The BWIs - the IMF and World Bank - are not Fit for Purpose

IMF and World Bank logos

Barbara Adams, Global Policy Forum (GPF)

Expecting the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) to reform, or be reformed, to be accountable to human rights, ecological and economic justice is as far-fetched as expecting reform of the UN Security Council to further global peace by adding more veto-wielding permanent members.

Both of these governance failures were on the agenda of the 2024 Summit of the Future (SOTF). Yet, the outcome at the highest political level endorsed only complementarity, coordination and governance independence between the UN and BWIs:

“We acknowledge the important role of the United Nations in global economic governance, recognizing that the United Nations and the international financial institutions have complementary mandates that make the coordination of their actions crucial, while fully respecting existing governance mechanisms and mandates independent of the United Nations that preside over specific organizations and rules.” (Pact for the Future, Action 48)

The attempt to tackle the double standards embedded in multilateralism failed then and any band-aid reforms extracted in Bangkok at the upcoming IMF-WB meetings will benefit the governors of these “one dollar, one vote” institutions and sustain their control of macroeconomic rules and policies. These will continue the free pass from being accountable to the hard-won UN norms and standards and legally-binding instruments.

We saw this with the COVID-19, Special Drawing Rights (SDR) campaign which failed to take account of how the injustice built into BWI governance generates inequalities. It resulted in SDRs to countries being distributed by the IMF proportional to their quotas – the richest countries have the biggest quotas and quotas of the “emerging economies” are smaller than their weight in the global economy.

Unlike the BWIs, the UN Charter declares that: “The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members” and that “Each member of the General Assembly shall have one vote”.

It is time to remove the IMF and World Bank from the UN system and expel them from the UN Chief Executive Board, and to reconsider their role as custodian agencies of several of the SDG indicators. While the Summit of the Future failed to correct governance inequities, perversely, it exposed the independence of the BWIs and its governance structure which is an “anathema to the UN Charter”, as responded a senior UN official to my proposal over a year ago. Expulsion will not stop the severe economic policies that come with IMF loans and the so-called development support from the World Bank, but it will expose the rhetoric provided by being a member of the “UN family”, remove this camouflage and possibly help to situate vital macroeconomic decision-making closer to the national, local or regional levels where people have agency over their lives and livelihoods. The Bangkok show provides a global stage to demand that the BWIs be removed from the UN system as perpetrators of wealth and income inequalities, propagating false solutions and reinforcing structural obstacles to justice in global governance.  Global Policy Forum Briefing, October 2026. – Third World Network