Revitalizing the World Bank: Engagement with the Private Sector and Scope Expansion

The World Bank has significantly shifted its multilateral development financing model in recent years, mobilizing private capital to finance projects of the International Development Association. What induced this major shift in the financing of the World Bank? This chapter argues that the World Bank received criticisms from several directions and was losing its focality in multilateral development financing. To cope with these new challenges, the Bank reinvented itself by resorting to private capital markets and widening the scope of its activities to include new transnational governance domains – including climate change, health, and gender issues. The chapter concludes by briefly reflecting on the consequences of resorting to private investors to finance multilateral development finance.