Karin Shepardson ’86, the World Bank’s senior regional coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean addressed a group of approximately 40 students, faculty and community members on March 4.

A part of the weekly EnviroThursday series, her lecture was entitled “The World Bank and Sustainable Development: A View from the Inside.”

Shepardson, who graduated from Macalester with a degree in economics and environmental studies, began working for the World Bank in 1994. On April 1, she will become the coordinator of the region that includes Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Shepardson spent the majority of the lecture discussing what the World Bank is and what it does. She said that she believes people are often somewhat misinformed about the Bank.

“We don’t get the message out to the press about what we really do,” she said. “The world is much smaller today due to globalization. Poverty issues are getting larger. Because the World Bank is multilateral it can take an unbiased, nonpolitical view on issues.”

According to Shepardson, the World Bank is a multilateral financial institution that is concerned primarily with international development and poverty reduction. It is part of the United Nations family and currently has between 6,000 and 8,000 staff. Staff come from all member countries of the Bank and the number of staff cannot exceed the voting power of any particular country.

Shepardson said that the World Bank consists of a research arm, which functions as a think tank and produces documents on development and the World Bank Institute, which focuses on distance learning around the globe.

Shepardson said that the most decentralized part of the World Bank is the system of six operational vice presidents who work in different regions around the world.

These units develop programs and set policy agendas regarding issues such as sustainable development, environmental waste management and biodiversity investment in client countries. The units tend to employ locally and operate in the local language.

Shepardson works in the Latin American unit, which currently has about 150 staffers working on sustainability and social issues.

Shepardson said that she thinks that people believe the World Bank is a secretive organization. “People often think that the World Bank is a secretive organization, but the World Bank has the most accountability of any institution for development,” she said.

The World Bank has an inspection panel through which parties who are not satisfied can file cases against projects. The Bank also has an internal fraud and corruption unit and keeps no documents confidential.

Most students said they felt that Shepardson was informative. “I felt like she gave a good perspective of what it is like for an individual working at the World Bank,” Ninya Loeppky ’06 said. “She made me realize how individual people don’t really have that much to do with what we perceive as the evil things the bank does.”

Joel Larson ’07 said he wished Shepardson had known more about the World Bank as a whole. “I thought she was well-versed in her area of work, but wasn’t too familiar with the bigger workings of the organization,” he said.

“She did not, in my opinion, totally dispel the concerns that many people have regarding the Bank’s broader policies and political positions,” said Brett Smith, a visiting assistant professor of environmental studies.

“However, these are huge questions that cannot be answered in a short presentation and what she did was very valuable—to just convey a sense of pride and commitment to the highest ideals that she attempts to work by in the context of the World Bank,” he added.

Loeppky said she thought Shepardson’s discussion of accountability was the most interesting part of the lecture. “The anti-corruption measures the Bank takes and the fact that there are no confidential documents gave me a better impression of the institution than I had before,” she said.