocate for greater transparency in recipient countries to ensure that increased funding does not lead to increased corruption. Linking lending criteria to transparency and striving to be a model of procurement and procedural transparency are crucial steps forward.
Strengthening Engagement with Civil Society Organisations (CSOs): the World Bank should engage and support CSOs as critical advocates for transparency and accountability. While acknowledging that CSOs were well-represented in the consultations, there is a concern that the institution may be disengaging them. With governments as the primary clients of the WBG, the involvement of CSOs is crucial to ensuring the transparency and impact of projects.
Focusing on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs): Participants generally welcomed the World Bank’s enhanced focus on leveraging private capital. However, it is vital to ensure that SMEs, which drive economic growth and job creation in LICs and MICs, are not overlooked in this new orientation. The Bank must actively address the concerns raised by some participants who fear that SMEs may lose out to larger corporations.
In sum, the World Bank’s ongoing reform process is commendable for providing a platform for multiple voices from around the world, including from African countries. The concerns from around the world must be met with a strong commitment to proactively combat corruption, improve governance, engage CSOs and support SMEs. In addition, the Bank’s financing capacity needs to be strengthened through capital increases from shareholders and through other bold changes that better leverage the Bank’s balance sheet to unlock additional financial resources. The German government can play a key role by trying to convince other stakeholders to join in investing in hybrid capital as a way to mobilise additional resources for sustainable development.
The BRICS group – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – invite six countries to join them for a BRICS+. The final list of invitees is an odd bunch: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Iran from the Middle East, Argentina from Latin America and Egypt and Ethiopia from Africa, with the former also being an Arab state. This decision on specific members came after apparently tough discussions amongst current membership, as interests varied widely. Yet, the return of geopolitics seems to have revitalised a disparate group. Why (only) these six, what are likely effects on international relations, and who’s benefitting most?
Knowledge cooperation—specifically science cooperation—is a precondition of coordinated efforts for combatting global crises from climate to finance, and from food to public health. Cloud server storage and satellite-based internet connectivity are key technologies to reducing to zero the time and distance necessary to exchange knowledge across the planet. Science could be an effective means of international cooperation towards combatting global crises, but knowledge is currently not shared freely. Consequently, calls for scientific knowledge to be freely accessible and open to participation by everyone are ever more present.
“Open Science”, the term under which the discussion is led, comes with enormous potential to address global challenges such as climate change or pandemics. It has been embraced by international organisations and major science associations around the world. Most recently, in February 2023, the UN’s 3rd Open Science conference, uniting UN bodies with international science institutions and associations made a clear statement: Open Science is necessary for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, and further, it is an instigator of positive digitalisation in the combat against global crises. Despite these promises, its implementation remains limited. The current science paradigm, political will, technical limitations, and a narrow understanding of the concept constitute key obstacles. Following our previous calls for Open Science action, we identify that G20 countries can build upon initiatives by UNESCO and the EU to implement Open Science and materialise its impact soon.
The Open Science concept benefits from technological advances, as it calls for scientific knowledge to be freely accessible and open to participation by everyone. Its most popular tenets are Open Access, Open Data, and Open Source software, which seek to make publications, data and software code as findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) as possible. The practice of public participation and collaboration in research (citizen science), incorporation of indigenous knowledge, open educational resources, open notebooks, preprints and transparent peer review processes are all aspects of Open Science too.
The current science paradigm
A main obstacle to the full implementation of the Open Science objectives is the current science paradigm, which enforces stratified and hierarchical access to scientific knowledge by creating barriers between citizens and the channels through which knowledge is accessed. Many of those barriers are capital and affiliation-based, with most scientific publications locked behind paywalls, including Article Processing Charges (APCs). The UNESCO Science Report 2021 notes that “five commercial publishers are responsible for more than 50% of all published articles and about 70% of scientific publications are still unavailable in open access.” Other ‘rights to access’ are restricted by intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes, in which private companies and individuals have ownership over the data and production of scientific research. In the name of innovation and economic incentives, IPR are vociferously protected by commercially-driven governance regimes, including private sector lobbyists. The production of COVID-19 vaccines provides an illustrative example of how privatising innovation can conflict with the global common good.
In its Recommendation on Open Science, published in November 2021, UNESCO called for policy implementation at the national and regional levels in order to transform the way that science is conducted and thought about in each UN member state. The Recommendation called for a paradigm shift away from the institutionalisation of science as a tool for profit (or war), and towards the tenet of Article 27 of the Declaration on Human Rights, which defines science as a public good for the common good.
Digital technologies are key instruments for implementing a global Open Science platform, as most scientific knowledge is shared via the internet. However, ubiquitous and open access to scientific knowledge requires that each person has access to the internet, the digital tools which provide the access, and the skills to navigate the online world (digital literacy). Digital technologies are not only an adult tool—they enter the hands of the youngest generations. This means that digital literacy education needs to integrated alongside of ‘traditional’ literacy education of reading and writing. Therefore, the UNESCO Recommendation declares that governments and international institutions need to invest public finances in education, science and digital infrastructure. These public investments are intended to make a clear statement that the right to science and access to the internet are fundamental human rights; they are essential for inclusion and equality, for economic growth and cooperation, for an informed and democratic citizenry, and for connecting humanity to a global pool of knowledge for social advancement and combatting global crises.
Despite remaining problems of connectivity and access, and the tenacity of the “closed” science paradigm, Open Science is gaining traction. The European Commission’s Open Research Europe platform is a model for implementing Open Science policies cross-nationally. Open Research Europe is the European Union’s one-stop-shop for its Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe research funding programmes. It is not only a repository for publications and their datasets, like Zenodo, but it is also a collection of journals, a transparent peer review platform, and a publishing house all in one platform. Metadata from all uploaded materials is organised in an index which makes preprints, publications and datasets as FAIR as possible. Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe research is publicly funded; and whereas Horizon 2020 piloted Open Science policies in an optional Open Research Data Pilot (ORDP), Horizon Europe mandates Open Science policies in the grants that it awards.
Whereas Open Research Europe can be understood as a model and part of the solution, it is limited to the research conducted under the European Union’s public financing regime. This regime (Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe, etc.) is, not exclusively but, predominantly focused on research by European institutions. We need an ‘Open Research Global’ approach, which not only takes on the roles of being a host of journals, a publishing house, a data repository and a knowledge index, but also acts as a research and innovation investment instrument that incentivises cross-border flows of knowledge and knowledge cooperation in all dimensions. UNESCO is uniquely situated to spearhead an Open Research Global platform. UNESCO cannot pass a policy for the creation of a global and equitable digital infrastructure, but it can establish scientific partnerships between public and private research institutes which incentivize the construction of an adequate digital infrastructure intra- and internationally.
What can the G20 do?
Here the Group of 20 can make a significant contribution. According to a 2020 report from Clarivate’s Institute for Scientific Information, G20 countries accounted for 86% of global research papers in the Web of Science index in 2019. This position comes with the power to promote a global science community in line with the Open Science ideals. The G20 should therefore support initiatives spearheaded by UNESCO and other relevant international bodies in establishing an Open Research Global platform, for sharing scientific knowledge globally and increasing international and economic cooperation. The group could answer the call of the S20 (Science outreach group of the G20), which led up to the last G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia in 2022, that “G20 governments [should] strengthen the nexus between data, research, policy and practice” by making long term investments in scientific research and open science infrastructures. On this basis, the G20 could employ the Open Science concept for achieving the mandates of the UN 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development by including more voices (and eyes and ears) in science, technology and sustainable development discourses.
When rolling-out Open Science globally with the support of the G20, policy-makers will have to address concerns that are already on the G20 agenda, such as free flow of data, data localisation, and privacy concerns. In an Open Research Global instrument data and research results would be centralised in a global repository and indexed to be accessed in a FAIR manner, while also requiring that the research be stored locally in interconnected national or regional repositories and indexes. Open Research Global could follow data storage models, such as the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC), which exchanges and keeps copies of data between regional servers. This protects the free flow of data in case of an uptick in data nationalism in one nation or region.
A digital Open Science with a focus on sustainable development would mitigate concerns of constricting a nation’s ability to prosper from the data its institutions produce and reinforce the sentiment that knowledge is to be shared, openly and equally. To illustrate, a G20-supported Open Research Global approach could advocate for community building projects. Citizen science and indigenous knowledge could be brought into the mainstream science discourse, creating pathways for schools and coding communities to access and develop open educational resources and open source software. The values and skills of digital citizenship and digital literacy could be embedded into primary and secondary school education. The sustainability orientation could thus promote science as an enterprise through which we all participate, shaping our world towards the solutions for common challenges.
Governments across the world, politically supported by the G20 and in line with the recommendations by international organisations such as UNESCO, need to invest in digital infrastructure, science and education. Reliable internet connections must be thought of as basic, essential infrastructure for enhancing science, education and community building, and for growing the economy. Science must become a public good, open to participation by all citizens in all places. Laws concerning for-profit knowledge protectionism, such as IPR regimes, need to be rewritten so that innovation is fostered by scientific knowledge with a high public impact. Open Science is a concept that should serve as a guiding star to materialise the full potential of inclusive, globally shared knowledge.
This blog is published jointly with the blog Digitalización Inclusiva, hosted by Instituto Mora, related to the PRODIGEES project.
Addressing a Davos audience last year, in January 2022, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida publicly declared his vision for an Asia Zero Emissions Community (AZEC). Under Tokyo’s leadership, Kishida said, AZEC would drive regional cooperation and joint financing on renewable energy technologies and infrastructure, standardisation, and an emissions trading zone.
A year on, Prime Minister Kishida and Japan’s Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Yasutoshi Nishimura, have now laid much of the necessary diplomatic groundwork for a more concrete set of initiatives. Tokyo has successfully secured buy-in to the concept from a range of partners, including Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Australia.
AZEC should be viewed in the broader context of geopolitical competition in the Indo-Pacific. In line with this, Kishida has acknowledged that he does not expect China to join. The AZEC in large part seeks to build a narrative around Japan’s existing Asia Energy Transition Initiative (AETI), which was initially viewed by some as thin on detail. The narrative includes five core pillars of collaborative action: support for the creation of national energy transition roadmaps in partner states, transition finance presentation and promotion, $10 billion in direct funding for renewables and other energy projects, the development and dissemination of new green technologies, and training programs for those tasked with operating them.
On the sidelines of last November’s G20 summit in Bali, AZEC’s first major deal was unveiled between Japan and Indonesia. Japan’s state-owned corporation Nippon Export and Investment Insurance (NEXI) agreed to insure up to $500 million of loans for Indonesian electric utility company PLN to accelerate its green energy transition. And the state-owned Japan Bank for International Cooperation signed an additional pact to facilitate further collaboration between PLN and Japanese corporations.
To drive further momentum, Japan has invited energy ministers and business delegations from partner states to Tokyo in early March for two days of discussion on AZEC proposals. Progress made on further deals here will likely give a better sense of the true scale and shape of Tokyo’s ambitions.
Green chequebook diplomacy?
AZEC has been linked with Japan’s top-level strategic concept of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific. Japan has a long history leading on aid, trade, and investment in Southeast Asia that dates back to the Cold War era. As the US moves to establish new military bases in the Philippines to counter China, Japanese leadership across Southeast Asia remains predominantly economic. In part, these dynamics echo Japan’s much maligned ‘chequebook diplomacy’ – most closely associated with Tokyo’s foreign policy in the early 1990s. Japan contributed $13 billion to the first Gulf War in 1991, yet received little in the way of international recognition and faced criticism for not committing troops. We argue that Japan should be optimistic about the potential of this new green chequebook diplomacy, as it holds three key advantages over its 1990s forerunner.
First, substantial investment in the region’s clean energy transition is likely to be recognised and rewarded by a range of actors at the regional and global level. Indo-Pacific states at the sharp end of the climate crisis have much at stake, and AZEC will be supported by close geostrategic partners like Australia that are similarly concerned about providing alternatives to Chinese investment.
Second, Japan’s new green chequebook diplomacy works in tandem with a greater regional role for Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF). The SDF are involved in an increasing number of joint exercises in the region, and defence budgets continue to rise. So while economic measures may be Japan’s preferred tool in the region, it is not shying away from deploying military assets either.
Third, green chequebook diplomacy is more likely than its forerunner to result in mutual economic benefits instead of one-way transfers. A clear part of Japan’s strategic thinking about green energy cooperation is how to drive growth in its domestic green energy industries.
Challenges
At the same time, Japan must overcome challenges if it is to maximise returns on its new strategic concept. Most urgently, Japan needs to match the vision of the AZEC with bolder domestic action to reduce its own emissions. Tokyo’s plan to refit current coal-fired power stations to burn ammonia has been labelled a ‘false solution’ by those who claim it will only prolong the use of coal. And at COP27 in 2022 Japan was awarded the inaugural ‘fossil of the day award’ by activists for climate inaction. If Tokyo is to shake off accusations that AZEC is more an industrial strategy than a genuine attempt to combat the climate crisis, then bolder action is needed to transform Japan’s image from climate laggard to leader.
Meanwhile, Japan’s AZEC concept faces potential competition from other powerful actors that are developing their own varieties of green energy statecraft. China, the US and the EU are among those actively seeking to harness climate diplomacy to pursue their geostrategic aims, and Tokyo faces competition even from its closest partners as they seek to maximise returns on their individual strategies.
As AZEC’s first scheduled multilateral meeting approaches, though, Japan’s climate diplomacy is gathering momentum and interest – enhancing the prospect of cooperation and mutual benefits in the coming Indo-Pacific clean energy transition.
The EU has long prided itself on being a leading supporter of international democratic change. Its development cooperation budget for the period 2021-2027 has allocated €1.5 billion for a dedicated ‘Thematic Programme on Human Rights and Democracy’. The EU has also joined forces with several of its member states to pursue a Team Europe Initiative on Democracy to strengthen the collective visibility, effectiveness and impact of their various democracy support programmes.
In her last annual State of the Union address to the European Parliament, European Commission President von der Leyen called for a rethink of the EU’s foreign policy agenda. Reflecting on the global implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she considered that “this is the time to invest in the power of democracies”. Although “our friends in every single democratic nation on this globe” form a core group of like-minded partners with which the EU seeks to shape global goods, von der Leyen also recognised the need to engage beyond the EU’s democratic partners – including through its Global Gateway infrastructure investment initiative. The EU’s efforts to become energy-independent from Russia underlines the need for a broad engagement, but also highlights the challenge of doing so in a way that is consistent with its democracy promotion commitments. One example of this tension was von der Leyen’s presence at the opening of the Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria pipeline that enables direct gas imports from Azerbaijanregime has been accused of carrying out an extensive crackdown on civil and political liberties in recent years. The EU’s credibility and effectiveness as a democracy promotion actor requires awareness of this tension between its commitment to democracy and its economic interests.
Notwithstanding its tensions with other policy fields, the EU’s democracy support itself often inadvertently contributes to enabling authoritarianism. In the Southern and Eastern neighbourhood regions, for instance, the EU’s democracy support had the unintended effect of strengthening illiberal reform coalitions. In the South-Caucasus region, political incumbents used EU-supported anti-corruption projects to discredit their political opponents, which in turn weakened the EU’s legitimacy among liberal-minded voters. Research on EU democracy support in Sub-Saharan Africa describes how authoritarian regimes have acted to counteract international democracy support, e.g. in Ethiopia where the authorities further restricted the space for civil society.
Moreover, other than failing to prevent undemocratic actors from taking nefarious counter measures, the ways in which EU democracy support is delivered may work against the very “democrats” it seeks to support. For example, international democracy support has sometimes eroded the transformational potential of civil society organisations. Dependence on external funding, implementation requirements (e.g. logframes and reporting) and the increased exposure to being labelled as foreign agents that both encompass has often contributing to these organizations prioritising more depoliticised, “tame” forms of democracy support.
Also, despite a self-proclaimed “turn to resilience”, EU democracy support often risks impeding the very structures that make a society resilient. For instance, analysis of the EU’s democracy support in the Acholi region in Uganda shows how the EU’s prioritization of youths risks causing further generational tensions among an already fractured society. Rather than engaging with different local imaginaries of what is considered “freedom” or “justice”, the EU assumes that poverty and lack of skills prevent these local communities from sufficiently imagining and claiming political rights and civil liberties. Consequently, the EU’s support is predominantly targeted at empowering Acholi youths in terms of individual entrepreneurship, particularly in the most remote rural communities. Yet, many of those communities understand such emphasis on the individual as well as the exclusion of other important members of society, i.e. the elders, to represent a fundamental corruption of Acholi society and its values, and to be disconnected from their needs and concerns. In addition, it should also be noted that such international support as provided by the EU does little to curb the power of the authoritarian government over this region, on the contrary. Since the government increasingly emphasises the need for privatisation and job creation, any effort to engage these youths in terms of business development is likely to appease an important section of society with which the authoritarian Ugandan government increasingly struggles to create legitimacy.
These examples underline that EU cooperation initiatives are introduced in complex multi-actor settings and as such are inherently political. While international development policy debates are continuously looking into how to improve and apply frameworks and approaches that are sensitive to the contexts in which these interventions are made – e.g. “Thinking and Working Politically” – such sensitivity nevertheless often prioritizes consideration of how the local context might affect the external interventions concerned, rather than vice-versa. These frameworks also tend to too narrowly focus on project implementation, without allowing to assess the intended and unintended effects of the EU’s wider engagement in the country and regions concerned.
Beyond satisfying academic inquiry, analysing and acknowledging the (un)intended effects of EU democracy support within the wider context of its external action brings two potential gains. First of all, it will allow us to learn more about the effectiveness of the specific budgets set aside for democracy support abroad. Secondly, such a broad inquiry will both allow us to learn more about how the EU is perceived by its partners – who generally look beyond individual projects when forming such appreciations over time – and also signal the EU’s willingness to learn from its international cooperation efforts. The latter would be a key condition to practicing in international cooperation what it funds in partner contexts: promoting open and responsive societies.
Authors: Niels Keijzer (German Institute of Development and Sustainability) & Nathan Vandeputte (Ghent Institute for International and European Studies, Ghent University)
About: This blog was developed in the context of the MORDOR project, an education and research project that looks into authoritarianism and EU democracy support, co-funded by the Erasmus Plus program of the European Union. More information: https://mordorproject.eu/
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