Speaking the language of change

Speaking the language of change

Democratic Centralism entails popular participation in formulating the plan at the enterprise level. — World Bank Romania country report, 1979.
The World Bank’s ‘World Development Report 2017: Governance and the Law’ is a remarkable document. Remarkable, because it is hard to believe that the World Bank authored this document. When the report cites Michel Foucault — that incandescent (उत्साही/दीप्त) French thinker, who showed us how supposedly free and rational institutions of modernity are indissolubly linked with power and social control — it is time to pay attention.
Politics and power
The report focusses on politics and power in development policy, and endeavors (प्रयत्न) to move them “from the margins to the core of development thinking and action”. Essentially, this goes against the soul of seven decades of development thinking — technocracy: reliance on capital, technology and (Western) experts and supposedly above politics and power — perpetrated by international financial institutions (IFIs)/development agencies controlled by the Global North.
Contrast the report with scholar Bruce Rich’s assessment of the World Bank during the presidency of Robert McNamara when the bank expanded phenomenally: “McNamara’s grandiose (विशाल/भव्य) vision involved a wager (more formal term for bet) that was indeed Faustian (relating to or resembling Faust, a German astronomer and necromancer reputed to have sold his soul to the Devil.) — a risky experiment with life and nature, using simplistic technologies, and a fatal hubris (अभिमान/शेखी) about the bank’s ability to know, plan and direct the evolution of human societies and the natural systems they depend on.” This Faustian notion informed development projects in the Third World, whether inspired by the imagination of American economist W.W. Rostow in the 1960s, or that of neoliberal capitalist policy prescriptions of the Washington Consensus from the 1980s.
Reading the report in this context is like reading a treasure trove of ironies. There is a lot in it for those who oppose development as technical fixes and as Northern imperialism. The report, remarkably, emphasises public goods and public spending on health, education and infrastructure. It expresses concern that inequalities are growing, that inequality has a multiplier effect, and stresses that “ultimately, growth and inequality are jointly determined”.
For the report, development is not the expansion of economic freedom, but following Amartya Sen, is the removal of all kinds of “unfreedoms” so that governance delivers the three goals of security, growth and equity achieved in ecologically sustainable ways. The report also gives a nuanced (सूक्ष्म भेद युक्त) account of the democratisation processes. It has a useful survey of elites from 12 countries. The report’s comparative scope is one of its strengths, giving interesting facts such as how multi-party elections led to the reduction of infant mortality rates in Sub-Saharan Africa!
This reinforces what critics of the World Bank and other IFIs have always argued — that there is no solution to problems of development but substantive democracy. But the most important question is what has changed since the days when the bank, as Rich documents, applauded (सराहना करना) the Communist dictator Ceauşescu’s centralised economic control and state planning and helped Romania become one of its largest borrowers.
As a social document
The answer lies in reading the World Bank report as a social document. It is not just about the World Bank studying society, but turning the lens back on the World Bank. The bank is not detached from but is a part of the same social processes that it describes. Ironically, then, we have to follow the report’s prescriptions: “taking politics seriously in development points directly to the need to challenge the interests of the power holders that control institutions — something that many development organizations have not yet decided they are willing to do”.
What is different from four decades ago is that the bank is also responding to multifarious (बहुविध/अनेक) challenges to the development hegemony (आधिपत्य) of the North (secured also by the participation of Southern elites). This hegemony ensured that the bank has always been headed by white American males (until the current president) when the planet is virtually kept alive by women who constitute 60% of the agriculture force in Asia and Africa. Unsurprisingly, many World Bank presidents previously worked in defence departments and private corporations.
The resistances by social movements have led the bank to speak the language of the people. Hence, the increasing focus on issues such as gender rights, equity (the 2006 report was titled ‘Equity and Development’), etc. Besides, the rise of China and India and their decreasing reliance on the bank makes the latter less powerful than before. Thus, acknowledging politics and power relations is one way to defuse (स्थिति को गंभीर होने से रोकना) the challenges to the bank’s dominance.
There is a telling statement in the report: “The development community is talking the talk of politics. How much it will walk the walk is not yet clear.” Ultimately, the question is whether the World Bank itself is willing to walk the walk. A 2015 United Nations Report called the World Bank as a “human rights-free zone” and that its policies consider “human rights more like an infectious disease than universal values and obligations”.
Perhaps, it is time for those who control the World Bank to read its own ‘World Development Report 2017’.