The World Bank

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. World Bank, ‘About Us’, http://worldbank.org. 2. Henceforth, the ‘Bank’. 3. The World Bank, ‘IBRD Articles of Agreement: Article One’, amended 16 February 1989, http://web.worldbank.org. 4. Sebastian Mallaby cites the presidency of George Woods (1963–1968) as the beginnings of the Bank's increasing focus on Third World poverty, with a speech delivered in 1967 as the high point of Woods's advocacy on ‘the plight of the developing peoples’. Robert McNamara, Woods's successor, went on, Mallaby argues, to push ‘Woods's rhetoric to the emotional edge’. Wolfensohn remains, nevertheless, Mallaby's key figure in the fight against poverty, tackling the issue of Third World poverty with a ‘consuming passion’ that lasted for both terms of his presidency. See Sebastian Mallaby, The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (Yale University Press, 2005). John Pender argues that the changes initiated in Bank discourse during the 1990s, as embodied in the development of the Bank's Comprehensive Development Framework, nevertheless represent a significant shift in the Bank's development rationality, as the first inklings of the Bank's use of a ‘partnership building’ discourse designed to foster a the idea of borrowing governments ‘owning’ the policies they ‘choose’ to pursue. See John Pender, ‘From “Structural Adjustment” to “Comprehensive Development Framework”: Conditionality Transformed?’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 3 (2001), pp. 397–411. The Bank itself cites the beginnings of its change in direction from 1994 and the Annual Meetings in Madrid. See ‘World Bank History’, http://worldbank.org. 5. World Bank, ‘About Us’, http://worldbank.org. 6. World Bank, ‘Comprehensive Development Framework’, http://worldbank.org. 7. World Bank, ‘Mission Statement, June 30 2003’, http://worldbank.org. 8. World Bank, ‘World Bank History’, http://worldbank.org. 9. The ICSID ‘operates as a secretariat whose secretary-general is selected by its governing Administrative Council every six years. The World Bank Group president is chairman of the Administrative Council’, http://www.worldbank.org. 10. Richard Peet, Unholy Trinity: The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO (Zed Books, 2003), p. 114. 11. The World Bank, ‘IBRD Articles of Agreement’, http://web.worldbank.org. 12. Morten B⊘ås & Desmond McNeill, Multilateral Institutions: A Critical Introduction (Pluto Press, 2003), p. 21. 13. World Bank, ‘About US’. 14. World Bank, ‘World Bank Annual Report 2004’, http://www.worldbank.org. 15. China has 9.79 per cent of its US$15,835 million total loan still outstanding, Mexico 9.28 per cent (of US$12,526 million), Indonesia 8.4 per cent (of US$10,395 million), Brazil 7.64 per cent (of US$11,140 million), Argentina 6.89 per cent (of US$9588 million), Turkey 5.16 per cent (of US$8762 million), Russian Federation 5.43 per cent (of US$7414 million) and India 3.96 per cent (of US$7950 million). 16. Graham Harrison, The World Bank and Africa: The Construction of Governance States (Routledge, 2004), p. 18 17. The World Development Reports (WDRs) emerging in the 1990s are possibly the clearest indicators of the Bank's shift towards issues of equity and social development. The first five WDRs published in the 1990s (‘Poverty’, ‘The Challenges of Development’, ‘Development and the Environment’, ‘Investing in Health’ and ‘Infrastructure for Development’) signal, in the Bank's own words, ‘a re-evaluation of the idea that market liberalization alone [c]ould spur development’. The WDRs that follow go on to remould the Bank's conceptualisation of market efficiency in terms of global integration, income distribution, market reform and, in particular, the nature of the state and its role in augmenting market efficacy. ‘From Plan to Market’ (1996) is perhaps the earliest indicator of the Bank's ensuing discourse of ‘good governance’, with its focus on the ‘social policy’ prerequisites for successful marketisation, such as institutional and legal reform, privatisation and the ‘quality’, not the size, of government. 18. From interviews with World Bank Staff, August–September 2005. 19. Gobind Nankani, Vice President, Africa Region, World Bank, Public Lecture given in Nairobi Kenya, 6 December 2004, http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/AFRICAEXT/0,,contentMDK:20291859∼menuPK:258660∼pagePK:146736∼piPK:146830∼theSitePK:258644,00.html. 20. Cf. ‘International Conference on Shared Growth in Africa – Call for Papers’, http://worldbank.org. 21. Ibid. 22. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/AFRICAEXT/EXTAFRREGTOPTRADE/0,,menuPK:502475∼pagePK:34004175∼piPK:34004435∼theSitePK:502469,00.html (accessed 28 December 2005). 23. ‘The Africa Action Plan’, http://worldbank.org (emphasis added). 24. The neoliberalism I identify as a commitment to the market, to private capital, to flexible labour and to deregulated economies is, of course, not only to be found in an institution such as the Bank. Institutions operate within the parameters of their own historical conditions, which is why the Bank's neoliberalism is not articulated in the same way, and with the same effects as that of, for example, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, or the Brazilian state government. 25. Seven World Bank members of staff were interviewed between August and September 2005, most, but not all, of whom occupied relatively senior positions in country regions and Vice Presidential networks. 26. Christine Sylvester, ‘Development Studies and Postcolonial Studies: Disparate Tales of the “Third World”’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 4 (1999), pp. 703–21. 27. The Bank first appointed a Women In Development Advisor (WID) in 1977, and established a WID Unit in 1986, renamed in 1994 following the Bank's issuance of its gender policy. 28. From Interviews with World Bank Staff, August–September 2005. 29. Katherine N. Rankin, ‘Governing Development: Neoliberalism, Microcredit, and Rational Economic Woman’, Economy and Society, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2001), pp. 18–37. 30. Cf. World Bank, ‘Development Outreach Special Report: Women and Power’, 2001, and ‘Development Outreach Special Report: Engendering Development, A Comment by Nicholas Stern’, 2001, http://web.worldbank.org. 31. World Bank, ‘Integrating Gender in World Bank Assistance’, Operations Evaluations Department, Report No. 23035, 2001, http://web.worldbank.org. 32. World Bank, ‘The Gender Dimension of Bank Assistance: An Evaluation of Results’, Report No. 23119, Operations Evaluation Department, 2002, http://worldbank.org, p. 4. 33. Sylvester, ‘Development Studies and Postcolonial Studies’. 34. From Interviews with World Bank Staff, August–September 2005. 35. Harrison, The World Bank and Africa, p. 71 (emphasis added). 36. World Bank Development Committee (with the IMF), ‘Review of World Bank Conditionality’, Operations Policy and Country Services, 9 September 2005. 37. Ibid. 38. Harrison, The World Bank and Africa, p. 71. 39. World Bank, ‘Review of World Bank Conditionality’. 40. Ibid. 41. World Bank, ‘Review of World Bank Conditionality: Recent Trends and Practices’, Operations Policy and Country Services, 30 June 2005. 42. Ibid. 43. Bank staff as a source of development expertise figured frequently in interviews conducted at the Bank between August and October, 2005. Several interviewees were keen to point out that staff working at the Bank are among ‘the best in the world’, and considerably experienced in the politics and practices of development. 44. From interviews with Inter-American Development Bank Staff, August–September 2005. 45. Latin America and the Caribbean have the lowest levels of benchmarks of all Bank groupings. The second highest level, after the Africa region, is thirty for the Europe and Central Asia region. 46. World Bank, ‘Review of World Bank Conditionality’, 30 June 2005.