The World Bank Supports Decentralization.

What the World Bank is doing in this area

The World Bank supports state decentralization as a means to strengthen democracy, enhance transparency and pursue efficiency and competitiveness gains. The World Bank has also been extremely careful in supporting fiscal sustainability during the transition from centralized to decentralized public management.

For the Bank, decentralization is a complex, medium-to-long term process that needs legal and constitutional reforms, cuts across sector ministries, involves numbers of stakeholders, entails adjustment at the central or federal level and requires strengthening of subnational government capacity.

Decentralization usually precipitates or makes more evident the demand for overall public sector reform. It is also a good -but ordinarily risky-- entry point for modernization of the public sector.

The World Bank reinforces support for decentralization strategies with change management and communication components geared to ensuring the smooth transfer of responsibilities and resources to lower levels of government. Solid governance capacity is usually a sine qua non when the Bank supports decentralization efforts.

Source: http://web.worldbank.org/archive/website00912B/WEB/OTHER/D2FDB2AF.HTM

The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects.

The World Bank is the collective name for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), International Finance Corporation and International Development Association (IDA), three of five international organizations owned by the World Bank Group. It was established along with the International Monetary Fund at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference.

The World Bank is run by a president and 25 executive directors, as well as 29 various vice presidents.

The U.S., Japan, China, Germany and the U.K. have the most voting power. The bank aims loans at developing countries to help reduce poverty. The bank is engaged in several global partnerships and initiatives, and takes a role in working toward addressing climate change. The World Bank operates a number of training wings and it works with the Clean Air Initiative and the UN Development Business.

The World Bank has been criticized as promoting inflation and harming economic development. The way it is governed has been criticized.

There have been major protests against the bank. There has also been criticism of the bank’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Bank