Bretton Woods Non-Commission

 

About

Welcome to CGD’s Bretton Woods Non-Commission!  Change is in the air for the governance of the World Bank and IMF.   But will it enable these institutions to provide the global public goods that the world so urgently needs?  CGD president Nancy Birdsall invited experts on global governance to offer their suggestions.

The IMF and the World Bank have both announced new commissions to offer recommendations on how they can reform their embarrassingly outmoded mid-twentieth-century governance.  Both are led by experienced and capable individuals, the IMF commission by Trevor Manuel and the World Bank commission by Ernesto Zedillo.  But bureaucratic inertia has a strange way of sapping the power of even the most energetic reformers – especially when it comes to the multilateral financial institutions, with their many stakeholders.

To help invigorate this process, CGD has launched this Bretton Woods Non-Commission, dedicated to providing fresh and perhaps even revolutionary ideas for changing how these important institutions are run – specifically, who decides what they do and how they do it.  Our Non-Commission will not meet – and the experts’ ideas will not be massaged into a consensus document.

Instead, members of this group will each contribute one or more op-ed – like comments on why and how the World Bank and the IMF should reform their governance.  Contributions will be posted on the CGD website in the order received. Public comments are enthusiastically encouraged.  Please enjoy – and join in the debate!

For more information, contact Peter Gardner.