‘A disciplining method for holding standards down’: how the World Bank planned Africa's slums

Abstract

This article examines the World Bank's attempts to frame the relationship between states, markets, and citizens through its urban assistance programmes during the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on internal memoranda, mission reports, and staff reviews, this study traces the bank's arguments about the ideal role of the state in housing and service provision. Over this period, the World Bank encouraged governments to withdraw from providing public housing directly and to act instead as an ‘enabler’ of market forces, with lasting economic and political consequences. The article concludes with a focus on South Africa in the early 1990s, when the World Bank (after two decades of practice in promoting privatised land and housing markets) counselled the African National Congress on its post-apartheid policies. In the years since, these policies have resulted in explosive confrontations with civil-society activists who remain committed to alternative visions of the role of the state in housing and service provision.

[« Une méthode disciplinaire pour avoir tiré les normes vers le bas » : comment la Banque mondiale a planifié les bidonvilles d'Afrique.] Cet article examine les tentatives de la Banque mondiale en vue d'encadrer la relation entre les Etats, les marchés et les citoyens à travers ses programmes d'aide en milieu urbain au cours des années 1970 et 1980. S'appuyant sur des notes internes, des rapports de mission et les commentaires du personnel, cette étude retrace les arguments de la Banque sur le rôle idéal de l'État en matière de logement et de prestation de services. Au cours de cette période, la Banque mondiale a encouragé les gouvernements à se retirer dans le fait de fournir logement public mais d'agir plutôt comme un ‘‘ facilitateur ’' des forces du marché, avec des conséquences économiques et politiques durables. Le document conclut en mettant l'accent sur l'Afrique du Sud dans les années 1990, lorsque la Banque mondiale (après deux décennies de pratique dans la promotion des terres privatisées et du logement) a conseillé le Congrès national africain sur ses politiques d'après-apartheid. Dans les années qui ont suivi, ces politiques ont donné lieu à des affrontements explosifs avec des militants de la société civile qui demeurent engagés à d'autres visions du rôle de l'Etat en matière de logement et de prestation de services.

Mots-clés: Banque mondiale  ; citoyenneté  ; privatisation  ; logement  ; terre

Keywords:

• World Bank
• citizenship
• privatisation
• housing
• land

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Gregory Mann, Sofia Nelson, and the journal's two anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on earlier drafts.

Notes

The Cohen Archives are located in the New School University's Graduate Program in International Affairs office (New York City). Cohen joined the faculty at the New School in 2001, and brought his personal archive of published and unpublished World Bank materials, including reports, conference proceedings, budget documents, staff reviews and correspondence. He has made the material available for research purposes. During his tenure at the World Bank, he worked in over 50 countries and was responsible for much of the bank's urban policy development between 1972 and 1999. From 1994–98, he served as the senior advisor to the bank's vice-president for Environmentally Sustainable Development. Cohen has published widely on urban policy and economic development.

Witness, for example, the United States and European Union – staunch proponents of free trade – sustaining their dominance in global agricultural markets through subsidies to their own farmers.

As John Campbell put it in his study of the bank's urban shelter projects in East Africa, ‘Bank projects appear to have called forth, if not a proliferation, then an expansion of bureaucracy as new and more complicated regulations are required to administer the scale and type of projects it sponsors. The result has been to reinforce the power and patronage of the state over the poor’ (Campbell 1990, p. 213).

Since housing policies varied widely among African governments, generalisations such as these are only marginally useful. Individual countries and regions have their own rich literatures, which it is outside the scope of this paper to explore. For case studies on the housing markets of Nigeria, Egypt, Tunisia, Tanzania, Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe, see chapters in Amis and Lloyd (1990) (see also Murray and Myers (2006), Morrison and Gutkind (1982)).

Subsequent research and analysis from the early 1990s onward, such as that of Alejandro Portes and Kate Meagher, has demanded a reformulation of Hart's question and approach, arguing that it is misguided to try to measure the ‘autonomous capacity’ of informal activity that is, in fact, deeply bound up with ‘formal’ activity. Meagher's work further reveals the error in viewing informal activity as a ‘sector’, instead defining informalisation as a social and historical process. Revisiting the term just after the end of the Cold War, Hart himself was deeply sceptical of its usefulness and its popularity among academics and development practitioners, calling it a ‘neologism [that] reflected the cold war ideology of a frozen opposition between the state and the market’ and arguing that ‘its popularity was indicative of the blindness of academics and policy-makers to real conditions and historical trends in Africa’ (Hart 1992, p. 216). Nonetheless, this idea was popular with the bank in the early 1970s and remains so (see Meagher 1995, Portes 1994, Hart 1992).

For more on Turner's influence, see Werlin (1999). Werlin worked on urban projects at the World Bank, and years of observing the impact of Turner's ideas would lead him to conclude ‘that the “minimal state” advocated by Turner can deal with the problems typically encountered in slum upgrading is a dangerous illusion’ (ibid., p. 1526).

For more on Bank staff's perceptions of the shifts under McNamara, see Mattingly et al. 1984, p. 4.

McNamara is quoted, for example, in World Bank Managing Director Sven Sandstrom's 1992 address, ‘Making urban assistance more effective’ (Sandstrom 1992). Address to the 20th Anniversary of World Bank Urban Assistance, Washington, DC, 23 June. Box: Africa Urban – Eastern and Central, Cohen Archive, Department of International Affairs, New School University, New York.

These were divided into first- and second-generation projects, namely Botswana I (initiated April 1974), Tanzania I (July 1974), Zambia I (July 1974), Kenya I (April 1975), Tanzania II (July 1977), Kenya II (April 1978), and Botswana II (May 1978).

They made the following projection: ‘The Bank is expected to more than double its urban lending by fiscal year 1993, by which time it will reach $3.5 billion. Over the five-year period 1991–95, the Bank is expected to fund approximately 150 urban projects, for a total value of $15 billion. This compares to about 180 urban project loans from 1972 through 1989, and will represent an increase in the urban portfolio from 5 to 9 per cent of total lending’ (ibid, p. 11).

As the bank's urban sector reconnaissance mission to South Africa stated in a May 1991 aide memoire, ‘It appears that many parties envisage a top-down approach, in which “standards” are decided upon and services meeting those standards provided to people. Experience in other countries at similar levels of development have shown that such approaches inevitably fail’ (World Bank Mission 1991, p. 11).

This shift away from the dual economy thesis in favour of thinking about unified economic processes is similar to the work of scholars who have attempted to replace the formal/informal sector dichotomy with analyses of ‘processes of informalisation’ (see e.g. Meagher 1995).