14 - Accountability, governance and the reform of the IMF

Summary

Introduction

To be effective, the IMF and its activities must be transparent to the public, accountable to its members, and responsive to the lessons of experience and outside evaluation.

(G7 Communiqué, 15 April 2000)

Over the 1990s, in an effort to improve both its effectiveness and its public image, the IMF began to take steps to make itself more transparent, more accountable and more participatory. This chapter investigates how accountable the institution has become and what ‘accountability’ might and should mean for an international institution such as the IMF. Curiously, although great strides have been made in improving transparency and in better understanding concepts of participation and ownership in the implementation of the institution's programmes, a rigorous definition and concept of ‘accountability’ has been slow to emerge. Indeed, most contemporary proposals for the reform of the institutions use the term regularly without ever developing who should be accountable to whom and for what.

Section 2 of the chapter discusses why accountability is now so prominently on the agenda and why the traditional structure of the IMF no longer meets expectations as to how accountable the institution should be. Section 3 examines the demands of new actors to hold the institution better to account, focusing in particular on the rise of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and their engagement with the IMF. Section 4 critically examines the role of the United States in reforming the Fund and evaluates the recommendations of the Meltzer Commission.