Of texts and practices: Empowerment and organisational cultures in world bank-funded rural development programmes

The World Bank's recent concern for ‘empowerment’ grows out of longer standing discussions of participation, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society. While commitments to empowerment enter World Bank texts with relative ease, their practice within Bank-funded projects is far more contingent, and the meanings they assume become much more diverse. This paper considers the relationship between such texts and the development practices which emerge, using an analysis of the ‘organisational cultures’ of the Bank and the many organisations on which it depends in the implementation of its rural development programmes. The paper presents a framework for analysing these organisational cultures in terms of (a) the broader contexts in which organisations and their staff are embedded; (b) the everyday practices within organisations; (c) the power relations within and among organisations; and (d) the meanings that come to dominate organisational practice. A case study of a development programme in Bangladesh is used to illustrate the ways in which cultural interactions between a variety of organisations – the World Bank, government agencies, NGOs, organisations of the poor, social enterprises – mediate the ways in which textual commitments to empowerment are translated into a range of diverse practices.     

Post-Feminist Spectatorship and the Girl Effect: “Go ahead,really imagine her”

Women and girls are currently positioned as highly visible subjects of global governance and development, from the agendas of the United Nations and the World Bank to the corporate social responsibility campaigns of Nike, Goldman Sachs and Coca Cola. This paper examines the representations of empowerment in visual (image and video) material from the Nike Foundation’s ‘Girl Effect’ campaign. Drawing on the works of Angela McRobbie and Lilie Chouliaraki, I suggest that this campaign is reflective of a mode of ‘post-feminist spectatorship’ that is now common to corporatised development discourses; it is manifested both in terms of the conservative mode of neoliberal empowerment proposed for distant others and the mode of ironic spectatorship imagined for the viewer. I conclude that the relations constructed in the ‘Girl Effect’ campaign between the (empowered) Western spectator and the (yet-to-be-empowered) Third World Girl work to erode bonds of solidarity and entrench structural inequalities by positioning economically empowered girls as the key to global poverty eradication.     

Civil war and the coalition government of democratic Kampuchea

This article explores the relationship between the politics of international development and the reproduction of global inequality. I argue that contemporary discourses about— and the practices of—‘development for developing countries’ represent an attempt to reconstitute the political utility of the ‘Third World’. In an era of globalisation the deployment of the notion of a Third World of ‘developing countries’ which require immediate, systemic attention through the discourse and practice of international development continues to provide a way of both disciplining and displacing the global dimension of social and political struggle. I refer to this dynamic in terms of the political utility of the Third World, which, I argue, has been conducive to the organisation of global capitalism and the management of social and political contradictions of inequality and poverty. I develop this argument by drawing on the historical implications and legacy of ‘international development’ as practised in and on the Third World and through a critical analysis of the methodological premises that constitute international development. I illustrate this by drawing on a key strategy aimed ostensibly at development: the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (prsp) approach, promulgated by the World Bank and the imf, which I discuss in relation to the ‘development agenda’ inaugurated during the 1999 wto meeting in Doha (Qatar). I argue that the ideology and practice of the global politics of international development reinforce the conditions of global inequality, and must be transcended as both an analytical framework and an organising principle of world politics. While the prsp and related approaches are currently presented as key elements in the building of the ‘architecture for (international) development’, what is emerging is a form of governance that attempts to foreclose social and political alternatives.     

The New Biopower: Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and the obfuscation of international collective responsibility

As successors to structural adjustment programmes, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (prsps) were introduced in 1999 as preconditions for World Bank and imf concessional financing and for debt relief. prsps now serve as the basis of negotiations for a variety of development financing and have influenced the design of other aid instruments. This paper considers the impact of the prsp framework on the constitution of global economic governance, in particular its effect in foreclosing possibilities for a radical revision of the rules and institutions of international economic law. The paper argues that the prsp project not only reframes fundamental tenets of international co-operation and global communal responsibility but also establishes a new disciplinary framework for Third World state engagement with the global economy and the international law which sustains it. In this way the discourse and methods of resistance against the injustices of the international order have been appropriated to distil such dissent through qualified operationalising of contestable notions of ‘participation’, ‘ownership’, ‘partnership’ and ‘poverty reduction’, disabling the resurgence of any form of emancipatory politics in the international economic order, whether through a state-led nieo-style revival or cosmopolitan social movement.     

How comprehensive is comprehensive? Using Wangari Maathai as a critique of the World Bank’s contemporary development model

This paper asks how comprehensive and holistic is the World Bank’s current development model, also known as the Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF), in Africa? By comprehensive and holistic, I am referring to whether the framework has the ability to capture the sources of all impediments to progress in different African contexts and offer corresponding solutions. I argue that the CDF is myopic and hackneyed. Not only does the World Bank employ the same neoliberal logic that informed structural adjustments, but it also continues to miss crucial non-material facets of development in the African countries it purports to serve. I make this argument by comparing the CDF/Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) model in Kenya to the under-utilised development philosophy of Wangari Maathai. This comparison intimates that an alternative to the CDF is not only possible, but also necessary. Maathai demonstrates how any holistic development approach for postcolonial Africa must grapple with both international and domestic factors that historically and currently exacerbate the chrysalis of political, economic, and social progress. A comprehensive approach must also deal with the particulars of each context while not eliding the uniform histories of exploitation and purposive underdevelopment that many African countries share.     

The ‘girl effect’: liberalism,empowerment and the contradictions of development

The ‘girl effect’ – the idea that investment in the skills and labour of young women is the key to stimulating economic growth and reducing poverty in the global South – has recently become a key development strategy of the World Bank, the imf, usaid and dfid, in partnership with corporations such as Nike and Goldman Sachs. This paper examines the logic of this discourse and its stance towards kinship in the global South, situating it within the broader rise of ‘gender equality’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ as development objectives over the past two decades. Empowerment discourse, and the ‘capability’ approach on which it is based, has become popular because it taps into ideals of individual freedom that are central to the Western liberal tradition. But this project shifts attention away from more substantive drivers of poverty – structural adjustment, debt, tax evasion, labour exploitation, financial crisis, etc – as it casts blame for underdevelopment on local forms of personhood and kinship. As a result, women and girls are made to bear the responsibility for bootstrapping themselves out of poverty that is caused by external institutions – and often the very ones that purport to save them.     

‘Subsistence’ Readings: World Bank and State Approaches to Commercialising Agriculture in Post-Communist Eurasia

This article explores the World Bank’s project of ‘returning agriculture to the market’ through land titling reforms. It describes how World Bank and national government strategy papers distinguish between a ‘commercial’ or ‘entrepreneurial’ sector of farming and a ‘subsistence’ agricultural sector in post-communist Eurasia. The extension and growth of the former represents the desired goal of policies since the 1990s, while the latter’s numerical prominence in many countries constitutes a source of concern for authorities. The article argues that ‘subsistence’ represents a misreading of the rural population that confounds self-sufficiency with the size of farms, and casts millions of smallholders as non-economic and alien to markets. It focuses on two post-communist countries (Romania and Ukraine, extremes in terms of the introduction of property rights over agricultural land) to argue that efforts to reduce ‘subsistence’ translate into measures that increase the households’ monetary needs and are therefore going to be resisted. The article relies on analyses of World Bank and national government’s strategy papers as well as ethnographic data collected in 2013–2017 in the Ukrainian-Romanian border region.     

Exploring Social Capital Debates at the World Bank

This article explores the ways in which discussions of social capital have emerged within the World Bank, and how they interacted both with project practices and with larger debates in the institution. These debates are understood as a ‘battlefield of knowledge’, whose form and outcomes are structured but not determined by the political economy of the Bank. Understanding the debates this way has implications for research on the ways in which development discourses are produced and enacted, as well as for more specific discussions of the place of social capital in development studies. The article concludes with a reflection on implications of these debates for future research, policy, and practice.     

Gender and institutional strengthening: the World Bank's policy record in Latin America

This article examines the gendered nature of institutional strengthening policies at the World Bank, as part of an attempt to analyse what role gender plays in the institutionalist turn within development policy. It focuses on three snapshots of Bank action wherein debates about gender and institutional strengthening are particularly pertinent: Washington, DC policy texts and Presidential speeches; gender policy enacted in the Latin American and Caribbean region; and an Argentine project loan on social capital promotion and family strengthening. Two themes emerge from these sites: (1) that couplehood between men and women has been identified as a key informal institution necessary for development; and (2) that gender reform has been positioned as an institutional change issue requiring attention to issues such as social marketing. New norms about gender interaction thus emerge as an explicit part of the Bank's reform agenda, and are shaping project experiences across Latin America.     

The geopolitical economy of social policy in the Philippines: securitisation,emerging powers and multilateral policies

Recent geopolitical and economic changes have altered global social policy formation. The Bretton Woods multilateral development agencies (MDAs) have selectively incorporated ideas emerging from developing country states and decision makers, with a recent increased acceptance of social transfers as part of renewed efforts at poverty alleviation based on social risk management. There has been an instance in the use and promotion of conditional cash transfer (CCT) policies by MDAs. CCTs were a product of the emergence of a neo-structuralist welfare regime (understood as an ideal type) in Latin America – an attempt to reconcile neoliberal strategies of development with aspirations for guaranteed minimum incomes. The Bretton Woods and regional development bank MDAs have facilitated the adoption of CCTs in other developing countries, including the Phillipines. Here, a combination of actions by national political actors and MDAs has resulted in the implementation of a securitised and compliance-focused version of CCTs derived from the Colombian security state. Although poor Philippine households welcome income assistance, CCTs have acted to enforce further state monitoring without altering the national-based political and economic processes that replicate poverty.     

World Bank Lending and the Quality of Economic Policy

This study investigates the impact of World Bank development policy lending on the quality of economic policy. It finds that the quality of policy increases, but at a diminishing rate, with the cumulative number of policy loans. Similar results hold for the cumulative number of conditions attached to policy loans, although quadratic specifications indicate that additional conditions may even reduce the quality of policy beyond some point. The paper measures the quality of economic policy using the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessments of macro, debt, fiscal, and structural policies, and considers only policy loans targeted at improvements in those areas. Previous studies finding weaker effects of policy lending on macro stability have failed to distinguish loans primarily intended to improve economic policy from other loans targeted at improvements in sector policies or in public management. The paper also shows that investing in economic policy does not ‘crowd out’ policy improvements in other areas, such as public sector governance or human development. The results are robust to using alternative indicators of policy quality and correcting for endogeneity with system generalized methods of moments and cross-sectional two-stage least squares. The more positive results in the study relative to some previous studies are consistent with claims by the World Bank that it has learned from its mistakes with traditional adjustment lending.     

‘Pedagogical’ and Ethnographic Fictions and Meta-narratives of Development: 1 World Manga

This article focuses on the development-themed Manga series entitled 1 World Manga, a World Bank/Viz Media project that follows the adventures of a young orphan boy, who ‘discovers that the only way to become a true warrior is to understand the challenges facing the poor and disadvantaged people he befriends along the way’. I argue that the series generates a pedagogical meta-narrative of ‘development’ that engages behavioural and situational, rather than ontogenetic and structural causes of inequality and disenfranchisement impede the characters' human development. I then discuss how ‘pedagogical’ fictions of development produce normative discourses of development that are centred around explicit, recognisable, fixed sets of circumstances, actors, and outcomes, and how they differ from ‘ethnographic’ fictions of development that emerge when development projects and interventions become sites of cultural production.     

Banking on Social Change: Grameen Bank Lending to Women

The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has become an international model for microcredit as a poverty alleviation strategy. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to evaluate the Grameen Bank as a strategy for empowering and improving the socioeconomic status of women in Bangladesh, and to identify lessons from the Grameen Bank experience that can inform development policy more generally. Arguments for and against Grameen Bank are evaluated in the light of evidence from studies of the Bank and knowledge of women and development. The conclusions that are drawn from this evaluation are that Grameen Bank is not a panacea for poverty alleviation and improving women's lives, that it has increased the income of borrowers, has led to improvements in specific aspects of their lives, and that it has potential if used in conjunction with other progressive social and economic policies to contribute to long-term, sustainable, progressive social change.     

Chronic poverty and entitlement theory

This paper examines chronic poverty in the developing country context within the entitlement theory approach. The dialogue on entitlement theory originally introduced by Sen is extended here to explore poverty and its persistence, or chronic poverty. A conceptual framework is presented, in which poverty and its persistence are explained within the context of the individual's economic and non-economic situation and development incentives. These attributes are influenced by the individual's entitlements. It is shown that poor endowments and resource base are important causes of persistent poverty. Policies aimed at reducing poverty therefore must address problems associated with improving the entitlements of individuals and households. The definition of ‘entitlements’ in the paper is not restricted to material possessions—the economic entitlements of the individual or the household—but is extended to incorporate the individual's skills, education and productive ability—the non-economic entitlements. The discussion is rooted in the increasing awareness of multidimensional poverty. The paper focuses on rural poverty in certain parts of India, where most of India's chronic poverty is situated. Over a million people can be classified as chronically poor in terms of duration, severity and deprivation. This is despite the government's commitment to the eradication of poverty since the early 1950s, with a total expenditure of nearly $7 billion in the past 50 years.     

Enforcing Stalinist Discipline in the Early Years of Post-war Reconstruction in the USSR, 1945–1948

A distinctive approach to disciplining the Soviet population emerged following the Terror of 1937–1938, and as a consequence of World War II, around the notion of socio-political and socio-economic ‘organisation’. The early post-war years as a consequence saw the introduction of innovative means of social disciplining in all areas of Soviet society. The infamous attack on the post-war intelligentsia, in particular, resulted from Stalin’s belief that only through the intelligentsia’s correct ‘leadership’ of this socio-economic ‘organisation’ would the Soviet Union be able to meet its challenges of reconstruction and superpower consolidation. This post-Terror and post-war phase in Stalinism marked a lasting turn, which consolidated the authoritarian socio-political dynamics evident in the later post-Stalin Soviet system.     

International Organisations and the Production of Hegemonic Knowledge: how the World Bank and the oecd helped invent the Fragile State Concept

This article examines the role of the World Bank and the oecd in the emergence and circulation of the ‘fragile state’ concept. These organisations were critical to the early development of the concept and in the consolidation of a knowledge-based agenda set out by Western aid donors to justify international assistance to poor and conflict-ridden countries. Attention is focused on three normative processes affecting the production of transnational knowledge: normalisation, fragmentation and assimilation. ‘Normalisation’ is the process by which influential knowledge producers help to transform a rough concept into a widely accepted transnational norm based on expert knowledge, detailed definitions and statistical exercises. Once the concept has been appropriated by several international actors, it undergoes normative ‘fragmentation’ as it is subjected to various interpretations across time and space. ‘Assimilation’ is the process by which the overarching concept is renewed, enriched and gradually adapted through the incorporation of additional insights. The article argues that the World Bank and oecd have functioned as central knowledge hubs, facilitating the circulation of new and controversial ideas on fragile states and their integration into the prevailing policies of the most powerful aid donors. The two organisations have thus taken an active role in the consolidation and perpetuation of the aid donors’ policy doctrine, ultimately protecting it from major normative dissent.     

How Can African Governments Reach Poor Farmers with Fertiliser Subsidies? Exploring a Targeting Approach in Ghana

African governments have been pursuing reforms to improve the targeting of fertiliser subsidy programmes, but recent experience suggests that these reforms have not ensured that subsidies reach intended beneficiaries. Using a targeting approach based on proxy means tests with carefully selected indicators, this paper suggests that Ghana’s fertiliser subsidy programmes can be targeted to the country’s poor and smallholder farmers more efficiently and more cost-effectively. While a universal subsidy in 2012 is estimated to have reached 11 per cent of poor farmers, the proposed targeting approach would have reached 70 per cent of the poor farmers in northern Ghana and 50 per cent of poor farmers in southern Ghana. Targeting reduces the costs of leakages by about 72 per cent, thus justifying the costs of administering targeted programmes using the poverty proxies. Furthermore, we show that once the initial models are constructed, the targeting approach can be used for nearly 20 years without any significant losses in accuracy. We propose that policy-makers should consider implementing this targeting approach on a pilot scale involving a few communities and, if found successful in practice, in a larger-scale programme.     

Risks and Opportunities in Gender Gaps to Access Shelter: A Platform for Intervention

In the context of the current global trends such as polarization of social groups and intensified poverty, there is a serious risk that gender gaps in access to shelter widen among the poor to the detriment of women's social, economic, and personal well-being. Paradoxically, these conditions also provide certain opportunities for women, including their greater community-based mobilization and leadership role. This paper examines these risks and the opportunities they bear upon and stresses the need for intervention in four areas of rights, access, security, and empowerment. The paper draws on a participatory research project carried out by the United Nations Gender and Habitat program in 1992 to 1999 in low-income settlements of Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.     

Recycling and expansion: an analysis of the World Bank agenda (1989–2014)

This article analyses the agenda of the World Bank after the Washington Consensus, arguing that it became more encompassing, politicised and intrusive. This agenda expanded and recycled itself since, in addition to liberalisation, privatisation and macroeconomic adjustment, it also advocated the wide-ranging reconstruction of the economy, the relationship between society and nature, the state, civil society and visions of the world and social practices from a neoliberal perspective. It is argued that the fight against poverty was incorporated by the institution, which functioned as an auxiliary mechanism for this liberalisation. The importance of the incorporation of New Institutional Economics for this expansion and recycling is highlighted.