The US Treasury is racing to assemble a list of contenders with strong credentials in climate finance to lead the overhaul of the World Bank, following the early exit of Trump appointee David Malpass.
Potential candidates include Samantha Power, the former US ambassador to the UN and now chief of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Rockefeller Foundation president Raj Shah, and World Trade Organization director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, according to development finance officials.
Gayle Smith, a former senior Obama aide, US development official and Africa expert, and Mafalda Duarte, chief executive officer of the $11bn Climate Investment Funds, are also potential candidates.
The US, which traditionally chooses the World Bank president, is expected to select a candidate who could attract the backing of other leading shareholders and accelerate its reform to put climate change at the heart of its work.
The US is the largest shareholder in the bank by far, out of almost 190 member countries, followed by Japan, China, Germany, France and the UK. The countries are represented by a board of governors, generally ministers of finance or development from member countries, and 25 executive directors that are responsible for operations.
The board is expected to announce soon a timeline for all the member states to propose potential candidates for the top job, and their vetting will begin after that process.
Clemence Landers, a former Treasury official working on engagement with multilateral development banks and former adviser to the US executive director at World Bank, said there was a “crisis of confidence” in international institutions among countries that borrowed from them. The next president would have to be able to “rebuild frayed bonds of trust”.
Some developing countries fear that the reforms may distract from the bank’s core mission of ending poverty. Development finance experts said the next president would need to assuage their concerns while still driving through significant changes.
“This is not about the next five years, this challenge is for the next three decades,” said Amar Bhattacharya, a senior fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development. “We need somebody who has the understanding of both the development and the climate agenda, who doesn’t see this as a zero-sum game.”
Avinash Persaud, climate adviser to the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, who has proposed a series of reforms to the IMF and World Bank, said the US should consider breaking with the tradition of appointing a US citizen to the job, unless a US candidate was “the best person for the job”.
Malpass has signalled that he will depart the bank by June 30. The group of next most senior executives are led by Axel van Trotsenburg, who was recently promoted to be the bank’s managing director of operations.
The bank’s leadership will come under intense scrutiny at the spring meetings in April and annual meetings in October, which are expected to be key moments in the reform process.
Experts said it was unlikely that the new president would be elected before the spring meeting. Scott Morris, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, said even having someone in place by June was “a fairly compressed period of time.”
Although presidents had traditionally been US citizens, that was not an official requirement. That tradition “should not be taken for granted”, particularly given the reform process under way, said Morris.
Inder Sud, a former senior staffer at the bank, said the next president must be “a proven leader” and that the recent appointees had “no managerial experience” because the US “began to reward friends”.
Kate Hampton, chief executive of The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, said Malpass’ departure “creates an unexpected window of opportunity to reboot the international financial system, starting with [multilateral development bank] reform, but not ending there”.
While there have been increasingly loud calls for Malpass to be removed for the past year, some of those close to the bank said that Wednesday’s announcement was unexpected.
Frustration with Malpass had been building in the US administration for some time, however, and had boiled over after he failed to acknowledge human-caused climate change at a conference late last year. He said afterwards that he had been misunderstood.
One person with knowledge suggested his exit this week may not have been “quite as sudden as it seemed”.
US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen threw down the gauntlet last year by demanding that the bank come up with a plan for change. The “evolution roadmap” that it produced in December, however, has been criticised as insufficient.
Additional reporting by Daria Mosolova and Jonathan Wheatley in London
