Power, knowledge and environmental assessment: the World Bank’s pursuit of ‘good governance’

Abstract

This article sheds light on the dynamics of power in a contested field of action – environmental assessment (EA) – within which theorisation and analysis of power has been limited, and there has been little engagement with productive approaches to power. We use of a typology for analysing the production of social order to create a rich and complex narrative of the power dimensions of the institutionalisation of EA systems, and thereby to problematise this field of action. The analysis focuses upon the World Bank’s pursuit of its strategy of reshaping governance in developing countries through the development of a new instrument for EA – Institution‐centred Strategic Environmental Assessment (ISEA). We examine the Bank’s experimentation with ISEA as an instrument for the critique, unsettling and potential reform of environmental governance in developing countries, and as a mechanism for reinforcing its status as a leading authority on development. This situated analysis opens the way towards a richer understanding of power dynamics in the field of EA, from which a clearer understanding of the normative challenges within this field of action can be developed. In so doing, it also raises the vexed question of how concepts and technologies of governance have permeated environment and development thinking with so little critical scrutiny.

Keywords:

• World Bank
• power analytics
• environmental assessment
• governance
• development cooperation
• institution‐centred strategic environmental assessment (ISEA)

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of the article was presented at the ‘Power & Knowledge’ 2nd International Conference, Tampere, Finland, 6–8 September 2010. (Track IV: Knowledge, Power and the Environment – Theoretical perspectives: ‘Power, knowledge and environment assessment: Towards a research agenda?) Matthew Cashmore acknowledges the financial support of a fellowship on ‘The effectiveness of strategic environmental assessment’ funded by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. We are grateful for insightful and constructive referee’s comments.

Notes

1. We use the former term, ISEA, because this portrays more clearly the primary focus of this tool. Yet it is noted that the WB does not define how it interprets the term ‘institution’, and it uses it in an imprecise manner. Oftentimes, the WB seems to use it as a synonym for organisation, yet at other times, it seems to refer to understanding the governance context (see Ahmed and Sánchez‐Triana 2008a, pp. 187–189).

2. This is a function of framing governance as a technical issue, as opposed to a political one. The need for such a framing is arguably driven, at least in part, by the constitutions of many multilateral development cooperation organisations, which tend to prohibit them for engaging with political issues in developing countries (Jokinen 2004). As a consequence, governance has to be construed as a technical and solvable concern in order to legitimise intervention.

3. An explicit objective of the pilot programme and its evaluation was to inform guidance on EA produced by the OECD DAC (World Bank 2010).

4. One aspect of this is acceptance within the WB as a powerful mechanism for reproducing ISEA. For example, it was suggested that the ISEA pilot for minerals policy in Sierra Leone affected the WB’s sectoral practices in Kosovo, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea, Mongolia, West Africa and Malawi. It was also said to influence WB projects for other economic sectors that were being initiated in Sierra Leone.

5. See the distance‐learning course developed for EA capacity development in China, in particular the presentations by Ahmed and Sánchez‐Triana: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/WBI/WBIPROGRAMS/ENRLP/0,,contentMDK:20380435~pagePK:64156158~piPK:64152884~theSitePK:460957,00.html

6. The need for evidence of the utility of EA has been emphasised publicly and vociferously at the annual conferences of the International Association for Impact Assessment in 2010 and 2011 by members of the OECD DAC Strategic Environmental Assessment Task Team.