Vice president for programs and senior fellow Todd Moss is quoted in an article on the future of IDA at the World Bank.
Once they are created, international organizations can be awfully hard to change (and even harder to dissolve). Amending or revising the formal treaties or charters that created these organizations is often prohibitively difficult. What's more, the bureaucracies of the organizations themselves often figure out how to resist major change or adapt just enough to seem useful. The World Bank may be about to conduct an interesting experiment in whether major organizational change is possible.
A new report by Jean-Michel Severino and Todd Moss of the Center for Global Development (CGD) argues that coming changes in the set of IDA-eligible countries pose a major, perhaps existential, challenge to the institution:
IDA will face a wave of likely client graduations over the next 10-15 years. CGD projections suggest that IDA's client base will soon be much smaller, more fragile and almost entirely African, creating major implications for its operational model, future replenishments, and its relationship with other multilateral [organizations].
"For the sake of efficiency and to justify to donors two separate institutions with nearly identical client bases and mandates," the authors point out, "IDA will have to work with the [African Development Bank] differently."