Part 7.  Relevance Criteria (2021)

              Relevance of Action Paths

                           Relevance Debates in Development

                           Environmental, Social, and Human Rights Policy Conditions

                           Maintaining a Stable System of International Payments

              Relevance of Instructions

                           World Bank

                           IMF

              Summary

This Part addresses the extent to which authority holder actions and instructions appear prospectively to be well-aligned for goal attainment.  Relevance has two components, 1) alignment of the action paths promoted by instructions in ways that appear prospectively most likely to foster goal attainment given the particulars of the situation in which participants find themselves and 2) formulation of instructions that promote activity in ways that avoid notable distributional bias in favor of the authority holder itself or its most favored addressees.  Though prospective, relevance criteria over time will be influenced by observed progress or lack of progress toward the goal.  Yet unless or until most participants regard one possible action path as significantly more efficacious than all the others, there will be room for considerable debate about which path or paths are the better choices.  Favoritism becomes an irritation and potential source of addressee complaint if and when it is noticed.  The release of more detailed information about World Bank, IDA, and IMF lending since the early 1990s has allowed a growing set of outside observers to try their hands at estimating favoritism through quantitative correlational analysis linking number of loans, loan amounts, or extent of conditions attached to loans to a whole array of borrower characteristics.  The results vary enough that it remains unclear how much these outside efforts influence member government perceptions of organizational favoritism.