The limits of reform: the Wolfensohn era at the World Bank

Abstract

With the appointment in 1995 of James Wolfensohn to the presidency of the World Bank began an attempt to recast the negative image that the Bank had acquired as a result of its widely criticised structural adjustment programmes, land resettlement schemes and large dam projects in developing countries. ‘Poverty reduction’ and ‘good governance’ were to be the new watchwords, and civil society organisations were invited to engage in a process of dialogue and reform. The various initiatives introduced by the World Bank during Wolfensohn’s ten-year presidency are surveyed here and shown to continue, in effect, the discredited policies of the 1980s, while the promised dialogue with civil society was stillborn.