This chapter examines the question of when expanded channels of community consultation and redress are made available in infrastructure project-affected communities, are grievances aggregated or reduced? To provide context for the nature and functioning of redress mechanisms and requirements for community consultation alongside other safeguard policies including information disclosure, this chapter examines the increasingly stringent application of such principles in the practices of a select number of global multilateral development banks (MDBs) supported by the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment and Belt and Road Initiative. This includes the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and Asian infrastructure Investment Bank to explore how their Environmental and Social Frameworks are designed to mitigate negative social and environmental impacts of project investments beginning in the early 2000s. This is followed by a statistical comparison of the proportion of grievances per project raised prior to and after bank policy amendments between 2010 and 2020 expanding access to pre-project consultation, informed consent and formalised grievance mechanisms amongst 10 of the world’s MDBs in order to determine whether increasing channels of consultation and accountability lead to an increase or reduction in the number of project disputes. The findings indicate that the percentage of grievances per project peaks at 15.4% in 2019 then drops significantly in 2021 to 7.1%.

Global community-infrastructure engagement and accountability norms have emerged out of crises, decentralised shared knowledge generation amongst national and multilateral banking institutions, resulting in legal innovations. This process has accelerated in the context of cross-border infrastructure development projects, which often involve coordination between national and multilateral standards. A learning orientation, accompanied by the creation of shared learning spaces such as the International Financial Institution Meetings, which are hosted by the world’s multilateral development banks on a rotating basis on themes such as information disclosure and stakeholder engagement, have resulted in growing agreement on relevant underlying principles and good practices in community engagement in the context of infrastructure planning.

Chapter 1.4 looks into official development assistance. Official development assistance (ODA) is provided by governments or multilateral development banks (MDBs) to support economic development in other countries. Key learning includes that

• ODA is critical to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the world’s poorest countries

• The lowest-income countries typically receive less ODA than comparatively wealthier countries due to their limited capacity to absorb additional funds.

• MDB funds are best utilized when they are invested in under resourced areas, such as global or regional public goods, and when they are well-aligned with domestic policies and national goals.

• ODA success (i.e. resources having a meaningful impact on development outcomes) depends on

• – Prioritizing the right long-term development challenges

• – Effective domestic governance and an active role for national-level stakeholders

• – Transparency around ODA activities

• – Continuous assessment, evaluation, learning and improvement.

• ODA and financing institutions must adjust to new challenges such as climate change

• – moving away from a sector-by-sector approach, addressing trends and emerging themes and delivering innovative and agile financing mechanisms.

This chapter considers the theory’s implications for the significant issue of accountability in global governance. My reasoning may appear to suggest a fundamental tension between performance and accountability: If avoiding the thorniest obstacle to performance requires curtailing state influence in the policy process, international institutions presumably cannot be both effective and accountable. I argue, however, that if we embrace a more expansive understanding of how accountability may be institutionalized, no such tradeoff arises. This is because the same factors that nurture policy autonomy make institutions more likely to adopt a variety of modern accountability structures – what I call second-wave accountability (SWA) mechanisms – that primarily benefit and empower non-state actors. Once in place, moreover, SWA mechanisms can themselves deliver performance gains by revealing operational problems, improving the quality of decision-making, and boosting policy compliance. I provide two forms of empirical support for these claims: (1) statistical evidence based on novel data on the spread and strength of SWA mechanisms; and (2) a qualitative plausibility probe focusing on institutions in the issue area of economic development, where many SWA mechanisms were pioneered.