![Sample our Global Development journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5929/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Global-Development.jpg"})
Abstract
Arguing that international development policymaking is technocratic is not new. However, examining technocracy as a political rationality sheds new light on intentionality, on the evolution of policymaking practices, and on change and stability as part of a single process. In short, the meaningful adoption of new inclusive practices (change) has stabilised World Bank employees’ mode of thought and action (stability). My overall argument is that World Bank employees translate potentially radical new knowledge, tools and concepts through a neoliberal technocratic rationality, thereby translating radical practices into technocratic ones. The concept of translation can further our understanding of how inclusion has reinforced rather than challenged the status quo. I thus consider both stability and change at the World Bank from 1980 to 2010, without downgrading either. This article also explores the spread of this political rationality to borrowing governments and populations through self-censorship and mirroring mechanisms, rendering old fashioned conditionalities obsolete. This research is based on extensive interview material and archival analysis.
Acknowledgements
For their careful reviews of this research, I would like to thank Emanuel Adler, Steven Bernstein, Jacqueline Best, Willy Blomme, Matthew Hoffmann and Wendy Wong. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors of Third World Quarterly for their invaluable comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Interview, Oral History Project (OHP), Ismail Serageldin, October 25–26, 2000. Interviews for the OHP were carried out by World Bank archivists throughout the years with previous World Bank employees and managers.
2 Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents; Lie, “Developmentality: Indirect Governance”; Easterly, Tyranny of Experts; Chhotray, “Negation of Politics in Participatory Development Projects.”
3 Vetterlein, “Seeing Like the World Bank on Poverty,” 53.
4 Levy, “Learning and Foreign Policy,” 286.
5 Ruckert, “Producing Neoliberal Hegemony.”
6 Rahnema, “Participatory Action Research.”
7 Cammack, “What the World Bank Means,” 13.
8 Lie, “Developmentality: Indirect Governance,” 723, 724, 736.
9 Easterly, Tyranny of Experts.
10 Pouliot, “Practice Tracing.”
11 Best, “Bureaucratic Ambiguity.”
12 Kothari, “Authority and Expertise,” 427.
13 Dardot and Laval, Nouvelle Raison du Monde, 21.
14 Dardot and Laval, “Néolibéralisme et Subjectivation Capitaliste.”
15 Dardot and Laval, Nouvelle Raison du Monde.
16 Weaver, “The World’s Bank and the Bank’s World”; Barnett and Finnemore, Rules for the World.
17 Ruckert, “Producing Neoliberal Hegemony.”
18 Bechky, “Sharing Meaning across Occupational Communities.”
19 Cernea, “Sociologists in a Development Agency,” 32. (Emphasis added)
20 Bacqué and Biewener, L’Empowerment, une Pratique Émancipatrice; Kabeer, “Empowerment, Citizenship and Gender Justice.”
21 Guijt and Shah, Myth of Community, 1.
22 Dudley, Critical Villager: Beyond Community Participation, 7; Cornwall, “Buzzwords and Fuzzwords: Deconstructing Development Discourse.”
23 Interview, OHP Gloria Davis, June 28–29, 2004.
24 Alsop et al., World Bank, Empowerment in practice, 6.
25 Robb, Can the Poor Influence Policy? 6.
26 Ibid., 57.
27 Ibid., 35.
28 Porter and Craig, “The Third Way and the Third World,” 54.
29 Shah, Participatory Budgeting, 1.
30 Theuer, “Democratic Participation and the Management of Scarce Resources.”
31 Sintomer et al., “Learning from the South.”
32 Ibid., 31.
33 Kapoor, “Concluding Remarks: The Power of Participation,” 127.
34 de Senarclens, “How the United Nations Promotes Development,” 195.
35 Chhotray, “Negation of Politics in Participatory Development Projects,” 328.
36 Sondarjee, “Collective Learning at the Boundaries of Communities of Practice.”
37 Interview 20, July 17, 2017.
38 Interview 26, July 24,2017; Interview 34, November 8, 2017; Interview OHP Winston Temple, October 25–26, 2000.
39 Interview 26, July 24, 2017.
40 Interview OHP Paul Cadario, April 4, 17, 22 and 30, 2013.
41 Ibid.
42 Interview 28, August 15, 2017.
43 Interview 20, July 17, 2017.
44 Interview 41, November 21, 2017.
45 Interview 26, July 24, 2017.
46 Interview 20, July 17, 2017.
47 Interview 14, June 26, 2017.
48 Interview, OHP Peter Woicke, March 7, 2005.
49 Ibid.
50 International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, Submission to IMF/World Bank Review on the PRSP Process, Washington DC, 1November 13, 2001, cited in Rowden and Irama, Rethinking Participation. Questions for Civil Society.
51 Lister and Nyamugasira, “Design Contradictions in the ‘New Architecture of Aid,’” 99.
52 Dardot and Laval, Nouvelle Raison du Monde, 325.
53 Interview 28, August 15, 2017.
54 Interview 21, July 19, 2017.
55 Wood, “World Bank’s Poverty Reduction Support Credit: Continuity or Change?,” 1; Lie, “Developmentality: Indirect Governance,” 731.
56 Interview 28, August 15, 2017.
57 Cited in Rowden and Irama, Rethinking Participation. Questions for Civil Society.
58 Wolfensohn, A Global Life: My Journey.
59 Interview 39, November 14, 2017.
60 Interview 31, November 6, 2017.
61 Mosse, “Is Good Policy Unimplementable?,” 652.
62 Burchell, “Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self,” 29.
63 Foucault, “Governmentality.”
64 Wilson, “Beyond the Technocrat? The Professional Expert,” 510.
65 Ibid., 511.
66 Finley Scott, Internalization of Norms, 45.
67 Phillips, Reforming the World Bank, 158.
68 Kothari, “Authority and Expertise,” 425.
69 Jackson, Globalizers: Development Workers in Action, 3.
70 Ruckert, “Producing Neoliberal Hegemony.”
71 Dardot and Laval, Nouvelle Raison du Monde, 433.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Maïka Sondarjee
Maïka Sondarjee is an Assistant Professor at the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. She was previously a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Université de Montréal. She obtained her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2020. Her doctoral research was a critical sociology of the inclusion of local populations in policymaking processes at the World Bank.