The Strategic and Organizational Development of the World Bank: Critical Assessment of the World Bank’s Disaster Risk Reduction, Resilience and Climate Change Initiatives.
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| The World Bank’s Disaster Risk Reduction, Resilience and Climate Change Initiatives. |
Organizational framework and strategic development
The primary focus of the World Bank is economic stability by building financial resilience in regions needing better economic prospects to bring about change in people’s lives. In recent years, the rapid changes in climate have contributed to climate risks and natural disasters attracting disaster risk reduction organizations to improve their policies and strategic initiatives to build resilience to natural disasters (The World Bank, 2023). The World Bank's disaster risk reduction (DRR) initiatives focus on three different aspects of disaster management. These include infrastructure development, pre-disaster strategic initiatives and training, and, the outcome evaluation of post-disaster risk reduction initiatives (Independent Evaluation Group and The World Bank Group, 2023). Close collaboration with the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) is an initiative to help countries and communities overcome disaster risks by adopting proactive preparedness activities offered by the World Bank disaster risk reduction teams (The World Bank Group, 2024). The improvement in the World Bank's strategic and organizational framework in the context of DRR is now based on three principles which include building physical, social, and financial resilience. Physical resilience strategies focus on improving infrastructures and better planning for disaster-affected rehabilitation. Social resilience focuses on including local communities to plan resilience activities better. In addition to these, financial resilience ensures government-to-World Bank interaction to assist governments and households in following standard DRR programs for relief, recovery, and reconstruction initiatives (The World Bank, 2023). The World Bank’s DRR initiatives are in accordance with “the Sendai Framework, the Paris Agreement, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)” (Independent Evaluation Group and The World Bank Group, 2021, p. 4). The application of 'the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction' in the World Bank DRR policies helps respective government agencies in disaster-prone or disaster-hit areas to identify ‘exposure’ and ‘vulnerable’ to disaster to better initiate recovery and rehabilitation processes (Independent Evaluation Group and The World Bank Group, 2021, pp. 2, 4).Challenges in disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate resilience
The accurate use of resources and the availability of the DRR framework to ensure disaster resilience are certain challenges that require the presence of trained staff, and political, social, and cultural understanding of people in affected areas. All these issues highlight the need for the presence of effective governance and coordination with regional agencies and governments to better plan and prepare people to overcome disaster challenges(Islam, Chu and Smart, 2020). One of the biggest challenges for the World Bank's DRR initiatives is aligning its DRR policies with different regional DRR policies to ensure resilience in its DRR initiatives. Developing countries lack not only finances but also the availability of trained disaster management staff with international working exposure and technicalities are certain issues that weaken the World Bank’s resilience-building initiatives (Kull et al., 2024). Although, the World Bank places significant importance to include women and girls in DRR designing and tracking activities; however, gender plurality is an issue that contributes to effective DRR planning gaps. The World Bank DRR team's inability to track vulnerable children and youth in the DRR context is a major challenge requiring the integration of youth in DRR activities (Independent Evaluation Group and The World Bank Group, 2023). Disaster risk reduction and resilience according to Sufri and Lassa (2024, p. 2) can only be enhanced with a close collaboration between “disaster management actors”, and “communities”.The World Bank's achievements in DRR and resilience-building
The World Bank’s one of the most significant achievements in DRR context is becoming a part of global partnership with other agencies. This helps to collect and analyze the data to overcome DRR resilience issues resulting in improved decision-making (GFDRR, 2021). The second significant achievement of the World Bank is the development of a crisis toolkit that allows disaster-hit countries to have speedy access to finances to respond to emergencies (World Bank Group, 2024). The third significant achievement of the World Bank is the development of ‘the IDA Crisis Response Window’ to boost preparedness for future disaster risks (The World Bank Group, 2024).Financial resilience is the prerequisite to reduce the impact of disasters and to plan and build better infrastructures to mitigate future disaster scale. The World Bank's Catastrophe Bond (CAT) provides financial assistance to its member countries to mitigate financial challenges during and in post-disaster times. The CAT Bond program allows countries to transfer disaster risks to Bond investors. The CAT Bond allows countries to pay fixed premiums and receive payouts to cover events when these events occur. The World Bank CAT Bond covers payments for hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, and pandemic risks (World Bank Catastrophe (Cat) Bonds Explained, 2023). In addition to these achievements, the World Bank has set some indicators to contribute to better DRR known as 'Good practice outcome indicators'. These indicators evaluate the World Bank's performance according to the hazard or disaster type. The identification factors include number of people saved from a disaster, reduction in economic losses, effectiveness of climate resilience projects, investment projects to reduce drought risks, and measurement of decreased time for rehabilitation of people and continuity of services (Independent Evaluation Group and The World Bank Group, 2023).
Overlap with other agencies.
The World Bank overlaps with other agencies such as the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) to mitigate the scale of disasters globally (World Bank Group, 2021; Independent Evaluation Group and The World Bank Group, 2023; The World Bank Group, 2024). International cooperation promotes not only collaboration but competition with other agencies to bring reforms in organizational structures and performance standards (Zheng and Jin, 2024). This is the case with the World Bank as in recent years it has improved its DRR initiatives to promote human well-being globally (The World Bank Group, 2024).Reference:
GFDRR (2021) ‘Global partnership on disaster risk financing analytics’. Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery. Available at: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/573931621943747775/pdf/Results-and-Achievements.pdf (Accessed: 1 January 2025).Independent Evaluation Group and The World Bank Group (2021) ‘Reducing disaster risk from natural hazards: An evaluation of World Bank support, FY 10-20.’ The World Bank. Available at: https://ieg.worldbankgroup.org/sites/default/files/Data/reports/ap_disasterriskreduction.pdf (Accessed: 1 January 2025).
Independent Evaluation Group and The World Bank Group (2023) Chapter 4: Effectiveness of the World Bank’s disaster risk reduction activities. Available at: https://ieg.worldbankgroup.org/evaluations/reducing-disaster-risks-natural-hazards/chapter-4-effectiveness-world-banks-disaster (Accessed: 1 January 2025).
Islam, S., Chu, C. and Smart, J.C.R. (2020) ‘Challenges in integrating disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation: Exploring the Bangladesh case’, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 47, p. 101540. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2020.101540.
Kull, D. et al. (2024) ‘Building resilience: Integrating climate and disaster risk into development.’ The World Bank. Available at: https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/switzerland/publication/building-resilience-world-bank-group-experience-in-climate-and-dsaster-rsilient?utm_source=chatgpt.com (Accessed: 4 January 2025).
Sufri, S. and Lassa, J.A. (2024) ‘Integration of disaster risk reductionand climate change adaptation in Aceh: Progress and challenges after 20 Years of Indian Ocean Tsunamis’, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 113, p. 104894. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2024.104894.
The World Bank (2023) ‘Financial resilience against climate shocks and disasters.’ The World Bank. Available at: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099732511072314227/pdf/IDU0893ba78605dc8048f5091f70893ee26173ef.pdf (Accessed: 1 January 2025).
The World Bank Group (2024) Overview, World Bank. Available at: https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/disasterriskmanagement/overview (Accessed: 1 January 2025).
World Bank Catastrophe (Cat) Bonds Explained (2023). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBADNz5ASAU (Accessed: 5 January 2025).
World Bank Group (2021) World Bank and IFRC Support Independent Monitoring of COVID-19 Vaccine Campaign in Lebanon, World Bank. Available at: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/02/12/world-bank-and-ifrc-support-independent-monitoring-of-covid-19-vaccine-campaign-in-lebanon (Accessed: 5 January 2025).
World Bank Group (2024) World Bank group expands its crisis toolkit to empower countries amid intertwined crises, World Bank Group. Available at: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/factsheet/2024/02/01/world-bank-group-expands-its-crisis-toolkit-to-empower-countries-amid-intertwined-crises (Accessed: 4 January 2025).
Zheng, X. and Jin, J. (2024) ‘Cooperators or competitors? The interactions between WHO and the World Bank in global health governance’, Global Public Health, 19(1), p. 2408608. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2024.2408608.