ABSTRACT
Many people living in rich countries today regard the existence of extreme poverty in poor countries as an affront to justice. But it is implausible, we suggest, to claim that each of these individuals is morally responsible for this extreme poverty – unless one also includes international organisations in the picture. International development organisations, such as World Bank and UNDP, are important because they are mandated to ameliorate conditions of extreme poverty; and international organisations of various kinds, such as WTO and the IMF (and also, again, the World Bank), may implement rules which, in practice, contribute to the conditions of extreme poverty. For these reasons, such organisations have a very real responsibility; and the responsibility of their staff and the ‘non-poor’ inhabitants of the world is to ensure that the organisations successfully achieve their task. The existence of international institutions, then, renders it possible for
individuals to respond to the intuitive demands of global justice; something which, in the absence of such institutions, would for practical reasons be impossible. By contrast with individuals, international organisations are thus ‘response-able’; they are particularly well placed to act by virtue of the powers that we, the people of the world, have given them: the economic resources and the expertise that enable them to change the world, and the political legitimacy they enjoy by virtue of their mandates. In this book, however, we shall show how these same powers have con-
strained them from behaving as moral agents; how the various organisations we examine have, for very differing reasons, been hesitant to embrace the discourse of ethics and human rights. The reasons for this are complex and varied, as we shall show. But a major constraint has been the actions of states; both those that created them (in the idealistic period after World War II) and the newly independent states which later joined, and claimed that – in contrast to the imperial powers that had once ruled them – they would act in the best interests of their people.1 For this reason we shall argue, more controversially, that not only do these international organisations have a responsibility to ameliorate poverty, they also have a responsibility to rise
above the states that created them – should this be necessary in order to achieve their purpose. In this chapter, we set out a framework for analysing the situation facing
multilateral organisations, and summarize some of the findings from the four case studies (presented in detail in Chapters 4 to 7) in terms of this framework.
