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The Cost of Shame: International Organizations, Foreign Aid, and Human Rights Norms Enforcement
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IOs, Foreign Aid, and Human Rights Enforcement
costs of norms enforcement that include allowing other donors to benefit from the strained strategic relationship.
In this paper, we assess the validity of these institutionalist arguments.
We focus our assessment on the behavior of two international organizations – the World Bank Group, and the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), the UN’s main body for sanctioning countries for their human rights abuses. We speculate that public resolutions passed by the UNCHR provide material information about the actual human rights violations of governments and political information about the will of the international community to sanction individual governments for their misdeeds. We argue, too, that these resolutions provide cover for the World Bank, which is under increasing pressure to consider the political character of recipient governments despite explicit prohibitions against doing so in the Bank’s Articles of Agreement (founding document). In short, we posit that, a country that has been successfully targeted with a public UNCHR resolution will experience a reduction in multilateral aid receipts and, in particular, World Bank loans. We expect no such effects for bilateral aid receipts.
We organize this paper as follows. First, we present the theoretical case
for assuming that IOs engage in the enforcing of international human rights standards. Second, we examine the role of the World Bank and the UNCHR in this process. Third, we focus on issues of data and method that include the justification for estimating a two-equation Heckman treatment model. Fourth, we present descriptive evidence, model estimates, and the results of robustness tests from the analysis of cross-sectional time-series data on aggregate bilateral, multilateral, and World Bank assistance in the 1989-2002 period. Finally, we present our conclusions.
We conclude that the support for our propositions is considerable and
robust with respect to alternative model specifications and estimating techniques. The evidence is that UNCHR resolutions have no impact on aggregate bilateral aid but have a substantial effect on multilateral aid. Indeed, we estimate that a public UNCHR resolution condemning the human rights performance of a government costs it slightly more than $2 per capita in World Bank aid – amounting to a more than one-third reduction in World Bank aid. More generally, the findings provide useful insights into the role of IOs in the enforcement of human rights norms. They suggest that the considerable time and energy invested in the shaming of states in IOs serves a useful purpose despite the criticisms leveled against the much-maligned UNCHR. The findings also offer perspective on why governments delegate aid-giving to multilateral institutions (e.g. Milner nd; Rodrik 1996) by suggesting that international institutions allow states to realize goals that cannot be achieved bilaterally. This explanation could
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| | Authors: Lebovic, James. and Voeten, Erik. |
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2
IOs, Foreign Aid, and Human Rights Enforcement
costs of norms enforcement that include allowing other donors to benefit
from the strained strategic relationship.
In this paper, we assess the validity of these institutionalist arguments.
We focus our assessment on the behavior of two international organizations
– the World Bank Group, and the UN Commission on Human Rights
(UNCHR), the UN’s main body for sanctioning countries for their human
rights abuses. We speculate that public resolutions passed by the UNCHR
provide material information about the actual human rights violations of
governments and political information about the will of the international
community to sanction individual governments for their misdeeds. We
argue, too, that these resolutions provide cover for the World Bank, which
is under increasing pressure to consider the political character of recipient
governments despite explicit prohibitions against doing so in the Bank’s
Articles of Agreement (founding document). In short, we posit that, a
country that has been successfully targeted with a public UNCHR
resolution will experience a reduction in multilateral aid receipts and, in
particular, World Bank loans. We expect no such effects for bilateral aid
receipts.
We organize this paper as follows. First, we present the theoretical case
for assuming that IOs engage in the enforcing of international human rights
standards. Second, we examine the role of the World Bank and the
UNCHR in this process. Third, we focus on issues of data and method that
include the justification for estimating a two-equation Heckman treatment
model. Fourth, we present descriptive evidence, model estimates, and the
results of robustness tests from the analysis of cross-sectional time-series
data on aggregate bilateral, multilateral, and World Bank assistance in the
1989-2002 period. Finally, we present our conclusions.
We conclude that the support for our propositions is considerable and
robust with respect to alternative model specifications and estimating
techniques. The evidence is that UNCHR resolutions have no impact on
aggregate bilateral aid but have a substantial effect on multilateral aid.
Indeed, we estimate that a public UNCHR resolution condemning the
human rights performance of a government costs it slightly more than $2
per capita in World Bank aid – amounting to a more than one-third
reduction in World Bank aid. More generally, the findings provide useful
insights into the role of IOs in the enforcement of human rights norms.
They suggest that the considerable time and energy invested in the shaming
of states in IOs serves a useful purpose despite the criticisms leveled against
the much-maligned UNCHR. The findings also offer perspective on why
governments delegate aid-giving to multilateral institutions (e.g. Milner nd;
Rodrik 1996) by suggesting that international institutions allow states to
realize goals that cannot be achieved bilaterally. This explanation could
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