The World Bank must address governance and accountability questions, declared Douglas Alexander, UK Secretary of State for International Development in a public lecture at the LSE last week. Emphasising the Bank’s centrality to global action on the most difficult global development challenges, the Minister laid out the UK’s three priorities for World Bank reform: 1) agreement on voting reform, to give the poorest a greater voice; 2) moving staff out of Washington to improve the organisation’s delivery on the front line; and 3) forging a new compact between shareholders and management in which each is held to account for the highest performance. Read the speech at DFID’s website and for more, see GEG’s World Bank Reform resources.

The GEG lecture by Mr. Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, President of European Socialist Party and former Prime Minister of Denmark, is now available online via the University of Oxford’s OpenSpires project.

To listen to the audio or watch the video of The post-crisis politics of financial reform: business as usual or new global order?, visit the OpenSpires project. You can also find it on iTunes U and via the University of Oxford’s podcasts.

Devi Sridhar’s book The Battle Against Hunger: Choice, Circumstance, and the World Bank makes the Foreign Affairs syllabus on foreign aid.  In ‘What to Read on Foreign Aid‘, John Gershman describes the book as a ‘richly textured’ ethnography, writing:

‘Sridhar provides both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a World Bank–funded nutrition program in India that, despite a lack of evidence for its effectiveness, has become the blueprint for similar programs elsewhere. She shows how the political objectives of both Indian policymakers and nutrition-policy advocates within the World Bank explain the expansion and replication of a program that fails to address the social conditions responsible for undernutrition in India and other countries.’

For more, see Devi Sridhar’s publications or visit GEG’s Global Health Governance project.

The success or failure of the Copenhagen climate change negotiations will depend not only on the substance of the deal but on the spirit and message of the talks as well, writes Arunabha Ghosh in his latest GEG blog post Making Copenhagen count. Four big questions will dominate: Who participates in the deal? How will it be implemented? Who will pay? And how will the private sector and civil society respond? Read more at the GEG blog and in Dr Ghosh’s latest op-ed Even climate is about money.

For more GEG research, see our new Climate Change Governance resource guide.

In launching the initiative, the Taskforce’s Honorary Advisors emphasised the scope of global knowledge governance challenges at hand…Read more