This article analyses the World Bank’s environmental and social Safeguards against the backdrop of changing paradigms of global legal order. In January 2017, a new ‘Environmental and Social Framework’ (ESF) entered into force and replaced older ‘Safeguard Policies’ that had incrementally emerged since the 1980s in response to harmful impacts of investment projects financed by the Bank. The Safeguards reform epitomizes the changing structures and geopolitical shifts that shape international law in the twenty-first century and provides a fascinating looking glass on the evolution of global order since the end of the cold war. In this perspective, we see the first generation of Safeguards, introduced since the late 1980s, as an element of incremental legalization in the emerging global governance regime, a regime characterized by unipolar multilateralism and geopolitical dominance of ‘the West’. The 2016 reform not only reflects the increased politicization of global governance by civil society but also the emergence of a more competitive multilateralism, characterized by counter-institutionalization on the part of emerging powers like China. A comparison of the old and new Safeguards thus allows us to analyse different forms of contestation and resulting normative evolution in the key area of global governance of development and finance.

This contribution focuses on the accountability of international governmental organisations as a conceptual problem. To that end it gives a quite extensive summary of the Final Report of the International Law Association on the subject and examines whether accountability can be conceptualise as an actual or potential part of the existing legal system of international organisations. Mainly because of the underlying traditional approach to international (institutional) law, it is asserted that the ILA does not really succeed in this objective. Inspired by a more realistic view of the plurality of modern legal systems – as developed by the institutional legal theory – an alternative legal concept of accountability of international organisations is presented. Based on the fundamental value that legal power entails legal accountability, the legal concept covers all situations of alleged non-compliance by international organisations with a legally valid – but not necessarily also legally binding – rule of international law. For the time being such a concept will be heavily contested in theory and practice. However, for that very reason it can help to stimulate the development of international institutional law as long as the international legal community actually believes in the fundamental value and the divergent views only concern the content of the rules and practices involved in the accountability of international organisations.