Inspection Panel appoints new member
5 September 2007
The World Bank's Inspection Panel has named Roberto Lenton as its newest member.
The Inspection Panel has appointed Roberto Lenton of Argentina, effective September 1, 2007, as a new member of the panel. Lenton replaces Edith Brown Weiss, whose term ended on August 31st, 2007.
The competitive process for selecting a member began in April of this year. One of the key selection criteria for membership to the panel is a clear commitment to accountability and a deep understanding of civil society and grassroots impacts of World Bank investments. Given this stated requirement, civil society groups had called on the Bank to open its selection process to include civil society stakeholders. The Bank refused. Instead the selection committee consisted entirely of Bank Executive Directors and the Bank's General Counsel.
Some civil society observers felt that there were stronger candidates in the applicant pool who had been screened out, but many were pleased that Lenton emerged as the top choice of the four shortlisted candidates.
Lenton has worked in international development for over thirty years with experience in Asia, Latin America and Africa. He served as the Director for Sustainable Energy and Environment at the United Nations Development Programme, the Director General of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), and as a Program Officer in the Rural Poverty and Resources Program of the Ford Foundation.
Prior to his appointment to the Inspection Panel, Lenton was the Chair of the Technical Committee of the Global Water Partnership (GWP) and Chair of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC). He is also a member of the Board of Directors for WaterAid America and Senior Advisor at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University. For three years, he coordinated the Task Force on Water and Sanitation for the UN Millennium Project.
Lenton will serve along with Tongroj Onchan of Thailand and Werner Kiene of Austria on the three-member body. With Wiess' departure, Kiene will be the new chairperson of the Panel. Weiss had served on the Panel since September 2002. During her tenure, the Panel registerd 14 new inspection requests from people affected by Bank projects.
The Inspection Panel was established in 1993 by the World Bank’s Board of Directors as a response to the criticism the institution faced over its funding for road projects in tropical rainforests and dams in highly populated areas. The Inspection Panel is a quasi-independent mechanism by which citizens whose lives have been or could potentially be harmed by the projects or policies funded by the World Bank's International Development Assistance (IDA) or the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), can seek recourse. The Panel does not have jurisdiction over projects funded through the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), the Bank's private sector arms. For harms related to their operations, the Office of Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO) was created in 1999.
See BIC's Accountability at the World Bank webpage for more information on the Inspection Panel
Read more about Robert Lenton and the selection process on the Inspection Panel website
See BIC's Accountability at the IFC and MIGA webpage for more information on the CAO