DEVELOPMENT APPROACHES AND THE ROLE OF POLICY ADVOCACY - THE CASE OF THE WORLD-BANK

This paper addresses policy innovation in international organizations and explains it in terms of four factors: independence of the IO withi n the international regime of which it is a member; external pressure; the consistency of new issues with organizational goals and procedure s; and internal policy advocacy. Internal policy advocacy, not often c onsidered in the development literature, is seen as an intervening var iable between the first three factors and the response to innovation. The first section of the paper addresses the conditions under which IO s respond to new issues, using different combinations of these four fa ctors, with examples. The second section focuses on a case study on in ternal advocacy efforts in the World Bank by a group of staff members to incorporate sociological issues, especially in the area of involunt ary resettlement and tribal populations' rights. While external pressu re played a large role in putting pressure on the World Bank, these in siders were the ones who introduced the issues in ways that fit the go als and procedures of the World Bank in an otherwise resistant environ ment and forged links with outside allies, thereby contributing to new policy guidelines, to the hiring of more staff with social science tr aining, and, in general, to the increased legitimacy of these issues i n the World Bank.