The strategic incoherence of development: marketing expertise in the World Development Report

Abstract

This paper offers a symptomatic reading of the 2008 World Development Report on Agriculture for Development by comparing it to the World Bank's previous Report on agriculture in 1982. The differences between these two reports say less about agriculture or development than about the changing way that the Bank envisions its place in the world and tries to give its projects coherence. The most telling aspects of this shift are a progressive hollowing out of the word ‘development’ itself and a proliferation of the layers of mediation involved in World Bank projects, all of which entail increased need for Bank services and decreased responsibility for its failures.

Keywords:

• World Bank
• development
• agriculture
• governance
• Paraguay

Notes

My thanks to Tania Li, Gavin Smith and the Munk Centre for hosting the original forum that brought these papers together, and to all those who participated and commented on the papers, as well as to anonymous reviewers at the Journal.

¹Hetherington (forthcoming) includes critiques of several World Bank programmes and projections for Paraguay.

²See Riles (2000) for an analysis of NGO documentary aesthetics.

³The first paragraph of the report opens with an image of an ‘African woman, bent under the sun, weeding sorghum in an arid field with a hoe, a child strapped on her back – a vivid image of rural poverty’, and quickly shifts to a litany of ‘pathways out of poverty’ which the Bank creates for smallholders (p. 1).

⁴Ferguson (2006) provides a schematic argument about the difference between singular temporal views of development (progress or modernisation) and spatial views of development in which all countries are expected to follow their own paths. His argument nicely captures the reasons why development is a unitary project in 1982, but in 2008 it is differentiated according to what the Report calls ‘three different worlds’, divided by the degree to which their economies depend on agriculture.

⁵I will not reiterate the many critiques of modernisation during the 1980s, but simply flag that the crisis came from at least two fronts. On the one hand was the ‘neoliberalisation’ of development thinking, which saw Keynesian macro-economic policy as a hindrance to growth, and favoured instead micro-economic tinkering (see Carter 1997). On the other hand was the backlash from the left, the critique of GNP-dominated measures of improvement and the environmental consequences of industrialisation, and the favouring of small-scale and community-level interventions (e.g. Rahnema and Bawtree 1997, Escobar 1995).

⁶See the OECD's 2007 report (Doonbosch and Steenblik 2007) for a much-publicised and relatively conservative evaluation of the problems with biofuels put out before the WDR emerged.

⁷In other WDRs, development is equated in the same way with things like transparency, empowerment, and respect for human rights, all of which here play an instrumental role.

⁸In accordance with its ‘three worlds’ approach to development, Paraguay fits the graph as an agricultural economy, but is the only Latin American country to fit this category, which is otherwise dominated by African countries (WDR 2008, 31).

⁹See BASE-IS (2008) for a discussion of the role of biofuel speculation.

¹⁰See especially Hetherington (forthcoming), Fogel and Riquelme (2005), and Berry (2007).

¹¹The title of Part II of the report is ‘What are effective policy instruments for using agriculture for development?’

¹²Rita Abrahamsen's (2000) excellent study of World Bank rhetoric makes this point most clearly.

¹³See Diamond (1989) and de Soto (1989) for particularly strong arguments for shifts in development policies toward democratisation.

¹⁴See Hetherington (2008).

¹⁵Abrahamsen (2000) makes the argument that ‘good governance’ is a bureaucratic form designed to produce particular political outcomes without political interventions. Since it is part of the World Bank's founding mandate that it not interfere in the politics of sovereign countries, it is necessary for it to create apparently apolitical institutions through which to control politics (see also Ferguson 1990).

¹⁶Amanor (2009, 260) makes a similar critique focused on the Bank's attempt to integrate smallholders into corporate agribusiness chains: ‘smallholders only have a voice so long as their agenda mirrors and furthers that of agribusiness’.

¹⁷It seems to me that there is no question about where the IMF stands on international politics and its role in them. USAID, CIDA, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Peace Corps likewise have their cards, both ideologically and politically, on the table, and people can easily form opinions about them. I do not think the same can be said about the World Bank, which has become totally unmoored from any coherent ideology or project.

¹⁸This process of continual reinvention arguably began in the first decade of the Bank's existence as it widened and then completely shifted the scope of its expert interventions form Europe to the ex-colonies (see Pincus and Winters 2002).

¹⁹With this point I mean to differ somewhat with Kojo Amanor (2009) who considers the rosy language of the bank to be ‘doublespeak’. While the words have clearly been chosen carefully, I do not suspect this is meant to be deceitful, but rather is a linguistic environment within which World Bank writers must operate in order for the Bank to remain viable.