Reframing knowledge: A comparison of OECD and World Bank discourse on public governance reform

ABSTRACT

As knowledge producers and transfer agents, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank (WB) rely on their own research infrastructures to promote the dissemination public governance reform. To enhance their authority and legitimacy, they frame their economic knowledge through prominent documents that set the agenda for policy advisory activities and practices. This paper suggests that the influence of epistemic communities on the extent of change in these international organisations’ agenda-setting depends on their institutional determinants, namely mandate, knowledge production processes and knowledge validation procedures. Both IOs strategically select their preferred sources of expert knowledge. The OECD refers to technical expertise to enhance its new public management agenda through adjustments. The WB is attuned to economic expertise, resulting in transformations of knowledge frames.

KEYWORDS:

• International agenda-setting
• good governance
• international knowledge institution
• epistemic communities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ In other words, ‘[i]t was legitimate to gather information on the political situation to enable the Bank to give good policy advice and make good assessments of the feasibility and effects of proposed reforms, or to judge creditworthiness or project implementation capacity’ (Thomas, 2007, p. 733).

² There is a general agreement among scholars that within the WB the notion of ‘good governance’ surfaced in the 1989 report on Sub-Saharan Africa. The report concluded that the crisis in the region was a consequence of a ‘crisis of governance’ (Santiso, 2001; Best, 2012 but cf. Thomas, 2007). The consideration of the importance of institutional quality in economic development was also due to the democratic institutional transition of former communist countries, the East Asian economic development model and the fiscal crisis of the welfare state.

³ The realisation of its intervention failures forced the WB to search for agencies other than the state that could design and implement development projects (Williams, 2008a, p. 48).

⁴ http://www.oecd.org/about/whatwedoandhow/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the FP7 People: Marie-Curie Actions [PCIG12-GA-2012- 334008].

Notes on contributors

Fabrizio De Francesco

Fabrizio De Francesco is a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. His research focuses on comparative public policy and administration, regulation and transnational governance.

Edoardo Guaschino

Edoardo Guaschino is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the University of Lausanne. He is a visiting researcher at the Wagner graduate school of public service of the New York University and previously was a visiting research fellow at the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.