Procurement Oversight or Policy Promulgation: Assessing Conditionality Implications of the World Bank’s Gender Based Violence Contractor Disqualification Mechanism

Maximilian Yuri Markus Frank*

The World Bank recently increased its efforts to prevent gender-based violence (GBV), a human rights issue estimated to affect one in three women globally. As of January 1, 2021, contractors in new World Bank development projects deemed to be at high risk for GBV must take specific, enumerated steps to reduce GBV on their worksites or face disqualification from bidding on World Bank projects. In light of the varied approaches that the Bank’s constituent states have taken to GBV, this mechanism raises fundamental questions about the scope of the Bank’s development mandate, the policy sovereignty of the Bank’s Borrower countries, and the attachment of policy conditions to development aid in general. This Note moves discussion of these questions out of the theoretical sphere by comparing the contractor GBVmitigation obligations to the domestic GBV law of each of the eleven countries in which the mechanism was applied in its first year of existence. It demonstrates that the Bank’s mechanism exceeds the GBV protections of forum law in each studied country and, in certain cases, is contrary to the enactments of local lawmakers. However, the conditionality implications of the Bank’s policy are diminished by the fact that the mechanism does not require a shift in national policy and that penalties for non-compliance fall exclusively on contractors. This Note posits the contractor disqualification mechanism as a middle ground between a transnational, human rights-conscious development agenda and jealously-guarded national political sovereignty.

* Articles Editor, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law; J.D. Candidate, Columbia Law School, 2023. My most sincere thanks to Vijay Tata for his illuminating and invaluable guidance on this Note. Special thanks also to Christina Schiciano, Wisdom Onwuchekwa-Banogu, Dana Ahdab, Jacob Pagano, Alex Herkert, and the rest of the CJTL staff for their diligent edits and substantive suggestions. Finally, I thank the World Bank procurement staff, especially Enzo de Laurentiis and Alexandre Borges de Oliveira, who provided information and data without which this project would not have been possible.