Audit as Accountability: Technical Authority and Expertise in the Governance of Private Financing for Development
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663921992100 |
| Published date | 01 February 2022 |
| Author | Celine Tan |
| Date | 01 February 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Audit as Accountability:
Technical Authority and
Expertise in the
Governance of Private
Financing for Development
Celine Tan
University of Warwick, UK
Abstract
The paper examines the emergence of a new landscape of international develop-
ment finance that is blurring traditional boundaries between public and private
resources for meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other global
public goods (GPGs). In the SDG financing ecosystem, private actors are no longer
passive bystanders in the development process but as active contributors to and
investors in development projects and programmes. The paper argues that the
emerging ‘private turn’ in the architecture of development finance represents a
technology of governance that is rooted in the assemblage of international
development policy and practice. This regime constitutes an emerging complex and
often problematic framework of organising and managing countries’ access to
external finance and establishing their terms of engagement with the broader global
economy.
Keywords
Aid, environmental, social and governance (ESG), financing for development, financial
regulation, global public goods, international financial institutions, private regulatory
standards, impact investing, Sustainable Development Goals
Corresponding author:
Celine Tan, School of Law, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: Celine.Tan@warwick.ac.uk
Social & Legal Studies
ªThe Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663921992100
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2022, Vol. 31(1) 3–26
Introduction
International development finance has emerged as a centrepiece for the international
community as the world responds to the health, social and economic impacts of the
COVID-19 pandemic. The health, social and economic crises brought on by the pan-
demic require large-scale injections of external finance to meet immediate interventions
and support short and long-term relief and recovery measures in developing countries
(UN, 2020). Financial resources are also crucial to ensuring that progress towards
broader global sustainable development objectives, notably commitments made under
the auspices of the United Nations (UN)’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
(Agenda 2030) and its associated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is not signif-
icantly derailed by the pandemic.
As global policymakers begin resetting the international agenda for sustainable devel-
opment in the context of COVID-19, i t is also important to cast a spotlight o n the
architecture for the mobilisation and disbursement of these global resources that has
undergone significant changes in the past few years. A key development in the frame-
work for financing for development since the inception of Agenda 2030 and the SDGs
has been the emergence of the ‘new ecosystem of investment for sustainable develop-
ment’ (Blended Finance Innovators, 2016) that is blurring traditional demarcations
between public and private resources for financing development and global public
goods. The rise of private non-profit and for-profit actors in international development
financing is reorienting the role of official financiers from funders of development and
global public goods to brokers of private financing for these purposes.
This shift in global public policy is transforming the regulatory and governance
landscape of international development finance, moving away from traditional, more
hierarchical forms of aid governance and public administration towards what scholars
have termed ‘contractual’ governance (Cutler and Dietz, 2017) and ‘hybrid transnation-
alism’ (Richey and Ponte, 2014) in the international development cooperation where
development actors and alliances are regulated less through formal transgovernmental
regimes and more through webs of private agreements and compacts to deliver devel-
opment finance and meet global public policy challenges.
An important aspect of this new landscape is the endorsement of private actors and
market models as key to overcoming the ‘resource gap’ of ‘billions to trillions’ to meet
the SDGs (World Bank, 2015) and, in contemporary circumstances, meeting the chal-
lenge of pandemic and post-pandemic resourcing (see Le Hou´erou, 2020). Although
deeply embedded within a globalised and marketised and assemblage of economic and
geopolitical relations, the SDG financing agenda has been turned into a depolicitised
technical exercise where questions of financial resources have been abstracted from
political contestation. Resource constraints have been decoupled from considerations
of the structural constraints of the global economy and the systemic inequalities of the
legal and regulatory architecture that supports it. Accompanying this discursive policy
shift is a corresponding pivot towards private systems of governance, such as private
regulatory standards and indicators, audit systems and private grievance processes to
regulate development finance.
4Social & Legal Studies 31(1)
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