The World Bank is a premier development institution, employing thousands of highly-trained analysts and shaping the development projects and policies of governments in every region of the world. In the realm of development actors, the Bank is an institutional Goliath—sometimes wrong, but almost always influential, given its financial resources and its capacity for research and policy analysis.

Over the last two decades, the Bank has been challenged with increasing frequency by transnational coalitions of civil society organizations—nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), churches, indigenous peoples movements and international networks—concerned with the impact of Bank projects and policies on grassroots populations in developing countries. Such coalitions have emerged to challenge a number of international actors, including UN agencies, multinational corporations, and a variety of national
governments. Playing David to the Bank’s Goliath is a particularly striking example of ambitious campaigning—ambitious, and in some cases, quite successful.

This paper draws on a series of case studies, carried out over the last six years under the auspices of the Institute for Development Research (see Fox and Brown, 1998), of transnational coalition efforts aimed at influencing World Bank policies and projects. The paper seeks to extract from those cases lessons
about successful influence efforts. More particularly, the paper will focus on answers to two questions:
(1) What is required for transnational coalitions to influence institutions like the World Bank?
(2) How can transnational coalition members be accountable to each other across large gaps of power, wealth and culture?

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[PIver PDF here]

L. David Brown & Jonathan Fox, Volume 16, Number 1, 2000