Our Dream is a World Full of Poverty Indicators: The US, the World Bank, and the Power of Numbers

Abstract

With the launch of its Africa Results Monitoring System (ARMS), the World Bank has recently consolidated its ‘results agenda’, and is now rolling out a concerted effort to improve International Development Association (IDA) borrowers' ability to track the impact of lending projects on a range of poverty indicators. Although the US pushed hard for the implementation of ARMS, viewing it as a means of improving its ability to monitor and control the Bank, the initiative has paradoxically also provided the Bank with an additional source of legitimacy and autonomy. This apparent contradiction forces a clarification of the analytical framework we use to investigate international organisations (IOs) to allow us to understand the ‘positive feedback cycle’ that has developed between the Bank and the US regarding the standard with which to judge the IO's performance. The refined focus on the impact of Bank-supported interventions has important implications for the internal ‘battlefield for knowledge’ in the organisation, particularly concerning the competing visions of an ‘economic’ and a ‘multi-dimensional’ conceptualisation of poverty.

Keywords:

• World Bank
• poverty reduction
• results agenda
• rationalism
• constructivism

Notes

I am grateful to André Broome and several members of the postgraduate community at POLSIS, University of Birmingham, for their comments on earlier drafts of this work. Thanks also to NPE's anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions helped strengthen the work.

The term is borrowed from Bebbington et al. (2004: 33).

Thanks are owed to the individuals that generously gave their time during interviews I carried out in late 2008 whilst working as a Visiting Research Scholar at American University. I am also grateful to Tamar Gutner of AU for her support during this time.

This idea accords with Johnson's view of ‘progress’ in political analysis. For Johnson (2002: 226), ‘we make progress insofar as we resolve conceptual as well as empirical problems. We make theoretical progress… to the extent that we specify more clearly the mechanisms at work in our theories or that we more successfully incorporate conceptual resources available from sources outside our own research tradition’.

The dramatic outlier in 2000/01 is the result of the WDR focussing on ‘Attacking Poverty’. The following graphs on capacity building assistance and the availability of poverty indicators also contain outliers around 2000/01, which I suggest were linked to a millennium-inspired push on MDG monitoring.

Information regarding the Bank's circulation of press releases was supplied by a World Bank Media Manager during e-mail correspondence, September 2008.

The insistence by creditor states that an increasing proportion of IDA resources are distributed in grant form means that the leverage available to them during replenishment negotiations is being ratcheted up.

In addition to its financial importance to the Bank, the relative influence of the US over the Bank is enhanced compared to that of other IDA creditors by the location of the Bank at the heart of Washington, DC. Senior Bank officials therefore meet directly with representatives of both the US Executive and Legislative branches with a frequency far surpassing that enjoyed by representatives of other creditors.

There is a burgeoning focus within a number of international forums on measuring the results of development assistance. The OECD DAC and the Paris 21 Consortium have been particularly noteworthy advocates. Their relationship to the processes outlined in the article is best seen as analogous to that of the UNDP mentioned above.

This information regarding the Bank's shift to statistical capacity building efforts was initially supplied by a Senior Statistician at the Bank in e-mail and telephone correspondence, September 2008, and was confirmed by several interviewees in Washington, DC in November and December 2008.

The group that I focus on are the 23 countries that have passed through the PRSP initiative to receive HIPC debt relief. For a complete list of the PRSP-HIPC group see IMF ‘PRSP Factsheet’, available at: http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/hipc.htm.

As the average level for World Bank members includes all IBRD borrowers (i.e. a grouping with on average a much higher level of per capita income than the PRSP-HIPCs), it is particularly surprising that the PRSP-HIPCs have a higher average capacity.

Calculated using figures from the World Bank World Development Indicators Database. On the database, nine proxy-indicators are used by the Bank to represent seven of the MDGs: I aggregated the total number of these poverty indicators on the database per year from the PRSP-HIPCs. This provided a rough corroboration of the Bank's own findings that over time the tracking by the PRSP-HIPCs had improved. Many thanks to Judi Atkins for her help with this painfully monotonous task!

See ARMS section of the World Bank Official Website, at http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/AFRICAEXT/EXTAFRRES/0,,contentMDK:21372873~menuPK:3882921~pagePK:64168445~piPK:64168309~theSitePK:3506896,00.html. For an examination of the use of training as a means of IO influence, see Broome (2010).

In order to be accepted as appropriate ‘global’ practices, the effectiveness of policy refinements generally must be demonstrated according to standards that satisfy key macroeconomic bastions within the Bank. See, for examples, Bebbington et al. (2004: 44) and Broad (2006).

On the role of Country Directors, see Aycrigg (1998: 18).

See Poverty Reduction Group section of the World Bank Official Website, at http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/0,,contentMDK:20153855~menuPK:373757~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:336992,00.html.

Poverty Reduction Group Training Workshop on Impact Evaluation of Poverty Alleviation Programs & Institutional Reforms, 29 April, 2009. For further information see http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/EXTPA/0,,contentMDK:22164246~menuPK:435390~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:430367~isCURL:Y,00.html.