Taking Sustainable Development Goal 17 Seriously. The World Bank’s Legal Framework for Providing Global Public Goods

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 17 aims to “[s]trengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.” Based on previous experiences with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), more and more voices say that, to succeed, the renewed global partnership in SDG 17 will have to overcome collective action problems in the provision of “global public goods” (i.e. those policy issues, such as climate change mitigation, the fight against corruption, and the control of communicable diseases, which transcend national boundaries and current generations). Both the new global partnership for sustainable development and the global public goods agenda are being actively supported by the World Bank – the world’s foremost development agency with near global membership and with the single largest source of net income. Yet, while internal staff reports and other recent studies commissioned by the Bank have already extensively analyzed the political, economic and financial role the institution could play in providing global public goods, the legal dimension of the Bank’s global public goods action has curiously attracted very little attention as of yet. The present article aims to put the Bank’s policy discourse on global public goods on a more solid legal footing by analyzing the legal framework within which the Bank operates to deliver such goods.