During the Civil Society Organization Town Hall at the World Bank Annual General Meeting in Tokyo, 2012, a CSO representative from Belgium asked whether President Kim is committed to ensuring that the Safeguards will not be diluted during the review process.
Here is President Kim’s response:
In the area of safeguards, I agree with you. It is a great accomplishment of civil society. We have absolutely no intention of diluting the safeguards, but here is the issue. We are going through a process now where we are asking ourselves really tough questions about how quickly we are able to move on any given project.
Now, the good news is that when there are emergencies, we move very quickly. We get our best people. We continue to honor the safeguards, but we get through the process more quickly. We need to find a way to maintain our absolute commitment to the safeguards, but to be able to get through the process more efficiently and effective. We are taking too long to approve projects.
Now, the reason we are doing it is because we want to move the attention of the Board from simply focusing on approval. There has been a critique that is almost as old as the World Bank itself. Again, the good news is that that critique is shared by the World Bank. The critique is, why do we spend so much time on approval and why is there such a focus on volume as a way of assessing the performance of individual Bank employees? Why can we not shift the focus to results and that the people who are rewarded most are the ones who actually work with our member countries to produce results for the poor.
Now, the IFC has already begun moving in that direction to change the way that their incentives are structured. The good news is that there really has been a change at the IFC. Now the reward is for development impact, not necessarily for volume of investment or loan. We have got to keep moving in that direction. In the process, we have got to be able to get through our safeguard screening process, but do it quickly and effectively so that we bring the real impact to the people.
The full transcript is available on the IMF webiste.
Watch video of Kim’s statement, beginning at 1:10:00, below: