Operational Policies of International Institutions as Part of the Lawmaking Process: The World Bank and Indigenous Peoples
Files
Description
This chapter examines issues concerning indigenous peoples in the World Bank as a case study of an important body of normative practice that has been surprisingly neglected in the theory of international law: the internal policies and practices of international institutions. I suggest that these policies and practices have considerable significance for international law, in three distinct dimensions: their contribution to the process of international norm formation; their implications for accounts of the sources of international legal rules; and the need these policies and practices generate for a more fully formed international administrative law. The aim of this chapter is to sketch a variety of ways in which such policies and practices may be important for international law in general, rather than to delineate specific legal rules relating to issues concerning indigenous peoples. For similar reasons the chapter does not address fundamental threshold questions concerning the merit of the types of ‘development’ promoted by the Bank, the struggles within the Bank group to define a satisfactory mission for its various institutions, or the status of indigenous peoples vis-a-vis states and international organizations. In the trend among international institutions having major field programmes and responsibilities to adopt normative operational policies on issues affecting indigenous peoples the World Bank has been a leader, but it is by no means alone. This chapter focuses on the World Bank as the institution with the most extensive body of juridically assessable experience. The pattern it has set has been followed closely in other international financial institutions, notably the Asian Development Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Loosely comparable policies have been adopted, or are under consideration, in other development institutions such as the United Nations Development Programme and the European Commission, and in humanitarian institutions such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Succeeding sub-sections will address the adoption, content, application, and supervision of the Bank's operational policies relating to indigenous peoples, focusing in each case on illustrative features of wider significance for international law. The wider normative impact of such policies will then be considered.
Source Publication
The Reality of International Law: Essays in Honour of Ian Brownlie
Source Editors/Authors
Guy Goodwin-Gill, Stefan Talmon
Publication Date
1999
Recommended Citation
Kingsbury, Benedict, "Operational Policies of International Institutions as Part of the Lawmaking Process: The World Bank and Indigenous Peoples" (1999). Faculty Chapters. 1001.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1001
