January 2005

Robin Broad
International Development Program
School of International Service
American University

On The World Bank

[NOTE TO COMMENTATORS: I look forward to any comments, but would find it particularly interesting if you would address one thing I propose on page 6. I call for replacing the Bank with a substantially shrunk global institution that makes long-term, low interest loans in 1-2 areas but is more democratic and transparent (among other changes). I am curious what other things each of you thinks a scaled-down global institution doing public lending in the service of “development” should do. Beyond what I suggest in the text, is there anything at the Bank worth preserving or transferring to such an institution? If so, should it be at a global institution or could it better be done at a regional or national lending agency? - ROBIN BROAD]

I. Critical Moment on World Bank Work

This is a critical moment for reflection in World Bank advocacy work since James Wolfensohn, the Bank’s most dominant and imposing president since Robert McNamara, is stepping down in June 2005 after 10 years in the job. There will be a major debate in the financial and general press on what role the World Bank should play under a new president. Organizations and individuals in our movements need to be at the center of this debate with bold new proposals, and we need to be ready to respond to what is likely to be a new agenda of a Bush appointee.

Likewise, this is a moment when a number of journalists, following in the tradition of Sebastian Mallaby¹, will be attempting to write the legacy of Wolfensohn as a proud one of shifting the Bank toward poverty alleviation and debt reduction. This is not the true legacy of the Wolfensohn years, and NGOs have a major role to play in correcting that revisionist history to reflect reality on the ground. This is a time to be quick and nimble with NGO media work. It is an historical moment that holds the possibility of using voices from the South and North to catalyze a broad public debate that forces a shift in the deliberations about the next phase of World Bank work.

II. Looking Back: My Vantage Point ²

My views are, of course, shaped by my history. My interest in and work on the World Bank date to the late 1970s, long before I became an academic. I was living in the southern Philippines on the island of Mindanao. Ferdinand Marcos was in power and the country was a World Bank-designated “country of concentration” ? which meant that World Bank money was pouring in for various kinds of projects. One of these projects was to be a series of dams across the Chico River in the northern Philippines ? a project that provoked intense grassroots opposition. In a then probably unprecedented move, the tribal communities in the area to be flooded by the Chico dams wrote World Bank president Robert McNamara to halt the flooding of their ancestral domain. As far as I know, they received no answer. The local people protested on the ground ? meeting with violent reprisals from the authoritarian Marcos government. Still no answer. And so the local people resorted to a different technique: when the technical folks arrived, indigenous women bared their breasts in protest to keep the project from going forward. ³

That was more than 25 years ago. Things have clearly changed since then in terms of formal and informal structures of protest and accountability. There are now sophisticated global and local civil-society campaigns focused on the Bank. Local and global networks of non-governmental organizations monitor the Bank and serve as transmission belts to relay local concerns. Demonstrations against Bank policy and specific loans occur across the globe and can attract thousands of people. I have researched and witnessed much of this work in the Philippines, and then as both an academic and during brief stints as an international economist in the Treasury Department and the US Congress, and as a participant in numerous activist meetings.⁴ As I have said, my views are shaped by this history.

III. Taking Stock: What Activists Have Won at the Bank Over 25 Years

There is no global public institution where citizen groups have been more consistently involved over this past quarter century, and there are thousands of examples of both inside and outside NGO strategies vis-a-vis the Bank, making any summary by this author difficult. However, without pretending to be all-encompassing, I make the following generalizations:

・ After a first round of criticisms in the 1970s and early 1980s that focused on issues of political economy came another round of criticism focused more on the environment and indigenous peoples. Activism on the Bank grew steadily over the 1980s and into the 1990s, and it did have some impacts, although significant and lasting positive impacts on the poor and the environment are few.

・ The Bank pretty much ignored the earlier, broader critiques, but responded to the latter by vastly increasing the numbers of environmentalists on staff, including environmental economist Herman Daly and ecologist Robert Goodland. Yet Daly and others admit they had minimal impact on World Bank operations.

・ Widespread NGO criticism of adverse impacts of Bank projects on communities led to the creation of a Bank Inspection Panel but, overall, its impact has been small. ⁵

・ Criticism of the human and environmental impacts of Bank projects led to new Bank policies on transparency and disclosure, on local consultation and other “safeguard” policies (e.g. on resettlement, forestry, indigenous peoples), and to special “independent” review panels on dams and then on “extractive industries.” NGO research, campaigns and advice were directed at both those panels. Arguably-thoughtful reports and recommendations from each of these two reviews in many ways reflected those NGO views, but were largely rejected and/or remolded by Bank management and the Bank board.

・ Wolfensohn ushered in his administration with positive rhetoric articulating a desire to shift the Bank toward a poverty focus. The global financial crisis years of 1997-1998 created a crisis of legitimacy for Bank/Fund policies that led Wolfensohn's Bank to retreat on some contentious policies. World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz was (temporarily, it turned out) given space to be more critical, particularly of the “market fundamentalism” of the Fund, and the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative (SAPRI) exercise was launched.⁷

・ However, overall, the main changes pushed at the Bank have ended up being largely rhetorical. As a notable example, “structural adjustment” was stricken from the Bank lexicon and replaced with terms that seem intended to suggest another reality, from “anti-poverty loans” to “development-policy support.”⁸ Yet, in terms of the basic macroeconomic policies pursued by the Bank, the key components of the neo-liberal Washington Consensus remained unquestioned.⁹ Moreover, the percentage of policy-conditioned loans (which the Bank wrongly claims to have either no environmental impact or a positive one) remains high. This said, there were gains by NGOs over this period, including increased transparency and disclosure and new “safeguard” policies on the environmental and social impacts of Bank loans.

・ Since the early-2000s, especially after 9/11, there has been some backsliding by the Bank in terms of such reforms. In particular, it has moved to eliminate or lessen environmental and social safeguards on loans to medium income countries like Mexico, arguing that these create “unnecessary obstacles” to funding countries which already have adequate protections and legislation in place.¹⁰ And, it is shifting somewhat from its loans that it claimed (often falsely) were aimed at poverty reduction back into large infrastructure loans reminiscent of those that generated so much of the NGO criticism in the 1980s, terming these “high risk, high reward.”¹¹ For the poorest countries, the Bank has a new scorecard that has become a new mechanism for imposing Washington Consensus-type policies. ¹²

IV. Current NGO Proposals and Initiatives

There are a number of thoughtful current and proposed initiatives and campaigns on the World Bank, many of which are summarized in the report of the Third World Network-hosted global strategy session on the Bank and Fund in January 2004. ¹³Again, I am forced to summarize here and can in no way cover all the work and proposals.

For much of the 1990s, there was much debate over whether the Bank and its regional counterparts should be reformed or dismantled. Now, in the mid-2000s, there is a growing sense that much of the effort to engage the Bank and encourage reform has largely failed and, therefore, that the Bank should be “shrunk,” and accordingly that Bank advocacy should be under a common umbrella of limiting the space for the Bank’s operations. So, for example, there are campaigns to get the World Bank out of fossil fuels, campaigns to end its policy-based lending, and work to provide encouragement and support to countries (like Malaysia) to avoid Bank (and Fund) advice at all. Even on urgent problems like the HIV-AIDS pandemic, the World Health Organization is taking the lead and can better direct the resources that the Bank devotes to the issue. This growing “shrink” consensus is positive, and it should allow NGOs in our movement to get beyond the internally-destructive debate between “reform” and elimination. Hence, it is almost a moot point whether we are advocating for a fundamentally reformed World Bank or a new entity; the end result would be the same.

In addition, there is a great deal of work to move beyond tinkering and transform the “governance” structure of the Bank by, for example, making it accountable to elected representatives of the public in different countries, if not to the supposed beneficiaries themselves.¹⁴ Under this rubric, there is work to afford rights to “whistleblowers” within the Bank who wish to report misdeeds.¹⁵ There are also related proposals to establish external mechanisms and processes of accountability,¹⁶ many attempting to use human rights-based criteria to place external checks on the Bank. At the Penang meeting, many stressed the importance of this work.

Similarly, there is important work to stop Bank initiatives that de-facto assist corporate expansion in developing countries. Of note here is work critiquing the Bank’s shift from advocating privatization to what many activists see as the equally-damaging framework of “public-private partnerships” (i.e. public sector ventures with large private corporations) in sectors like water. ¹⁷

V. Some New Directions

The following suggestions are based on my reading of this more than 25 years of work and of my sense of “consensus” among Bank “watchers” and critics at this moment in time. It is not the job of one person or organization to suggest the one way forward on World Bank work. Rather, the suggestions are meant to provoke lively discussion and to supplement the excellent work already going on (some of which is mentioned above).

The first two suggestions build on current campaigns but aim our sights on not what is wrong with the Bank but on envisioning what we really want and need in terms of global institutions that meet our strategic goals. In other words, it is time to focus on the bridge between our decades-long criticism of the current global institutions (which has time and again proven correct) and our more recent, vibrant work on global alternatives.

1. We need to advance the discussion over whether there is any role for a global public institution that does long-term, low-interest loans and/or grants.

The key question in figuring out the overall strategic framework for NGO advocacy on the World Bank is whether, 60 years after the creation of the World Bank, there is a role for a global public institution that makes long-term, low-interest loans and/or grants. From my knowledge of NGO discussions, there has been very little in-depth discussion of this question.

Related to this, there was some discussion in the extractive industry battle about whether (if we could get the World Bank to stop lending massive amounts to oil, gas, and coal projects) we would want some global public body to provide long-term loans (or grants) for clean energy or energy efficiency. Such public subsidies for clean energy could help drive down the price of clean energy and give it the cost-advantage it deserves vis-a-vis fossil fuels. Some have proposed a new global institution with this mandate, but with a different governance structure from the World Bank.¹⁸ But, we need to expand the discussions on other aspects of long-term lending so we can know what positive global structure(s) ? if any ? we want.

Agriculture? We know we oppose World Bank lending for big agribusiness enterprises, but is there a role for global finance for other modes of agriculture or for transforming agriculture into a sustainable, locally-driven alternative? I would hypothesize probably not, precisely because most of our alternatives in agriculture are local,¹⁹ but it is worth a discussion as there are still “costs” here. How about for roads, electrical grids, and other infrastructure? Again, probably not, since we want most of those decisions to be local and national, and a global institution would likely distort this dynamic. But, still, let us have a discussion, keeping in mind that most Southern governments are enamored with long-term, low-interest loans of any kind and therefore it is hard to engage them in this “shrink” discussion without some clear alternative or very explicit argument of why no alternative is necessary. (More on engaging local governments, below.)

We may be for some sort of much smaller global institution that does public lending for specific purposes. If so, we need to spell it out, and, in the end, we might even want these purposes fulfilled by even smaller regional institutions that would reduce U.S. power.²⁰ And if so, we would want it (or them) to have much more democratic and open governance structures. We would want it/them to be accountable not to treasury and finance departments of governments, but to elected officials or others (with relevant expertise and mandate), chosen by the public for this purpose. But, it will take some discussion to spell out a consensus on what such institution(s) might look like and what it/they would do.

2. We need a discussion on whether there is a role for a global institution that offers policy advice.

NGOs in our movements are united against the Washington Consensus policies the Bank has pushed, even in their various new and improved rhetorical packages of the Wolfensohn years. But do we think that global public institutions can offer policy advice that is useful? Here I am also hesitant. We know that we do not believe in “one-size fits all” cookie cutter models and therefore want to stop non-project loans that carry Washington Consensus conditions. I suspect that some in our movements would be fine with a more democratic and open entity offering a menu of policy options to respond to different problems. But, to repeat, the advice must be offered as a menu and as suggestions only. Some may see a role for the UNDP in this sphere, if it were to follow its Human Development Report rights-based approach here.

The next two suggestions focus on new campaigns to target certain parts of the Bank for immediate elimination. I see these as potential “high reward, low risk” campaigns under the umbrella of a “shrink” strategy.

3. We should advocate dismantling the Bank’s research department.²¹

Most observers, NGOs, and even government members know little about this part of the Bank which is outside of operations and falls under the chief economist. But, as the Bank’s role evolves, it is critical that we focus on more than the operations side of the Bank. Indeed, I would argue that the Bank’s “paradigm maintenance” role²² , through its research is at least equally important to that of its actual lending.²³ Further, the Bank’s research serves the role of justifying the Bank’s lending.

A 2003 internal document detailing the research department’s mission, output, and outcomes makes its ideological bias clear. One would expect a research division to define a successful “outcome” of its work to be something along the lines of advancing rigorous research to answer some particular set of development-related questions. Instead, this document seeks to justify a requested research budget through the shocking statement that the top “final outcomes” for Bank trade-related research during FY04-06 will be as follows: “Developing countries are fully integrated into the global trading system; WTO rules are seen to support development by stakeholders.”²⁴ In other words, the research department begins its work by not only taking the answer to the question of the relationship between trade and development as given, but also seeing its research in service of a given structure of trade.

Yet, surely, researchers in an institution dedicated to reducing poverty should have a responsibility to the poor and marginalized, not to the ideology of the institution that employs them. Just as we would oppose a pharmaceutical company doing research on the health effects of its own medicine, it is impossible for the World Bank to do objective research on development. Today, when researchers are honest about the negative impacts of World Bank policies, their work is either subverted or ignored in World Bank operations. Indeed, the research department is a de facto propaganda arm of the Bank that masquerades as a center for vibrant and highest quality academic research; it is anything but. To repeat, it should be eliminated.

Wolfensohn had pretensions of moving in the other direction and expanding this role by turning the Bank (both operations and research) into a “Knowledge Bank,” a centralized and dominating place for development information and expertise. The irony here is that the Knowledge Bank initiative seeks to give the World Bank near-monopoly control to define and disseminate “development knowledge” ? while it pushed free-market policies elsewhere. The Bank has shown itself particularly incapable of doing rigorous research and of relaying alternative views of “knowledge.” It is the wrong place for such an enterprise; its Knowledge Bank initiatives should be de-funded.²⁵

The Bank’s Chief Economist oversees both research and data collection. Some may argue that we should move to vastly scale back rather than eliminate the Chief Economist’s terrain by eliminating research but continuing the data collection. Perhaps there is a role for a global public development institution to do data collection, but why the World Bank? Why not locate this somewhere else in a more democratic and open structure -- perhaps in the U.N., perhaps in the UNDP, or, better yet, in UN regional offices. Let us help bring back the days when, for example, the UN Economic Commission for Latin America was looked at for its regional expertise. Moreover, some civil society groups, such as Social Watch, provide excellent data on a wide range of countries and measurements. We should look to groups such as Social Watch, with its international coordinating committee, to clarify what kind of data collection is best done on which level and for suggestions on how, in this new set-up, best to link collaboratively national, regional, and global sources of data. ²⁶

The flagship publication of the World Bank, the World Development Report, which also is under the Chief Economist, should also be eliminated. It is costly, is typically overseen by an outside consultant, and actually tells us very little aside from what the World Bank wants outsiders to think that it does. Its role is mostly public relations.

4. We should advocate for the elimination of the External Relations department, which is little more than a glorified public relations department.

The External Relations department projects the research work of the Bank that attempts to justify the “market fundamentalist” approach of the Bank, while it underplays any research that raises questions about the Washington Consensus policies. External Relations also strives to be a filter for communication between the external world and other parts of the Bank. External Relations’ budget has increased over the years. It too should be eliminated. An institution that truly serves the poor and marginalizes should not need a de-facto public-relations firm.

In sum, in terms of the above four proposals, the vast majority of the Bank’s project loans are either ecologically or socially damaging, or increase inequalities, and its policy-based lending, research, and public relations should be ended. Hence, in effect, I am advocating a much smaller and more democratic and transparent global lending institution that restricts itself to a small number of activities where global reach is helpful, such as clean energy loans. Clearly its staff would not be conventional economists, but would be experts on clean energy and other areas where lending is deemed useful and with intimate knowledge of the multi-disciplinary development process. This entity might also play a role in coordination of reconstruction funds in global catastrophes, such as the December 2004 tsunami, but even then it would largely serve as a transmission belt of global funds to national and local entities. With a far smaller global bank, governments would be encouraged to refocus more public monies on national and local public entities that help to subsidize education, health care, and other social programs, as well as on private micro-credit institutions at the local and national level.

VI. The Political Moment

Let me end by focusing on two important issues to grapple with vis-a-vis the current political moment.

1. The new World Bank president is almost certain to be very different from Wolfensohn.

The Bush administration has internal conflicts over the World Bank that reflect the larger conflict within conservative circles over the Bank that surfaced with the late 1990s deliberations of the so-called Meltzer Commission.²⁷ Prior to the Bush administration coming to power in 2000, most U.S. conservatives supported the Bank and its market-oriented policies, and Republican administrations were good to the Bank (even those like Reagan who initially termed the Bank a “socialist” institution). However, another strain of conservatism, one that came to dominate the Meltzer Commission, has been far more consistently critical of the Bank, seeing it as a large, unaccountable public institution that should be significantly scaled-back to give grants to the poorest of poor countries while letting the private sector lead the “development enterprise” and invest in most other developing countries.

Given that a second George W. Bush administration is moving to the right, this view may be even more dominant. Among the leading candidates mentioned for the Bank presidency after Wolfensohn, there has been only one name of the old-fashioned pro-Bank wing -- Colin Powell, who claims to have taken his name out of the running. Other lead candidates, Treasury Department official John Taylor and former US Trade Representative Carla Hills, are more classic private-sector free-marketers, who may have a Meltzer-esque “neoliberal shrink” agenda. This will pose difficult political challenges for NGOs that also have a “shrink” agenda, but vastly different both tactically and strategically. Our movements need to be prepared to criticize heavily the Wolfensohn neoliberal agenda as well as the neoliberal-shrink agenda ? with specific tactics becoming clearer once a new president is named.

2. We need to engage the new governments such as those in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Venezuela in this advocacy.

The Third World Network and others have emphasized that one way to reduce the power of the international financial institutions overall is to work with governments to disengage from these institutions. The above-mentioned governments, along with India, have been, at times recently, bold in WTO and other trade discussions but largely silent on the Bank and Fund. Let us engage these governments more. As noted above, these key borrowers tend to approach the World Bank with an eye towards getting as much easy credit as possible. Engaging them is difficult work, but there are openings.

The World Bank presidential succession is one such opening. We should use this short-term historical moment tactically to criticize 60 years of Bank presidents and to push for an alternative “model:” the World Bank should be led by someone who has lived and really knows the issues of the poor and marginalized, preferably from a poor country.

In general, in terms of our overall strategic goal, we need to emphasize more graphically and empirically the adverse impacts of the Bank’s macro-economic policy pressure and its role in “paradigm maintenance.” Such borrower governments need to see more clearly that the World Bank is not simply an institution that provides easy, cheap credit. We need to stress the “cross-conditionality” and the cross interests that bind the World Bank to the WTO and IMF. We need to expose how the World Bank is expanding its neo-liberal trade work and role.²⁹

Concluding Remarks

It is a propitious historical moment for this work. And we should approach it with energy and optimism. Much has been exposed during the last 25 years. The World Bank is a different institution than it was. That does not mean our work is over. But it does mean that we need to view this work as doable. The Bank was created by individuals ? Dean Acheson, Harry Dexter White, John Maynard Keynes ? at a particular moment in history to do a particular task. We are at another moment in history; we need a different institution or set of institutions.

² This section (II.) is only for initial stages of circulation of this draft.

³ See Philippines: Repression and Resistance ? Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal Session on the Philippines (Utrecht, Netherlands: Philippine-European Solidarity Center-Komite ng Sambayanang Pilipino [PESC-KSP], 1980).

⁴ See, for instance, Walden Bello et al., Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines, of which I was a co-author.

⁵ Dana Clark, Jonathan Fox, and Kay Treakle, Demanding Accountability: Civil-Society Claims and the World Bank Inspection Panel (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). See the edition of this book published in India (Rainbow Publishers, 2003) for Smitu Kothari’s preface.

⁶ See “60 Years of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,” Civil Society Strategy Meeting, Summary Report, Report of a global strategy session, Penang, Malaysia, January 24-27, 2004, report prepared by the co-organizers of the Penang Conference: Bank Information Center, Bretton Woods Project, Campagna per la Riforma della Banca Mondiale, and Third World Network. See also Doug Hellinger, “50 Years Was Enough!” available from the Development GAP in Washington. D.C, or in Global Future (2004), 3rd quarter; and Bruce Rich, “The World Bank Under James Wolfensohn” in Jonathan Pincus and Jeffrey Winters, eds., Reinventing the World Bank (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2002), as well as the web-sites of 50 Years Is Enough, the Bretton Wood Project and of the Bank Information Center, the collective “IFI-watchers” site: www.ifiwatchnet.org, and freedominfo.org.

⁷ The Bank’s participation was not what it promised. But, whatever the results in this regard, this was an important undertaking. See SAPRI web-site (www.saprin.org) as well as the Zed book titled Structural Adjustment -- The SAPRI Report: The Policy Roots of Economic Crisis, Poverty and Inequality (2004)..

⁸ The Bank’s OP 8.60 was approved by the World Bank Board on 9 August 2004. See Operations Policy and Country Services, World Bank, “From Adjustment Lending to Development Policy Lending: Update of World Bank Policy,” Washington, D.C., World Bank, August 2004.

⁹ On this, see Robin Broad, “The Washington Consensus Meets the Global Backlash: Shifting Debates and Policies,” Globalizations v.1, n.2 (December 2004).

¹⁰The Bank’s document on this proposal is called “Enhancing World Bank Support for Middle-Income Countries” and an associated “Management Action Plan” (SecM2004-0071, dated 26 February 2004. Quote is from p.ii of the latter, but the term “obstacles” is used throughout. A thorough critique is Nancy Alexander, “Moving Money in Middle-Income Countries (MICs): The Bank’s Proposed Strategy and Implications for the Issues of Corruption and Infrastructure Development,” Citizens’ Network on Essential Services, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA, 1 August 2004 (available at www.servicesforall.org). Complement this with International Rivers Network (www.irn.org) which includes numerous NGO comments protesting the weakening of the safeguards. See also the Friends of the Earth-US report entitled “Gambling with People’s Lives: The World Bank and High-Risk Projects,” available at www.foe.org. For a view supporting the Bank’s new middle-income initiative, see Johannes Linn, “The Role of World Bank Lending in Middle Income Countries,” OECD Conference on the Effectiveness of Policies and Reforms, Washington, D.C., 4 October 2004. Linn, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, states (p.4) that the new middle-income-countries-policy is needed to counteract the fact the “excessively rigorous and demanding fiduciary and social/environmental safeguards attached to Bank projects has slowed down Bank lending and increased its effective costs to borrowers” (a view, he notes, that he shares with Sebastian Mallaby).

¹¹See “Informal Summary -- NGO Strategy Meeting on the World Bank and IMF,” summary of meeting held in Penang, Malaysia, 24-27 January 2004, first draft, p. 13. The final version of this document is “60 Years of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,” Civil Society Strategy Meeting, Summary Report, prepared by the co-organizers of the Penang Conference: Bank Information Center, Bretton Woods Project, Campagna per la Riforma della Banca Mondiale, and Third World Network.

¹²On the IDA Country Performance (ICP) and the Country Policy Institutional Assessment (CPIA), see Jeff Powell, “The World Bank Policy Scoreboard: The New Conditionality,” November 2004, www.brettonwoodsproject.org/atissuecpia.

¹³“60 Years of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,” Civil Society Strategy Meeting, Penang, Malaysia, January 24-27, 2004, Summary report prepared by the co-organizers of the Penang Conference: Bank Information Center, Bretton Woods Project, Campagna per la Riforma della Banca Mondiale, and Third World Network.

¹⁴Much, but not all, of this work is done locally. See, for example, the parliamentary work of Rede Brasil and the Freedom from Debt Coalition (in the Philippines) as well as that of the Bank Information Center and the Bretton Woods Project.

¹⁵For more on the campaign of the US-based Government Accountability Project that seeks to deepen whistleblower protections at the MDBs, see www.whistleblower.org.

¹⁶See the work of Jonathan Fox for more on this.

¹⁷For an overview of this work, see the websites of the Council of Canadians (www.canadians.org) and of Public Citizen (www.publiccitizen.org).

¹⁸See International Forum on Globalization, Alternatives to Economic Globalization, section on energy (2004 2nd edition).

¹⁹Here I am thinking about, for example, ongoing initiatives such as those in India. A notable example is the work of Vandana Shiva and the New Delhi-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology, especially on community seed banks.

²⁰See Walden Bello on deglobalization.

²¹This section on research and the next on external relations grow from my own research. I am writing
an article that takes a more detailed look at the Bank’s research and public relations work. Robin Broad, “Research, Knowledge, and ‘Paradigm Maintenance’: The Political Economy of the World Bank’s Development Economics Research Department (DEC),” 2005 draft manuscript available from author.

²²This term is taken from Robert Wade, “Japan, The World Bank, and the Art of Paradigm Maintenance: The East Asian Miracle in Political Perspective,” New Left Review, n.217 (May/June 1996): 3-39.

²³Note that I am absolutely not suggesting that we stop the project work. Monitoring upcoming and ongoing projects to be sure the local concerns are heard at the Bank remains important ? even if it is not our strategic goal. Witness the recent “confrontation” in Guatemala related to a gold mine for which the IFC has lent $45 million (Graham Saul [Friends of the Earth, Canada], “Action Alert: Guatemalans Oppose WB-Funded Mine ? Military Threatens,” distributed by 50 Years Is Enough “50 Years Email List, 11 January 2004. This includes a background briefing by Daniel Vogt).

²⁴This is an “official use only” document. Interesting enough, the same table lists “Assumption: trade reform will be achieved and it will contribute to pro-poor growth” ? in other words, no research was needed; this is just taken as a given assumption. World Bank Group, World Bank Programs and Budgets for FY04- Volume II: Unit Compact Summaries for FY04-06” vol. II, from Vice President and Corporate Secretary, section on “Development Economics Compact Summary,” 29 May 2003 for meeting of the Board, 26 June 2003, p.95.

²⁵This is discussed in the Penang document, p. 14 of first draft. For excellent background information on the Knowledge Bank, see the web site of the Bretton Woods Project.

²⁶See, for example, Roberto Bissio, managing editor, Social Watch Report 2003: The Poor and the Market (Montevideo, Uruguay: Instituto del Tercer Mundo, 2003).

²⁷This was published by the US Government Printing Office under the title of Report of the International Financial Institution Advisory Commission, by Allan H. Meltzer, chair (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2000), USGPO #048-000-00531-4.

²⁸This was especially so in Cancun.

²⁹See, for example, the World Bank’s “International Trade Group home page” at www.worldbank.org/research/trade/index.htm.
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