Technocracy and the market: world bank group technical assistance and the rise of neoliberalism

This thesis analyses the provision of technical assistance by the World Bank Group (the Group) from 1946 to 2010. Technical assistance concerns the transmission of knowledge and practices to encourage economic growth. Starting from the ontological position that “development” is merely a series of normative positions that change over time and that are dependent upon the worldview of the observer, it argues that Group technical assistance has helped to construct, project, and legitimise particular development “truths”. Drawing upon literature from within the discipline of International Political Economy, this analysis regards technical assistance as a form of power whereby exercising actors are able to persuade others and define structures in such a way as to make particular understandings appear as common sense. The use of “soft” technical assistance to build institutional and human resource capacity during the neoliberal era – built through policy reform, management selection, and personnel training – became a means to persuade recipients of the alleged legitimacy of market-led development. An institutional study, this work contextualises the growth and evolution of Group technical assistance in terms of crises in the world economy, shifting intellectual movements in academic and policy circles, and changes in the mission, organisational structure, and leadership of the Group. The Group is thus a shaper of and is shaped by the mainstream development discourse – the orthodox conceptualisation of the economic, political, social, and environmental “improvement” of developing countries. The thesis concludes that Group technical assistance has been able to reinforce particular “truths” through its allegedly scientific, objective, and value-neutral nature dissuading challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy. This thesis contributes to academic discussion by analysing the persuasive ability of Group technical assistance to convince recipients of the necessity of accepting and adopting particular development “truths” that are far from objective or value-neutral

The wolfensohn, wolfowitz, and zoellick presidencies: Revitalising the neoliberal agenda of the world bank

This article analyses the World Bank presidencies of James Wolfensohn (1995–2005), Paul Wolfowitz (2005–2007), and Robert Zoellick (2007–2012) to review how the World Bank spent more than a decade attempting to renew the legitimacy of its neoliberal agenda that was widely denounced following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. It is the argument here that between the Asian Crisis and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the World Bank turned away from an aggressive and coercively conditional neoliberal approach towards a flexible, collaborative, and comprehensive neoliberal approach. Observing the norm entrepreneurs of the World Bank Presidents and Chief Economists, the major contribution of this article is to reveal that the World Bank has attempted in recent years to renew the legitimacy of its developmental mindset, while maintaining a market-centric mentality. The conclusion reached by this article is that the World Bank evolved in rhetoric and practice between the Asian Crisis and the GFC to revitalise its widely condemned (yet stalwartly maintained) neoliberal discourse

Development Banks: Washington Consensus, Beijing Consensus or Banking Consensus?

This edited book provides a contemporary, critical and thought-provoking analysis of the internal and external threats to Western multilateral development finance in the twenty-first century. It draws on the expertise of scholars with a range of backgrounds providing a critical exploration of the neoliberal multilateral development aid. The contributions focus on how Western institutions have historically dominated development aid, and juxtapose this hegemony with the recent challenges from right-wing populist and the Beijing Consensus ideologies and practices. This book argues that the rise of right-wing populism has brought internal challenges to traditional powers within the multilateral development system.　 External challenges arise from the influence of China and regional development banks by providing alternatives to established Western dominated aid sources and architecture. From this vantagepoint, Rethinking Multilateralism in Foreign Aid puts forward new ideas for addressing the current global social, political and economic challenges concerning multilateral development aid.　 This book will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in the field of International Development and Global Governance, decision-makers at government level as well as to those working in international aid institutions, regional and bilateral aid agencies, and non-governmental organisations