The Civil Society Policy Forum (April 22-25) at this year’s World Bank Group-International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings hosted panel discussions that clarified and often challenged the policies and approaches of international financial institutions. Among the highlights was the session “Ensuring Accountability: The Challenges and Opportunities Posed by the Full Mutual Reliance Framework (FMRF),” which attracted a packed room of attendees.  

 
The FMRF between the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) was signed in February 2025. Under the agreement, borrowers in World Bank and ADB co-financings can rely on one set of rules, using the policies and procedures of the lead lender, for all aspects of a project, from design and preparation through to completion and evaluation. While the FMRF has been lauded as a breakthrough for efficiency and a more cohesive multilateral development bank system, concerns have been raised about whether this could be at the expense of social and environmental safeguards. 

The panel at the Spring Meetings brought together representatives of the World Bank, the two Chairs of the the World Bank Inspection Panel and the ADB Compliance Review Panel, and civil society to explore the implications of the FMRF for accountability for affected communities. 

Efficiency vs. Accountability 

Parameswaran Iyer, Executive Director at the World Bank Group and Chair of the Committee for Development Effectiveness (CODE), and Maninder Gill, Global Director, Environmental and Social Standards, World Bank said that the FMRF aimed to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and improve outcomes. “From the borrower’s perspective, it’s a huge gain,” Gill said, describing the FMRF as a fundamental but overdue step for the World Bank. “We are husbanding scarce public resources much more efficiently in working together.” 

World Bank Inspection Panel Chairperson Ibrahim Pam and the ADB Compliance Review Panel Chair Ramanie Kunanayagam expressed support for the FMRF but emphasized the need to ensure that the rights of communities are not diminished. Pam stated the common position of the two independent accountability mechanisms (IAMs): “We have advocated quite strongly to ensure, through a principles-based approach, that we are able to protect the accountability function.” Kunanayagam highlighted key procedural differences between the IAMs before adding, “Harmonization should not be working towards the lowest common denominator.”

Community choice 

Stephanie Amoako, Policy Director, Accountability Counsel, expressed the view that civil society consultation on FMRF had been minimal, and that communities had not been given a choice in the matter: “We saw this as a major shift in how accountability has been done in the MDB system since the Inspection Panel was created over 30 years ago. Communities that have been harmed have had the option to choose how they want to bring complaints.” Amoako provided an example of how complaints directed at multiple IAMs on the same project can lead not only to a range of agreements for the complainants, but also bring about changes at different levels within the IAMs and financing institutions concerned.

Prabindra Shakya, Convenor, Asia Indigenous Peoples Network on Extractive Industries and Energy (AIPNEE), stressed the need to raise standards: “The highest standards of safeguards and accountability mechanisms should apply, because we know that even the highest standards of the banks are still short of the international human rights standards that we are entitled to. Let’s not just talk about harmonization. Let’s talk about improvements. And for us, improvement in these policies would include requiring respect for free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) in the projects that are implemented in the territories of Indigenous Peoples.”

More alike than different?

Both Gill and Iyer argued that there would be scope for improvement and adjustments on a case-by-case basis during the intial four-year pilot period of the FMRF. Acknowledging the policy differences between the World Bank and the ADB, Iyer explained that the Board had felt that the FMRF was not the forum to resolve such differences, but that mutual reliance should be operationalized now in parallel with full (and likely time-consuming) policy reviews toward harmonization. Gill added: “The important message is that both [the World Bank and the ADB’s safeguards] are significantly above the threshold of what we want to see in development. We want to be held to the standards we have.” He also suggested that the two IAMs are well equipped in this regard. “Fundamentally, we are dealing with two exceptionally strong accountability mechanisms.”

However, both IAM Chairs and civil society argued that the differences that existed between the financing institutions and their IAMs were critical. For instance, as Kunanayagam pointed out, “The Compliance Review Panel’s threshold for access is much higher than that of the World Bank Inspection Panel. So, if ADB were the lead financial institution for a project under the FMRF, then the complaint could only be raised to ADB,” with a higher risk of being found ineligible. Referring also to the cultural aspect of communities choosing one IAM over the other, she suggested that policies should be scrutinized “much more intensively by the persons responsible for upholding the policies, such as the current incumbents of both IAMs, [rather than] relying on a legal team that doesn’t actually own the policies to do that assessment.”

A clear mission for IAMs

Closing the session, Ibrahim Pam called for the two IAMs in question to be as creative and responsive as possible within the FMRF, focusing on meeting their mandates as they were designed, “to address the concerns and the adverse impacts that projects financed by our institutions have on affected communities. We are citizen-driven accountability mechanisms.”