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61 Colum. J. Transnat'l L.: Bulletin 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/cjtbll61 and id is 1 raw text is: 










       Procurement Oversight or Policy
  Promulgation: Assessing Conditionality
  Implications of the World Bank's Gender-
Based Violence Contractor Disqualification
                     Mechanism


     The World Bank recently increased its efforts to prevent
     gender-based violence (GB V), a human rights issue es-
     timated to affect one in three women globally. As of
     January 1, 2021, contractors in new World Bank devel-
     opment projects deemed to be at high riskfor GBV must
     take specific, enumerated steps to reduce GBV on their
     worksites or face disqualification from bidding on
     World Bank projects. In light of the varied approaches
     that the Bank's constituent states have taken to GBV,
     this mechanism raises fundamental questions about the
     scope of the Bank's development mandate, the policy
     sovereignty of the Bank's Borrower countries, and the
     attachment of policy conditions to development aid in
     general.

     This Note moves discussion of these questions out of the
     theoretical sphere by comparing the contractor GBV-
     mitigation obligations to the domestic GBV law of each
     of the eleven countries in which the mechanism was ap-
     plied in its first year of existence. It demonstrates that
     the Bank's mechanism exceeds the GBV protections of
     forum law in each studied country and, in certain cases,
     is contrary to the enactments of local lawmakers. How-
     ever, the conditionality implications of the Bank's pol-
     icy are diminished by the fact that the mechanism does
     not require a shift in national policy and that penalties
     for non-compliance fall exclusively on contractors.
     This Note posits the contractor disqualification mecha-
     nism as a middle ground between a transnational, hu-
     man rights-conscious development agenda and jeal-
     ously-guarded national political sovereignty.

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