The World Bank as Knowledge Bank: Analyzing the Limits of a Legitimate Global Knowledge Actor

The World Bank has always sold ideas, not just loans. Starting in 1996, then president James Wolfensohn rebranded the Bank by articulating a formal vision of a “Knowledge Bank”—a provider of state‐of‐the‐art expertise on development. After a number of internal changes and assessments, the Bank is acknowledging that it needs to be more humble, pluralistic, and practical. Why do some regard the Bank as a legitimate knowledge actor, whereas others contest that authority? We offer an analytical framework that can explain stakeholders' uneven recognition of the Bank's knowledge role. When stakeholders define knowledge as products, the Bank generally obtains recognition for the quality and quantity of the information it generates. This is the output dimension of legitimacy. On the other hand, when knowledge only counts as such to users who have been part of the process of creating it, the Bank finds itself with limited recognition.     

A Public Choice Perspective of IMF and World Bank Lending and Conditionality

The paper explains IMF and World Banklending and conditionality stressingchanges in relative bargaining power ofdifferent stakeholders over time. Itapplies public choice theory to explain theinterests of the institutions' memberstates, its borrowers and staffs as well asprivate actors attaching their money to theIFIs' programs. Using panel data for 43countries between 1987–99 it is shown thatthe number of Fund conditions seems to beinfluenced by contemporaneous World Bankactivity and ``bad'' policies.     

Governance, the World Bank and Liberal Theory

We examine the recent debates about governance, focusing particularly on the World Bank and identify certain factors which have in recent years moved the Bank's thinking beyond narrowly economic notions of development. Our account is tentative and we suggest further avenues of research. We try to connect the Bank's thinking systematically with key features of liberal discourse and suggest that thiscan do much to illuminate practice. We illustrate this with a discussion of the growing relationship between the Bank and NGOs, to contribute to forms of analysis which go beyond the ideas vs. interests polarities that still inform so much of contemporary social and political theory.     

Context-sensitive monitoring and evaluation for the World Bank

This article sketches a preliminary design for a new system of monitoring and evaluation in support of a program on New Bank Practices in Civic Engagement, Empowerment, and Respect for Diversity (CEERD) in the World Bank. The new practices bring to the foreground uncertainties and ambiguities arising from the human factors in empowerment and development. Consequently, a system of monitoring and evaluation must be context-sensitive, taking into account differences and changes in context. Meaningful indicators of success or failure, and assumptions about responsibility for them, cannot be specified reliably in project agreements in advance of implementation. Specification in advance could inhibit the improvisations necessary to deal with unanticipated problems and opportunities in the implementation process on the ground.     

Institutional development in World Bank projects: Analytical approaches and intervention designs

This article examines a random sample of World Bank projects in order to identify the methods of institutional analysis (IA) and resulting institutional development (ID) strategies employed. The findings confirm impressionistic data which indicate that IA in World Bank projects is highly standardized, and concentrates on factors internal to the organization at the expense of external environmental factors, particularly as these are reflected in the needs of stakeholders and customers. ID is an integral part of most Bank projects, and the trend is shown to be towards increasing attention to ID. The nature of ID in World Bank projects reflects the inward orientation of IA, with strong emphasis given to training and development as a standard solution. It is concluded that IA and ID which are broader in scope will improve project design and impact.     

The Creeping Politicisation of the World Bank: The Case of Corruption

This paper looks at the increasing politicisation of the World Bank through its work on corruption. Historically, the Bank's Articles of Agreement, which forbid it from involving itself in the politics of its recipient countries, have excluded work on corruption. In the 1990s, internal and external demands grew for the Bank to address the problem of corruption, despite earlier reticence. Much research done over the past decade, often commissioned by the Bank or done in-house, has worked to turn corruption into an economic and social issue, rather than a political one, in order to conduct anti-corruption work while evading accusations that it is violating this non-political mandate. Now this pretence is gradually slipping away and the Bank is becoming overtly political, despite its Articles and a lack of international consensus that this is the direction in which it should be heading.     

World History in 60 Seconds: How Bank Imperial Re-Edited Russian Binary Logic

Contemporary Russian culture's biggest problem is not westernisation, popification or rampant social impoverishment, but the stubborn aversion to counting past three. There is some sort of sick fascination with binary oppositions. Ever since the destruction of pagan worship 1000 years ago, the Holy dialectical triad has damned Russian culture. All attempts at modernisation are stifled by grandiose plans based on binary models of cultural dynamism that, after an initial expulsion of energy, eventually stagnate and spoil more than they transform. Moreover, there is little opportunity for multiple modes of analysis since most studies privilege the same destructive dialectics that they seek to examine. Everything is locked into a violent oppositional mentality that suffocates change, and only leads to new and improved methods of oppression and social degradation. All of Russia's other problems stem from this mathematical myopia. Within the relatively new field of Kulturology (Russian Cultural Studies) and the relatively forgotten field of Russian Philosophy (not philosophy in Russia) there have been few attempts to explore moments of interconnection. Subsequently, Kulturology is presented as a natural progression of a dialectical continuum that is necessarily oppositional. There is a common assumption that scholars study texts by using specific critical strategies within disciplinary limits and not the other way round. That is, they do not explore or question their discipline through the study of tactical texts. The intention of this paper is not to contrast Kulturology to Russian Philosophy and Cultural Studies so as to come up with a more refined product, but to examine the relationship between their central epistemological concerns. Rather than applying them either singularly or coextensively in order to analyse a particular text, I will attempt to consider Kulturology and Russian Philosophy through the text of a contemporary Russian-made advertising campaign. Curiously, the commercial text and the critical disciplines share key discursive concerns that point to a shared contemporary cognitive logic. Their arithmetical articulation of the cognitive logic of the dynamics of Russian culture, structures of interpretation and the construction of cultural history are the excessive focus of this paper.     

Democratizing the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank: Governance and Accountability

Much has been said about the failing policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In this essay, I attempt to explain why the IMF has pursued policies that in many cases not only failed to promote the stated objectives of enhancing growth and stability, but were probably counterproductive and even flew in the face of a considerable body of theoretical and empirical work that suggested these poilcies would be counterproductive. I argue that the root of the problem lies in the IMF's system of governance. Thereafter, I discuss how the World Bank managed to reform its agenda in order to fulfill its goals of poverty reduction more successfully, and what lessons this reform holds for the IMF. I conclude by proposing needed reforms for the IMF that might mitigate some of the problems it has encountered in the past.¹     

World Bank Support for Public Financial Management and Procurement: From Theory to Practice

The advice provided by the World Bank on improving public financial management and procurement is influenced by debates on theory and practice in developed and developing countries. This article touches on some of the highlights of these debates, drawing from the indicative literature mainly since 1990 from scholars and practitioners. It goes on to examine the Bank's diagnostic work, design, and implementation of project and policy support in this area. It also assesses evidence of outcomes and attribution, and ends with questions for further research.     

Effects of the IMF and World Bank on public expenditure accountability in Jamaica

This article analyses the positive and negative effects of IMF stabilization programmes and World Bank structural adjustment programmes on the accountability of public expenditure management in Jamaica in the period 1980–1992. Particular attention is given to the negative accountability effects of IMF budget deficit reduction targets imposed on a Government uncommitted to meeting such targets. Many of the arguments presented in this article relate to expenditure accountability problems more generally and it cannot be proved that IMF conditionality was the sole cause of these problems. It is argued, however, that IMF conditionality contributed. This argument is based on a large number of semi-structured interviews conducted in 1993 with Jamaican bureaucrats, politicians, donors, academics and private sector representatives, many of whom were involved in Jamaica's budget formulation process, and on analysis of the existing literature and data. The conclusion reached is that donor-guided reform programmes have complex and often conflicting impacts on the accountability of the Government's budgetary practices. A major question that arises is the relative importance that donors such as the IMF place on budget conditionality as against accountability. The conclusion based on the Jamaican experience is that the IMF placed greater emphasis on the former. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Digital Government: A Primer and Professional Perspectives

Digital technology is a critical enabler of public administration reforms. It can improve the efficiency and productivity of government agencies and allow citizens to transact with government anytime, anywhere. It can also deepen the democratic process, empowering citizens to participate in policy formulation. In this article Andrew Botros, the director of Expressive Engineering, and Maria Katsonis, from the Department of Premier and Cabinet (Victoria), explore the challenges of the digital world for the public sector. Katsonis presents a primer on digital government tracing its evolution from the e‐government movement of the 1990s to Government 2.0 in the 2000s to today's digital‐by‐default agenda. As technology and its role in public sector reform have progressed, so too have the governance, cultural, and leadership challenges deepened. Botros examines NSW approach to open innovation with the Premier's Innovation Initiative in NSW, the state's open data experience, and Transport for NSW and its management of public transport data. He argues NSW's approach involves a significant innovation trade‐off, requiring fresh thinking in digital‐era collaboration.     

The World Bank and social capital: Lessons from ten rural development projects in the Philippines and Mexico

Social capital is widely recognized as one of the few sources of capital available to the poor, yet the processes by which development policies affect the accumulation of that social capital are not well understood. The World Bank, through its funding of development projects, affects the institutional environments for the accumulation of such social capital. The question is how to determine whether that institutional context is enabling, and to what degree. This paper compares ten recent World Bank-funded rural development projects in Mexico and the Philippines to explore how the processes of project design and implementation influence the institutional environments for the accumulation of horizontal, vertical, and intersectoral forms of pro-poor social capital. The findings have conceptual and policy implications for understanding the political dynamics of creating enabling environments for social capital accumulation by the poor.     

Political institutions and Central Bank independence: A cross-country analysis

Using three quantitative measures of Central Bank independence, we apply OLS and TSLS regression methods to investigate the possible correlation between political liberty, political instability and central bank independence. For a sample of Western democracies and highly democratic developing countries we show that Cukierman's legal independence index is positively correlated with political freedom and regime political stability. It is negatively correlated with party political stability. For a sample of developing countries that excludes dictatorships we show that a special index of legal central bank autonomy is positively associated with political freedom and political stability. Finally, we observe that, for the same sample of nations, the turnover index of central bank independence is not sensitive to our political variables.