Strategic Evaluations as Quiet Accommodation:
World Bank Responses to the Founding of China’s AIIB

China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) represents a potential
challenge to the World Bank: The AIIB’s founding countries appear to have
turned away from some World Bank projects in favor of working instead with
the AIIB. We examine the World Bank’s response to this competition, focusing
on its efforts to retain the participation of the AIIB founders. Drawing on
the accommodation dilemma framework developed in the introduction to this
special issue, we explore World Bank project evaluations. Our analysis reveals
that World Bank projects for AIIB founding members have systematically received
higher self-assessed evaluations since their accession to the Chinese-led
institution, a pattern that is not corrected by the Bank’s independent review
process. We contend that these positive evaluations offer AIIB founders certain
benefits that may appease them—but are subtle enough to minimize contagion
risk, lest the accommodation of AIIB founders provoke similar actions by other
countries. The study provides insights into the strategic use of nuanced policy
instruments and the dynamics of accommodating countries in the context of
contested multilateralism.
 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

James Raymond Vreeland, Princeton University

James Raymond Vreeland (Ph.D., New York University, 1999) is Professor of Politics and International Affairs in the School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He conducts research in the field of international political economy, specializing in international institutions. In addition to his first book, entitled The IMF and Economic Development (Cambridge University Press, March 2003), he authored The International Monetary Fund: Politics of Conditional Lending (Routledge, January 2007) and co-edited Globalization and the Nation State: The Impact of the IMF and the World Bank (Routledge, 2006) with Gustav Ranis and Stephen Kosack. His book, The Political Economy of the United Nations Security Council with Axel Dreher, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. His most recent book, Information, Democracy, and Autocracy: Economic Transparency and Political (In)Stability with James R. Hollyer and B. Peter Rosendorff, was published in 2018, also by Cambridge University Press.

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