From 'Structural Adjustment' to 'Comprehensive Development Framework': Conditionality transformed?

Abstract

This article reviews the dramatic shift over the course of the 1990s in the World Bank's approach to development policy and conditionality, addressing the impetus to change and the substance of that change. It suggests that the shift can be explained primarily as a response to the negative experience of the failure of its own policy prescription. It argues that the World Bank's response has been to revise its view of what constitutes development. From a conception of development based on the primacy of economic growth, the World Bank has moved to embrace a conception which elevates the poorest as the focus of development policy and which relativises the importance of economic growth. The World Bank's approach to conditionality has been modified accordingly, leveraging a specific emphasis on poverty reduction over society-wide development goals. We conclude that, while claims are made of country ownership, the new conditionality severely constrains the potential for genuine ownership of development policy.