This week's Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank - during which the institutions have marked their 80th anniversary - has ended in an anticlimax.

This week G20 finance ministers, the IMF and the World Bank have again failed to take any meaningful action to deal with the deepening global debt crisis, continuing to term it ‘short-term liquidity challenges’.

One year ago, at the time of the Annual Meetings in Marrakech, WBG President Ajay Banga said “I don’t subscribe easily to buzzwords about how to do things”. This was in response to CSO concerns about the use of the ‘cascade approach’ to development – a phrase coined by the WBG seven years ago. In plainer English it means the WBG seeks to leverage private finance in support of development and climate projects. Today, ahead of the 2024 Annual Meetings, which mark the 80th anniversary of the institution, the World Bank Group says it aims “to create a future-ready World Bank Group.” This sounds like yet another buzzword to us.

Civil society organisations call on the International Monetary Fund management and Board members for an evaluation of the 2015 guidelines and a Board-mandated framework to establish mandatory rules for CSO engagement at all levels.

On the eightieth anniversary of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, it is time for a change of course. In this blog, our experts on the Bretton Woods Institutions explain why the world is in urgent need of more responsive, democratic, accountable and development-orientated. global economic governance. 

Twenty-six civil society organsations have signed an open letter to Ajay Banga, the new president of the World Bank.

Thirty civil society organisations (CSO) call upon the EIB President, Board of Directors and Governors to firmly reject increasing support for the military-industrial complex.

Eurodad and 16 other CSOs have signed an open letter calling on the Board of Directors to not approve the final EIB Global strategy due to a lack of public consultation. 

Following the Annual Meetings of the World Bank 2023, we published our reaction.