Yale Agrarian Studies Series . ,

The Agrarian Studies Series at Yale University Press seeks to publish

outstanding and original interdisciplinary work on agriculture and rural

society—for any period, in any location. Works of daring that question

existing paradigms and fill abstract categories with the lived-experience

of rural people are especially encouraged.

J a m e s C . S c o t t

Series Editor

Christiana Payne, Toil and Plenty: Images of the Agricultural Landscape in

England, – ()

Brian Donahue, Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests

in a New England Town ()

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the

Human Condition Have Failed ()

Tamara L. Whited, Forests and Peasant Politics in Modern France ()

James C. Scott and Nina Bhatt, eds. Agrarian Studies: Synthetic Work at the

Cutting Edge ()

Peter Boomgaard, Frontiers of Fear: Tigers and People in the Malay World,

– ()

Janet Vorwald Dohner, The Encyclopedia of Historic and Endangered

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Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American

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Contemporary World ()

Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial

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ration and Environmental Activists Transformed a Tarnished Brand ()

Raymond L. Bryant, Nongovernmental Organizations in Environmental

Struggles: Politics and the Making of Moral Capital in the Philippines

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Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Revolution,

Resistance, and Reform in Village China ()

Michael Goldman, Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for

Social Justice in the Age of Globalization ()

Arvid Nelson, Cold War Ecology: Forests, Farms, and People in the East

German Landscape, – ()

Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite

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Imperial NatureThe World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice

in the Age of Globalization

M I C H A E L G O L D M A N

Yale University Press New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of

Amasa Stone Mather, of the Class of , Yale College.

Chapter is a revised version of “The Birth of a Discipline: Producing

Authoritative Green Knowledge, World Bank-Style,” from Ethnography :

(): –. Published by permission of Sage Publications.

Chapter is a revised version of “Constructing an Environmental State:

Eco-Governmentality and Other Transnational Practices of a ‘Green’ World

Bank, ” from Social Problems : (): –, © Copyright by

the Society for the Study of Social Problems, with permission.

Copyright © by Yale University.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including

illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections

and of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public

press), without written permission from the publishers.

Set in Minion type by Integrated Publishing Solutions.

Printed in the United States of America.

ISBN: --- (cloth)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

and the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability

of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the

Council on Library Resources.

Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments xxi

O N E Introduction: Understanding World

Bank Power

T W O The Rise of the Bank

T H R E E Producing Green Science

inside Headquarters

F O U R The Birth of a Discipline: Producing

Environmental Knowledge for

the World

F I V E Eco-Governmentality and the Making of

an Environmental State

S I X Privatizing Water, Neoliberalizing Civil

Society: The Power of Transnational

Policy Networks

S E V E N Conclusion: Can It Be Shut Down?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

vi Contents

Preface

The World Bank is a fickle place to experience and compre-hend. Mental maps mislead, directional signs baffle, and pathsthrough it confuse and confound. Many of the Bank’s best in-tentions seem to backfire in the most disastrous ways, and yetthe debates on these disasters tend to reduce the problem to asimple assignment of blame. Every decade of the World Bank’sexistence has been marked by both major improvements in thetechniques of development and new types of colossal failures.In the process of improving development—that is, helping theworld’s poor improve their livelihoods—so much gets gener-ated in the way of development experts and expertise, researchinstitutes, and worldwide professional networks. The worldtoday is saturated with new knowledge-producing sites on thetheme of development inside governments, universities, andbusiness communities. For government officials in Africa, Asia,and Latin America, development has become one of the mosttime-consuming, and yet potentially lucrative, business op-portunities on the horizon. Development has invaded the lan-guage, thoughts, and images of people in both the North andthe South. Consequently, one can hardly imagine the worldtoday except through the lens of World Bank-style develop-

ment. As the chief arbiter of development, the World Bank hasbecome so much a part of our everyday lives, with its practicesand effects so highly dispersed across the world, that it is diffi-

cult to know precisely where the World Bank starts and whereit ends (Kumar ). Such features make writing a bookabout this world-renowned institution no easy task.

Although I am not sure when my first encounter with theWorld Bank took place, I certainly became aware of the insti-tution while living in the Thar desert in western India, alongone of the world’s largest irrigation canals, built on WorldBank plans and capital. Described by the World Bank as an ex-emplary “sustainable development” project, it was designed tobring Himalayan mountain water and then affluence to theharsh Indian desert. What startled me most as my researchtook shape was the enormous gap between World Bank depic-tions of the Thar desert experience and my own observations.Did the blazing desert heat obscure the obvious? Official re-ports wrote glowingly about this project with the eye of a fas-cinated child in awe of the grandeur of the accomplishment—a thousand-kilometer-long canal irrigating two million hectaresof sandy desert and turning them into lush farm fields. Alongthe main canal arteries, wealthy landowners produced highyields of export-quality crops. But just down the waterway, themajority of small landowners suffered from an absence of water,sand-choked canals, failed crops, high indebtedness, and gov-ernment negligence.

To take just one example, the canals I saw were markedby constant shortages of cement, a crucial ingredient for liningthe canals to keep them from leaking precious water. Withoutcement, large swathes of the fields alongside the canal becamewaterlogged and salinated, making it impossible for many farm-ers to grow crops. Small farmers went bankrupt and had to

viii Preface

leave their land. Was this sustainable development? Walkingdown the many arteries of the canal, farmers would point outwhich canals were unlined, and who was getting water andwho was not. Yet, seemingly oblivious to the views of tens ofthousands of desert dwellers, Bank and government docu-ments repeatedly reported that the canal system was properlylined and that water was being allotted equitably. While havingtea with a local official in the engineer’s home, I would be toldone story, but when we walked to a canal I would observe theopposite. This occurred again and again.

In prosperous neighborhoods of the city of Jaipur, proj-ect engineers and government officials were building palatialhomes with an abundance of cement, much of it retrievedfrom canal supply warehouses at night. Did this incongruitypersist because World Bank officials slept at night? The crimewas not the theft per se but the fact that the supposed benefi-

ciaries of this development project were forced to abandontheir allotted land. Once animal herders, weavers, traders, andfarmers of rain-fed agriculture who lived off communallymanaged village lands, these desert dwellers were transformedinto a class of landless farmworkers—sharecroppers, inden-tured servants, and part-time laborers. They fell into debt,were displaced from their lands, and became laborers on theland of the wealthy. The employers, for their part, did not riseto the top through some natural selection process or entrepre-neurial spirit. They were well-connected property owners fromthe city and large farm owners from the Punjab, or govern-ment officials and engineers who ran the development project.

One did not need to be Sherlock Holmes to piece togetherthe evidence; it was the talk of the town. The chai wallas (teasellers) and patwaris (village revenue collectors) knew the storyinside and out; it was as present in daily life as was the blowing

Preface ix

sand. Yet World Bank reports repeatedly proclaimed the proj-ect a resounding success for the poor and for the environment.Whereas I am regularly told that the project of developmentuplifts the poor and restores the environment, too often I seeit impoverishing the majority and enriching the few.

Many commentators on development—scholars as wellas Bank officials—argue that projects often fail because of cor-ruption, a social disease endemic to the third world. These in-evitable aberrations, which the project of development worksto eliminate, occur during the transition from tradition tomodernity. To observers, development is a post–World War IItechnical achievement that transfers capital, expertise, andtechnologies from the North, that is, the advanced capitalistcountries of the Northern Hemisphere, to the “undeveloped”South. The dictionary defines “corruption” as a debasement,perversion, or decay; it is a dishonest act, and its meaning im-plies that corruption represents a deviation from an otherwisedominant norm of ethical practices in society. Corruption, sodefined, is the exception to the rule.

But what if governments and development agencies pros-per financially and politically from a project, what if their pro-fessional staffs are all “on the take” in the sense that their salariesdepend on the idea of development and its premises? What ifa region’s capitalist class invariably becomes enriched and em-powered through development projects? What if this thingcalled “corruption” is not the exception but the rule and assuch defines the political economy of development? Then itshould be logical that the prevailing paradigm of developmentneeds reexamining. As became increasingly evident to me, thisprocess occurred through such development schemes, not inspite of them.

x Preface

From these early experiences with the World Bank, Ilearned that development cannot be measured by such simpledata as increases in yields or gross domestic product. Instead,development should be understood as a complex set of prac-tices woven into the fabric of everyday life, both in poor dis-tricts and wealthy ones, in the global South as well as the globalNorth. After all, most of the capital lent to Southern govern-ments in the name of development funnels through Northernbanks to purchase goods from Northern firms, ranging fromtractors to turbines to the expertise of professional consult-ants. The surplus to pay back the loans and their accrued in-terest is produced through the back-breaking work of peoplelike the Indian farm laborers I studied. Part of that farm sur-plus goes straight into the coffers of Northern firms as repay-ment for farm inputs, dams, and electricity projects. The roleof the World Bank is pivotal for Northern wealth accumula-tion. The Bank raises most of its capital from Northern corpo-rate investors in search of high returns, and its loans purchasegoods and services mainly from Northern firms.

Whatever the original intentions of the Bretton Woodsagreement may have been, over the past few decades, the pri-mary effect of World Bank lending and policies is that muchmore capital flows out of borrowing countries and to theWorld Bank, IMF, and Northern-based banks than in. Onealarming statistic that has hardly changed since the Bank’s in-ception more than sixty years ago is that much of the capitallent by the Bank passes through the hands of Southern gov-ernments and travels directly to firms in the North, the mainactors who do development, and who supply the capital goodsand services for large projects. That is, the most important ben-eficiaries of development live in the North and not in the South.

Preface xi

Hence, World Bank-style development is not only, or evenprincipally, about the perceived “lacks” or “poverties” of thepeople of the South. Crippling debt, rising income inequali-ties, and exclusion from such basic goods as fertile land, healthcare, and clean water are as much the result of development asthey are attributable to the fundamental inequalities built intothe global political economy.

So why has development become such a laudable enter-prise? Why are projects such as this irrigation fiasco seen bydevelopment specialists as exemplars of environmentally sus-tainable development? The canal project I studied was pack-aged as a success story to school children in the North. Slideshows and teaching guides told the Olympian story of theWorld Bank “greening” the most inhospitable environment inthe world, the desert. (Tellingly, as public protest in India roseand filmmakers produced documentaries dispelling thesemyths, the Bank pulled them from the shelves.)

Finally, why has the World Bank, the leading proponentof the “project of development,” become the world’s mostpowerful international institution? How did development be-come so central to North-South relations? Why has the Bankbecome the obvious choice to fix our so-called global prob-lems, from rural poverty in India to the “rebuilding” of Af-ghanistan and Iraq? It has become easy to recommend theBank for these awesome tasks because the Bank itself has al-ready defined our global problems and has in place global ex-perts with their toolkits of solutions. Where would we be with-out the World Bank? What alternatives do we have?

When I presented my research on this inequitable canal proj-ect to an academic audience in the United States, a veteran sociologist in the front row barked his exasperation at me:

xii Preface

Enough with these papers on how the poor get screwed over by the World Bank! Tell us something about how this institu-tion works, how its so-called experts can possibly design suchschemes, and how these practices have become the norm?These were big questions, and ones that I could not answer.But his challenge and questions stayed with me, and promptedme to embark on this book. I decided I had to study the Bankfrom within, by conducting research inside World Bank head-quarters, the belly of the so-called beast. Since Bank staff donot spend all their time in Washington, D.C., neither did I as I gathered material. This book is the result of my long journeythrough the intestines of one of the world’s most powerful institutions. My research took me to unexpected places—toremote research institutes, run-down government agencies,international conferences, and mountain dam sites. It alsobrought me back to my own professional networks of devel-opment professionals, environmentalists, anthropologists, andeconomists. As I learned from experience, this wily beast cer-tainly gets around.

When I talk about my research on the World Bank, I fre-quently get asked, “How did you get access?” Did the Bankstonewall me as it does angry citizens demanding “the truth”about its projects? We are well aware that the people whom theBank wants “to develop” are always the last to know aboutBank projects or policies. But what about an academic profes-sional, such as myself? Remarkably, despite the high level of se-curity and their busy travel schedules, few Bank staffers re-fused my request for an interview; no one slammed the doorin my face. Some even seemed eager to talk about their workand worldviews. Interviews often carried over into lunch.Some staff invited me to attend their workshops, staff train-ings, and weekend retreats. One invited me to observe his proj-

Preface xiii

ect in Lao PDR (or Laos), which I did. Another senior officialoffered me an office and secretarial support! (Tempting, butno thanks.) I asked Bank staff members about their new man-date of environmental sustainability and about how the WorldBank was retooling itself in light of vociferous social movementpressure. These questions were asked during a tense periodwhen World Bank staffers were receiving relentless criticismfrom all over the world, a time when senior Bank managementpushed a series of dramatic reforms within the institution. Ofthe many staff I interviewed, a common narrative was never farfrom the surface. Interviewees repeatedly portrayed themselvesas honest reformers working against the grain and against in-ertia in a troubled and Byzantine organization. They strove tomake the Bank more responsive to public demands that it be-come more participatory, and more alert to indigenous peoples’rights and to the pressing issue of the environment.

I also learned that World Bank staff needed people likeme as much as I needed them, in large part because the Bankand its staff need to get their version of the truth out. The Bankcannot possibly carry the responsibility of its enormous taskswithout seeking public support and legitimacy. It must deployprofessionals around the world to help mainstream Bank-styledevelopment into government agendas, investment portfolios,civil-society activities, and the global political economy. Bankstaff cannot do the job alone or by relying solely on the Bank’sfinancial muscle. Historically, the Bank has always had accessto much more capital than it can lend and has always sufferedfrom a demand deficit for its capital and services. To survive,the Bank needs willing borrowers and willing promoters. Afterall, there are many reasons to not borrow from the World Bank:the irrigation canal fiasco with its huge debt repayments andhigh social and ecological costs is only one example. The fact

xiv Preface

that borrowers are now paying much more back to the WorldBank than the Bank lent to them is another. Hence, the WorldBank needs a hospitable climate of opinion; it needs profes-sional support, it needs scientific support, and it vitally needsthe consent of civil society. The Bank works like a major, pub-licly traded corporation, in that “market confidence” is itsmost important asset and its source of greatest vulnerability. Itgenerates confidence in part through the high rates of returnon the global bonds it floats; it also generates confidencethrough the global science and culture of development thatmakes the development industry seem essential and natural tothe solving of the problems of individuals, industries, nations,and the world. It hopes to place itself, and professional elitesworldwide, into the center of this globalizing narrative—as ahero, not a goat. But to do so requires people’s confidence inwhat it sells and their participation in the Bank’s own ex-panded reproduction as a global authority with few peers.Without our participation, in sum, the World Bank would beimpotent.

By taking seriously what the Bank does and says, I learnedthat one of the Bank’s greatest accomplishments has been tomake its worldview, its development framework, and its datasets the ones that people around the world choose above oth-ers. This is one reason why the Bank’s influence continues togrow, even with mounting pressure from critics. For example,fifteen years ago, environmentalists were up in arms about the Bank’s large-scale dams, rain forest colonization schemesand logging projects, and “greenhouse-gas-producing” powerplants. Today, by contrast, the world’s largest environmentalorganizations are now the chief cosponsors of World Bank en-ergy, land colonization, and forestry projects. Why did its fore-most critics jump on the bandwagon? How did environmental

Preface xv

organizations actually help the Bank expand its spheres of in-fluence to places in the South it could never before go? I wouldargue that the World Bank could only legitimately speak of en-vironmentally sustainable production once Northern envi-ronmental experts and activists enabled it to do so.

But following the words and promoters of Bank-style de-velopment tells only half the story. After all, Bank staff are notonly selling the knowledge, reputation, and deeds of the Bank;they are also selling the use of capital, which concretely trans-lates into dollar-based loans to dollar-poor countries to pur-chase commodities and services from firms residing largely inthe North. The reason this book is not about hunger andpoverty is because these are not the Bank’s primary interests(although they are its primary business). Its staff spend no timewith the hungry or poor—they themselves admit it would befoolhardy to send highly paid loan officers, who fly on business-class tickets, stay in five-star hotels, and are accompanied bystaff assistants, to sit and chat with itinerant laborers and streetdwellers about the structural barriers that keep them frommeeting their basic needs and facilitating their desires. In theBank’s own institutional linguistics, this would not be “cost-efficient.”

As the Bank’s chief pollution adviser once explained tome, he spends very little time responding to queries from con-cerned citizens or NGOs (nongovernmental organizations)about pollution problems or resource scarcity for the poor.Most of the time he spends with the so-called public is devotedto trying to satisfy the demands of Northern ministers of in-dustry or executives of Northern firms. Badgering him by phoneand through office visits, ministers want an explanation as towhy the goods and services of their country (and firms) are notbeing purchased with Bank loans. Executive salespeople are

xvi Preface

peddling the latest industrial technologies, which may miti-gate some pollution problems but may also worsen others. Hehesitates to buy their hardware because it comes at Germanprices with German engineers and German replacement partsfor Indian clients with only rupees in their accounts. He findsthat in the case of waste-water treatment plants, many Euro-pean-made plants are idle because of the prohibitive costs ofmaintenance and replacement parts. Why not promote in-digenous solutions to these development problems, he asks.India has its own waste-water treatment solutions that aremuch cheaper, he explains in frustration. Yet the Bank persistsin selling Northern power plants, wastewater plants, and damturbines to governments across the global South. Moreover, itinsists on privatizing Southern airports, power sectors, and in-dustries whose bidders are indifferent to the needs of the poormajority. And it demands that the services of such firms asBechtel, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Dutch Shell, Enron, andVivendi are the ones purchased with Bank loans. The WorldBank is, after all, situated within a global political economythat has been perpetuating such cozy corporate-governmentrelations for a very long time, at least since colonialism and thebirth of market capitalism.

Although this is the practical reality of the World Bank’soperating environment, we prefer to think in a less self-servingrhetoric. The most important accomplishment of the WorldBank, and the main theme of this book, is how it manages topursue its day-to-day activities while focusing the public’sgaze on the grand illusion of development. This is not simplya shell game. The chasm between rhetoric and reality is com-mon to many public bureaucracies. What is unprecedented isits practice on a world scale with such tremendous global con-sequences.

Preface xvii

This book can be read as an adventure travelogue throughone of the most powerful and undemocratic institutions in theworld, one that determines currency prices in Mexico City,water rates in Johannesburg, and possibly even the direction ofthe flow of the Mekong River—in sum, the fates of millions ofpeople—based on an economic “science” it produces within thecontext of capital-intensive deal making. This book can also beread as a sociological inquiry into the remarkable transforma-tion of the World Bank into a global “knowledge bank,” onethat uniquely and effectively produces the research institutes,ideational frameworks, data sets, professionals, networks, gov-ernment and nongovernment agencies, and policies that areinfluencing the trajectory of North-South relations today. Byemphasizing the Bank as simultaneously global lender, policymaker, civil-society actor, and knowledge-producer, I focuson how it has been able to become hegemonic, or the way inwhich it has successfully determined the parameters in whichwe speak and act in the name of development. In spite of itslong list of abysmal failures and destructive effects, the Bankremains the primary global player in countries in the South, aswell as, though less obviously, in countries in the North. Nomatter what one chooses to emphasize in analyzing World Bankpower, the dangers of leaving such authority unchallenged areenormous. As one longtime World Bank consultant observed inhis recently published diary on his assignment in Sierra Leone:

There are times when an economist tells [a bor-rowing] Government, “If you raise the price ofgrain to the farmers, certainly the immediate resultwill be that , children per year will die.” . . .[But] that, after perhaps three years, the increasedprice will mean a higher income in country areas sothere will be, perhaps, , fewer deaths among

xviii Preface

farmers’ children. . . . It is not pleasant to have tomake such recommendations, but it goes with thejob. . . . Making the decision does give you a kick,though. It is a big decision, an important decisionthat will kill many people and save many people.The fact that you make the decision, on your ownjudgment rather than on hard fact and theory,makes you feel important, powerful. I recognizethat the power is addictive.

A lot of the World Bank economists are ex-posed to the same temptation, the same addiction.In fact, it may be that the organization as a whole isaddicted. It does seem to go out of its way to makedecisions that will cause millions of deaths or savemillions of lives over the years, basing these deci-sions on judgments, rules of thumb, and politicaldogmas like the Free Market. It does come to be-lieve that harsh remedies are more likely to cure.(Griffiths , pp. –)

How did one institution based in Washington, D.C., ac-quire so much power and make its power and knowledge seemso natural and so logical, allowing it to transform people’s livesall over the world? Rather than a study of addictive personali-ties or fundamentalist theologies, this book instead tries to ex-plain how transnational structures of power, knowledge, andcapital are produced; how they become hegemonic; and howthey are challenged. I hope readers can gain from these pages abetter sense of how “the project of development” gets gener-ated, how it fuels highly uneven and unstable relations of cap-italist production, and how it is becoming a trigger for massmobilization of people fighting against a commodified and in-equitable world, and for social justice.

Preface xix

Acknowledgments

Through the luxury of time, I have learned from many people.At the University of California–Santa Cruz, I was fortunate tohave worked with James O’Connor when he began the path-breaking journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, and a group ofus traveled uncharted territory together. Jim’s insights fueled anera of innovation on ecological Marxism, political ecology, eco-logical history, as well as a re-engagement with the works of KarlMarx and Karl Polanyi. To Jim, I owe the book’s title and much,much more. Thanks to two generous postdoctoral fellowships,the S.V. Ciriacy–Wantrup of University of California–Berkeley,and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship inInternational Peace and Cooperation, I was able to conduct my research in Washington, D.C., and beyond, while living in Berkeley, where I learned from brilliant scholars, such asMichael Watts, Nancy Peluso, Donald Moore, Dick Norgaard,Ian Boal, Louise Fortmann, and Rachel Schurman, who col-lectively started the now legendary Berkeley Workshop on En-vironmental Politics. Gillian Hart and Michael Burawoy deeplyinfluenced my work and have offered exceptional comments onthe manuscript as well as inspiration from their own scholar-

ship on manufacturing consent, global ethnography, and dis-abling globalization.

In Washington, D.C., there were many people inside andoutside the Bank who helped me enormously, but I think Ishould leave them unnamed, with respect and much thanksfor their support. Devesh Kapur taught me much about theBank, although he must not be held responsible for the way Iturned on their heads many of his lucid and thoughtful inter-pretations. The project continued through my move to Ur-bana, where my colleagues and graduate students gave metremendous intellectual and comradely support, in particularTom Bassett, Steve Brechin, Zsuzsa Gille, Julian Go, John Lie,Faranak Miraftab, Zine Mugabane, William Munro, RachelSchurman, Charis Thompson, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, AndyPickering, Winnie Poster, Ken Salo, and David Wilson. To-gether we started an innovative Transnational Studies Seminarseries. Tom and William kept me on my toes on our prairieruns, talking through ideas and non-ideas alike. Thanks also goto my intelligent and creative graduate students at Illinois whotaught me much about the world. One in particular, YildirimSenturk, proved to be a superb research assistant, and helpedme immensely with this manuscript.

New Haven became a temporary haven for me, where forone year I could work through many of these ideas. Thanks goto Jim Scott, who gave me the confidence and inspiration to(try to) write a good story, and to do it surrounded by won-derfully supportive fellows: Harry West, Liz Oglesby, VupenyuDzingirai, Guillaume Boccara, Rachel Schurman, Subir Sinha,and some great locals, such as Eric Worby, Kamari Clarke,Kathy McAfee, Arun Agrawal, and Kay Mansfield who kept theProgram in Agrarian Studies the special place it is. (The year atYale was also sponsored by a University of Illinois’s Center for

xxii Acknowledgments

Advanced Study fellowship, where I was generously allowed to be a resident fellow out of residence.) In Thailand, WitoonPermpongsacharoen and the dedicated TERRA gang were ex-tremely helpful and inspirational; in Laos, many people as-sisted me, but it is best that I not name them; in South Africa,Patrick Bond and his comrades; in India, Shashi and LaxmiTyagi, A. B. and Rani Bhardwaj, the late Sanjoy Ghose, the Institute of Development Studies–Jaipur scholars, especiallySurjit Singh and S. Ramanathan; in Chile, Daniela and ArturoAlvestigui. I could go on.

I would like to offer my heart-felt appreciation to someof the close readers of various chapters and drafts—Ron Am-inzade, Tom Bassett, Karen Booth, Jeffrey Broadbent, FredButtel, Kate Dunnigan, John Bellamy Foster, Jonathan Fox,Phil Hirsch, Aviva Imhof, Sheila Jasanoff, Nina Laurie, HelgaLeitner, Larry Lohmann, Marybeth Martello Long, PatrickMcCully, Donald Moore, Ken Salo, Allan Schnaiberg, BenSchurman, David Smith—as well as for the patient and dili-gent support from Jean Thomson Black, Eliza Childs, andLaura Davulis at Yale University Press. Fred Buttel, MichaelBurawoy, Jim Scott, Gill Hart, and John Lie have all given meimmeasurable support in helping me overcome many careerhurdles. Many friends and family wisely had no interest inreading drafts, and I thank them for their gifts of sustenance:Barbara Laurence, Ethan Canin, Barbara Schuler, Steve Sellers,Allison Pugh, Karen Rhein, Eric Blanpied, Paul and BarbaraSchurman, Bert Schurman, Josh Schurman, David and RondaGoldman, Vivian and Steve McClure, Monica and Mark Abra-hams, and the transcendentally joyful Eli and Nadia Goldman.

Most of my gratitude, however, goes to my parents, who,sadly, were never able to see this book in print, and to my wife,Rachel, who helped me every step of the way. My parents were

Acknowledgments xxiii

the product of what Eric Hobsbawm called the “age of ex-tremes,” survivors of a place and time that did not bode wellfor people like themselves. As a consequence, my father, forone, was a person of very few words. For what they had to ex-perience in Germany, and the enduring pain afterwards, therereally were no appropriate words. Hence, I was educated infamily social history through nonverbal communication. Intime, I learned that it may be possible to find words to explainthe depth of social injustice, but also its absolute limits: mean-ing is inevitably lost in translation and in the distance from theexperience. My parents spent their life energies keeping me atarm’s length from such horrors; yet in spite of their efforts toprotect and shield, I learned from them that ultimately thedepth of such suffering and injustice can never be experiencedalone. For better or worse, it is always a shared social experi-ence. This was their greatest gift to me. And it has been one ofRachel’s most precious gifts to show me how to bring these ex-periences, and many others more joyous, to life. I dedicate thisbook to her.

xxiv Acknowledgments

IIntroduction:

Understanding World Bank Power

The purpose of this training seminar is to try to create

an epistemic community in Africa so that you can have

more power with your governments when negotiating for

institutional reform. You won’t feel alone. We’ll help you set up

networks and share information. You will be able to say to your

bosses: “Hey, but that’s how they’re doing it next door, and

look how successful they are.” We are prepared to offer you

support. . . . And when you return home after this workshop,

we would like you to initiate your own training workshops

on environmental economics. This way we can change

decision-making in your countries.

—Training workshop coordinator, Economic

Development Institute, World Bank, June

n June I was an observer in a two-week trainingworkshop on “environmental economics and economy-wide policymaking” at World Bank headquarters in Wash-

ington, D.C. Most of the invited participants came fromAnglophone Africa—Ethiopia, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe,Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa—and two fromRussia and Chile, countries that would be hosting future train-ing workshops.

Every two hours for the next two weeks, new learningmodules were presented by experts from the World Bank, theU.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Worldwatch In-stitute, and other Washington-based agencies. The workshopstarted out with a learning module on “imagining a global fu-ture,” followed by sessions on environmental cost-benefit analy-sis, writing National Environmental Action Plans (NEAPs),the benefits of structural adjustment for the environment, andapplying the concept of natural capital. The case studies weremostly from the United States, Europe, and Asia. Many wereon the management of industrial waste, urban air pollution,and forest logging. In one of the few illustrations from Africa,a senior Bank official, drawing on his research in Zimbabwe,explained that if highly inefficient cattle grazing were replacedwith wildlife preservation—that is, eco-tourism and gameparks—it would create a win-win scenario of both a sustain-able environment and a high-growth economy, never men-tioning the “value” of cattle to the rural people’s culture, envi-ronment, and survival. When another senior Bank officialexplained that “all environmental problems can be mitigatedby microeconomic tools,” the audience was silent. “That’s howwe find the true value of nature,” he said. Ten minutes later,over British biscuits and tea, the lounge was lively with con-versation on the relevance of these lectures. After a round of

Introduction

amused chatter on the inapplicability of the Bank’s modelsand assumptions for Africa, a South African professor from amajor urban university told the story of his experience after hepresented a paper on microeconomic issues in his home town.“A rural fellow came up to me and said: ‘What you value is notwhat I value. What you see when you look at the land or forestis much different than what I see. So what’s all this talk aboutuniversal values?’”

At the end of the third day, the workshop organizer re-minded us of that evening’s cocktail party, urging participantsto meet World Bank loan managers who worked in their homeregions. This is your big opportunity, he advised us: “They’relooking to hire consultants to work on their projects.” Al-though by week’s end, many of the participants were alreadydisappointed with the U.S.-centric and doctrinaire style of thepresentations, the lack of time for discussion, and the absenceof case studies from Africa, they certainly understood the re-wards. As one Zimbabwean development consultant said con-tentedly, “With this training certificate, I’ll be getting plenty of jobs back home with the international organizations.” A less sanguine participant, the department chair of economicsat a prominent East African university, remarked, “Under theBank’s structural adjustment [program], the university tenuresystem has been abolished. We have been forced to take onother jobs, private tutoring, anything we can get. To get a Bankconsultancy,” he said, “well, that helps. We teach with booksthat are twenty years old; the libraries are empty. The bestthings about this workshop are the materials.” A third partici-pant concurred, “We can sure use these materials. And we canuse them how we choose.” On a walk after a long day trappedin the seminar room, an Ethiopian trained in Marxist eco-nomics—the dominant science of his day—explained to me

Introduction

in a resigned tone:“A consultant for the [World] Bank in Addismakes the equivalent of thirty times what an equally qualifiedeconomist makes. In the army, you get a bullet for deserting,but with the World Bank, you lose your astronomical salary. Itis much easier dodging bullets from the army for desertionthan [saying ‘no’ to] the World Bank.”

African professionals selected by the World Bank to carryout its mission enact their roles in diverse ways that defy simplecategories. The only commonality is that they are rarely docilein their relationship with the Bank. People work for the Bankfor many reasons, some very different from what the Bankmight hope for. They may translate their assignment and im-provise in ways that do not follow the Bank’s credo. Nonetheless,less than six years after this workshop, one of the Bank’s earli-est on “environmentally sustainable development,” the WorldBank and its European-based aid partners have establishedmore than fifty policy and training institutes throughout Af-rica, where many of the Bank’s training programs are beingtaught by African professionals on themes ranging from envi-ronmental economics to water-sector privatization to “makingthe WTO work in developing countries.” The coveted trainingmaterials handed out at these workshops are not just requiredreading in economics courses in underfunded universities;they have become background resources for African policy-makers who, as preconditions for World Bank loans, are beingcompelled to act expeditiously to redraft national constitu-tions and land laws, liberalize forestry and water sectors, andrestructure state agencies and regulatory authorities. The guid-ing discourse of the Bank’s outreach and training programs,development projects, and national policy programs reflects aconfluence of tensions that come from what one observer callsthe “finance ministry agenda” of neoliberalism and the “civil-

Introduction

society agenda” of social justice and environmentally sustain-able development (Wade ). How these two seemingly di-vergent worldviews have emerged and converged to form theBank’s most recent and most powerful framework for inter-vention in the global South and Eastern Europe—green neo-liberalism—is the subject of this book.

In the chapters that follow, I argue that the World Bankand professionals from the North and the South are busily con-structing such a global agenda. It is a dance of inordinate conse-quence, one that is laden with power and meaning and is highlycontentious and yet contingent. It is infused with strategies,desires, constraints, and possibilities—all with world-alteringsignificance. In this book I try to capture and explain the waysin which the World Bank and its partners have worked to cre-ate a representation, analysis, and mode of action for the proj-ect of development that have become naturalized, legitimate,and durable. I show through ethnographic research how, in re-sponse to the effective organizing efforts of its critics, the Bankhas successfully worked to reinvent itself, tame its critics, andintervene in an ever-growing number of institutions, terrains,and social bodies located across the postcolonial map. Theseinterventions take shape in highly diverse forms, generating a “very particular, historically specific, and temporary ‘mo-ment,’”a hegemonic set of practices, with a “multi-dimensionaland multi-arena character” (Hall , p. ).

Over the past twenty years, enormous external pressureshave arisen to force the World Bank to either “green” its globalproject of development or to retreat from its work. This green-ing is neither simply window dressing nor mere public relations,as many critics argue. It is rather the Bank’s latest and most pro-found discursive framework, producing a power/knowledgeregime of green neoliberalism. Green neoliberalism has become

Introduction

influential the world over and has enabled the Bank to expandinto more places and insinuate its worldview into more life-worlds than ever before. In the following chapters, I describe anumber of linked sites where these transformations are takingplace: inside World Bank headquarters, along a dam site on theMekong River in Laos, inside the state agencies of debtor coun-tries, and among members of transnational water policy net-works. At each of these sites a wide array of professionals fromthe World Bank, national and transnational development agen-cies, governments, multinational firms, chambers of commerce,and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) participate inthe production and circulation of this new set of knowledge/power practices. Each of these organizations helps to embed theBank’s green-neoliberal regime into the architecture of localgoverning institutions.

As the Bank has become more active in the managementof borrowers’ political concerns, it brings new worlds and ex-pectations into its range of operation. The Bank no longermeets just with capital-goods contractors who supply the tur-bines and concrete or with financial executives who supply thecapital and buy the Bank’s global bonds; Bank officials are nowexpected to engage groups of irrigation users in Pakistan, in-ternational anti-dam activists, lawyers and marine biologistsfrom environmental NGOs, and judges from remote Chinesemunicipalities. Conversely, underpaid provincial judges andlow-level bureaucrats are now required to engage in the worldof the World Bank and to work closely with Northern conser-vationists and civil-society advocates who are always seekingfunding for their own projects.

That a specific ideology of development has become thedominant lens through which South-North relations are under-stood is a testament to the immense power of the World Bankover the past sixty years. That few development practices, be-

Introduction

liefs, and truths can be expressed today outside the parametersof environmentally sustainable development, on the one hand,and neoliberalism, on the other, is a testament to the efficacy ofthe Bank’s latest power/knowledge regime. As Italian politicaltheorist Antonio Gramsci noted years ago, the moment of hege-mony is revealed when the dominant bloc “also pos[es] thequestions around which the struggle rages” (Gramsci, Hoare,and Nowell-Smith , p. ; Hall , p. ). Because somany people—including promoters, interpreters, and evencritics—now accept as fact that there is no alternative to de-velopment and that the only question is how to make it moresustainable, that Gramscian moment may have arrived.

The Rise of Green Hegemony,World Bank Style

The most recent development regime of the World Bank, greenneoliberalism, rose to prominence in the early s when wide-spread popular protests against the World Bank forced it tocome to terms with the environmentally and socially deleteri-ous effects of its projects. Activists never anticipated, however,that the Bank’s response would be to reinvent and expand itsneoliberal economic agenda to include new social and envi-ronmental dimensions, helping it to intervene into more geo-graphical territories and lifeworlds and in ways that its earlierwork never permitted. This process ushered in a new regime ofenvironmental practices that involved civil-society actors fromdevelopment organizations, environmental groups, academicinstitutes, and state agencies. It fundamentally altered the de-fining features of the Bank’s neoliberal agenda by adding as agoal the restructuring and capitalization of nature-society re-lations that exist as uncommodified or underutilized by capi-tal markets.

Introduction

Originally conceived of and portrayed as a macroeco-nomic policy initiative to make troubled third world states andeconomies more accommodating to global economic actors—especially large transnational corporations—neoliberalism hasbecome a social, cultural, and ecological project of enormoussignificance. Strictly speaking, neoliberalism is an audaciouspolitical agenda dating from the Thatcher-Reagan era thatpromotes an “economic growth first” approach, presents theview that “the market” is naturally efficient and impartial, andpushes for downsized governments, privatization of publicgoods and services, and deregulation of capital in order to nur-ture the “self-regulating” capabilities of transnational markets(Peck and Tickell ). At first, neoliberal advocates vigor-ously pushed to reduce barriers to international trade and cur-rency flows; next, they succeeded in privatizing public trans-port systems and power companies, and then, social security,prisons, garbage, and health services. Neoliberalism has nowbecome a frame of mind, a cultural dynamic, an entrepre-neurial personality type, and a rule of law that penetrates themost intimate relations people have with each other, state ap-paratuses, and their natural environments.

Traveling beyond the advanced capitalist states of theNorth, neoliberalism reflects a set of aggressive interventionsinto the less capitalized territories of the South where “under-valued” and “undervalorized” human and natural resourcesare hypothesized to exist, and where “backward” social insti-tutions are said to rule. Indeed, as this book will demonstrate,the current, neoliberal political-economic agenda did not startin the West and then spread to “the rest” but was constituted inpostcolonial capitalist North-South relations from the start. Itbuilt upon the power relations embedded and embodied informer colonial capitalist relations; wove its way through the

Introduction

World Bank’s development regimes of poverty alleviation, debtmanagement, and structural adjustment; and now thrives inthe Bank’s version of environmentally sustainable develop-ment, expanding the neoliberal project and new avenues forcapital accumulation worldwide.

In the name of both export-led capitalist growth and eco-logical sustainability, the World Bank has forged national polit-ical agendas that have sparked the expansion of commercialland markets in regions where land-deprived people have de-manded progressive land redistribution. The Bank has pushedstates to auction off publicly owned natural resources and re-source-based industries to transnational corporations in con-junction with international conservation groups instituting newglobal sanctions for biodiversity protection. In remarkable syn-chronicity, the sustainability crowd and the neoliberal develop-ment crowd have united to remake nature in the South, trans-forming vast areas of community-managed uncapitalized landsinto transnationally regulated zones for commercial logging,pharmaceutical bioprospecting, export-oriented cash cropping,megafauna preservation, and elite eco-tourism (Greenough andTsing ; Moore ; Neumann ). Aggressive trans-boundary conservation politics and neoliberal economicshave coevolved and spread around the world in large part be-cause of the lucrative and muscular financial support of theWorld Bank’s project of development.

This process has unfolded since the s, when con-certed pressure by disparate campaigns around the world con-jointly forced the World Bank to “reform or die.” Significantly,the Bank was able to reform itself by both “mainstreaming theenvironment” into its everyday activities and mainstreamingits activities into the work of transnational environmental actors (World Bank Environment Department ). As it re-

Introduction

fined its position through consultation with senior environ-mental organization leaders in Washington, D.C., and envi-ronmentally minded faculty at the North’s major universities,the Bank began to argue that “sustainable development” couldnot occur without proper economic valuation of the environ-ment (World Bank ; World Bank ). But for that tohappen, social institutions that regulate the use of environ-ments according to noncapitalist principles needed to be trans-formed. According to the World Bank, under existing social in-stitutions in the global South, the valuation of land, forests,minerals, and water has been highly distorted and thus naturalresources have been poorly utilized. This is the World Bank’smain explanation for why water is supplied at below-cost pricesand is thus “wasted” by the poor majority, why tropical forestspecies are unsustainably harvested, and why valuable land isdedicated to “low-value” subsistence crops (Environment De-partment ; IUCN ; IUCN ; Pearce ; WorldBank ). Under such “underdeveloped” institutional con-ditions, elite sustainable-development scholars and WorldBank staff argue, local environments will continue to be de-stroyed, and “irrational” collective behavior will continue tocontribute to the global environmental crises that have be-come the major barriers to sustainable development andglobally shared prosperity. Throughout the s, this new,green-neoliberal development logic was not merely the pre-occupation of internal reports or rhetorical debates; it was thebasis for major policy shifts and preconditions to World Bankloans to borrowing countries, especially the most indebted,where so much of the world’s natural resources and biologi-cal diversity exists.

When the World Bank lends large sums of capital for thelofty goal of environmentally sustainable development, it re-

Introduction

quires borrowing countries to do much more than repeat themantra of sustainability in its official texts. To qualify forloans, borrowers are often required to restructure state agen-cies, to write national legislation that creates new commercialland and resource markets, and to adopt new scientific proto-cols that result in the shaping of knowledge and expertise onthe causes and solutions of ecological destruction and halteddevelopment. Under this development regime of green neo-liberalism, borrowers are compelled to thoroughly reform theirnational budgets and tax systems, open their banking and in-surance sectors to new foreign bidders, and subordinate na-tional laws to WTO standards and regulations. In other words,the greening and neoliberalizing of the development agenda isnot merely a rhetorical move but is profoundly material—andworld-altering. Moreover, these World Bank interventions havebeen highly profitable for a very particular set of World Bankconstituencies that critics often ignore or take for granted, thatis, the Northern capital goods, finance, and service sectors, es-pecially from the “Big Five” countries (U.S., UK, Germany,Japan, and France) that control the majority of the vote in theWorld Bank and in other global institutions competing tomanage the global political economy (George and Sabelli ).

Although many observers have sought to show either howthe Bank’s foray into environmentalism has failed miserably or how neoliberalism is strictly a disabling force, I see these two phenomena not as appendages or wrong turns in an other-wise apolitical or technical process. Indeed, I see neoliberalismand green development as fundamentally constitutive of twodimensions of development—development as a post–WorldWar II project of recovery from war and colonialism in theglobal South, or what Gillian Hart calls “development with abig D,” and development as a set of capitalist processes with un-

Introduction

even and contradictory effects (“development with a small d”)(Hart ; Hart ; Hart ). The argument that their his-tories have unfolded together is central to this book and helpsdemonstrate the basis of World Bank power.

My thesis is that the World Bank is much more than asingle global entity with a singular agenda and easily ascribed“impacts.” It is much more than twenty buildings across theroad from the White House and the U.S. Department of Trea-sury. Instead, it should be understood as a productive agentmaintained through its interactions in multiple sites (fromMIT’s economics department to Wall Street investment firmsand Cargill’s agro-industrial goods division in the UnitedStates, to rural research institutes, fertile fields, and the agro-industry sector in India), enabling a diverse set of elite proj-ects, with deeply exploitative effects. The argument is not thatthe world is run by the World Bank president, but rather thatthe global political economy has at its core a set of elite powernetworks in whose reproduction the World Bank is deeply em-bedded. Understanding the World Bank offers us a glimpseinto the workings of the global political economy and thehegemonic powers that maintain it. Whereas others have doc-umented well the gross violations of development projects, Iemphasize the more mundane forms of violence perpetuatedin the name of development—not the corporeal abuse, but theeveryday forms of building up hegemony that influence andpressure people to participate in the formation and stabiliza-tion of the World Bank’s green-neoliberal agenda, even if suchparticipation may not be in their own best interest (Bond; Caufield ; George and Sabelli ; Rich ). Ofcourse, all these forms of violence are deeply connected andhang over people’s heads as they try to survive the onslaught ofneoliberal capitalist development.1

Introduction

Tensions in Development Scholarship

In thinking about development, scholars of all political stripeshave become obsessed with the question: “Why does develop-ment fail?” This route has led scholars off some rather steepprecipices as they have sought to “improve” the process by pro-moting what they think are the right management solutionsand social-behavioral modifications. In pursuit of improve-ment, however, they also legitimate and expand the project ofdevelopment, writ large, justifying it as a necessary if flaweduniform project of modernity and progress for the South. Thedevelopment literature is enormous and diverse, but it has afew common threads. In this and the next section, I highlightthe problems with many of these approaches and suggest analternative perspective on the role of the World Bank in devel-opment as well as the role of development in the world system.Simply put, there is a dichotomous split in the developmentdebates: the “pro-development” scholarship, with its roots inmodernization theory, and the “post-development” scholar-ship, with its critique of modernization. Yet, as I argue below,they converge in unexpected ways.

T H E M O D E R N I Z A T I O N M O D E L

O F D E V E L O P M E N T

In their view of development, modernization scholars startfrom the assumption that there is no alternative to Western-style capitalist development, that development unfolds natu-rally based on a set of laws of capital, or what they call and reifyas “the market” (Dasgupta ; Dollar ; Easterly ;Germani ; Gilman ; Hoselitz ; Hoselitz and Moore; McClelland ; Meier ; Ray ; Rostow ). These

Introduction

scholars believe that development falters in third world coun-tries because indigenous institutions are poorly equipped totake full advantage of the benefits of capitalism. The problemlies not within the world capitalist economy and the power dy-namics of the world system, but in those elements of the Souththat are unable to adapt to and accommodate the infusions ofcapital, technology, and know-how offered to them by the West.Institutional immaturity and lack of moral restraint are two at-tributes ascribed to countries that are seen as development fail-ures. For these scholars and practitioners, the techno-scientificquestion thus becomes “What is the best model of develop-ment?” and the answer is invariably a managerial-disciplinaryone, “Learn from the developed West,” as if the West has beensome isolatable or unchanging organism that can teach thenon-West the how-to of economic growth and prosperity, aswell as the social norms and behaviors necessary to become“civilized,”“developed,” and “rich.”

In the s, early development policies at the World Bankwere framed by such a modernization model, albeit one with aKeynesian economic worldview, which emphasized govern-ment intervention into arenas of the economy where privatecapitalists are reticent to invest. Hence, the job of the Keynesian“developmental state” was to actively step in, with World Bankhelp, and stimulate job creation and economic growth. Fromthe Bank’s perspective, there was much work for states to dounder the flag of development, and Bank loans kept states busyborrowing in (relatively expensive) dollars to purchase powerplants, transmission grids, and other capital-intensive goodsfrom Northern firms. The World Bank inched forward in itsplans to lend prudently in the name of development.

This conservative agenda rapidly disappeared when atidal wave of events hit the global economy in the early s.

Introduction

With the rising surplus of Eurodollars and OPEC petrodollars(from high oil price hikes) coupled with a mounting U.S. defi-

cit and an American economy mired in military expenses, Pres-ident Nixon and his advisor Paul Volcker declared the end ofthe longstanding Bretton Woods system. That system had tiedthe values of all currencies to a gold standard linked to the U.S.dollar (Block ; Gowan ; Kapstein ; McMichael). This move represented the beginning of a U.S.-led man-date to deregulate flows of international finance capital in waysthat would ultimately benefit the U.S. economy. As I show inchapter , the new World Bank president, Robert McNamara,tapped this surfeit of capital to expand the Bank’s project lend-ing and transform the institution into a global player.

By the early s, the chickens came home to roost asoverspending helped spur the Southern debt crisis, which ledthe International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, andU.S. Treasury to articulate a strikingly different policy for bor-rowing countries. The new version of the modernization modelemphasized state fiscal austerity, market liberalization, andpublic-sector privatization for the South, the three pillars ofwhat came to be called the “Washington Consensus” (WC).2

Within the World Bank, the shift from a development econom-ics that promoted “growth with distribution” to a “market-only” fundamentalist perspective was cemented with the hiringof the orthodox Anne Krueger as chief economist and the purg-ing of the growth-with-distribution economists. In the wake ofKrueger’s appointment, Washington Consensus neoliberals in-side and outside of the Bank convincingly persuaded othersthat the World Bank and other multilateral development insti-tutions were simply prolonging the South’s woes by carelesslylending to “irresponsible” leaders for “nonproductive” publicinvestments. In their view, this “profligate” development lend-

Introduction

ing served only to encourage irrational economic behavior, orwhat Krueger famously called “rent-seeking” (Krueger ).

When this neoliberal development agenda took root, itwas highly draconian. In strict economic terms, for most of theglobal South, the – period marked a sharp reversal ofthe economic gains of the previous two decades (–)(Easterly ; Wade ; Weisbrot ). While there weresome exceptions to this rule—most notably, China, India, andSouth Korea—these were also the countries that had rejectedthe strict neoliberal prescriptions of currency devaluation;elimination of trade barriers and capital regulations; statefiscal austerity; and the privatization of public goods, services,and infrastructure. Those countries that did follow the Bank/IMF prescriptions most closely, often with little choice, sufferedfar more.

By the mid-s, social and economic conditions inmany Southern and Eastern European countries had becomeso terrible that a core group of Northern policy makers pub-licly denounced the Washington Consensus for destroying theRussian, Mexican, and East African economies and for precipi-tating the economic crises of the s in East Asia and LatinAmerica. After more than a decade of WC ideological domi-nance, the post-Washington Consensus crowd concluded thatthe Bank’s and IMF’s neoliberal orthodoxy had created a seriesof colossal disasters around the world (Easterly ; Meltzer; Sachs ; Stiglitz ). At the forefront of this newview were the new institutional economists, with a disillu-sioned Joseph Stiglitz at the helm (Hart ). A former chiefeconomic advisor for the Bank, Stiglitz argued that these par-ticular modernization policies had become “ends in them-selves, rather than means to more equitable and sustainablegrowth. In so doing, these policies were pushed too far, toofast, and to the exclusion of other policies that were needed.”3

Introduction

More recently, the post–Washington Consensus policycrowd has traveled down two divergent roads to reshape themodernization model. One group argues that the World Bankand IMF need to set up many more safety-net and social wel-fare institutions to blunt the impact of neoliberal policies, thatis, selectively revisit and expand Keynesian social buffers. Inthe view of these economists (and development practitioners),the Bank and IMF need to dispense with their “shock therapy”approach to change and instead prepare countries for globalintegration on a more gradual schedule, with a greater sensi-tivity toward local differences, needs, and capabilities (Fine). They fear that a world in which the poor live withouthope for jobs or clean water is a world ready to go up in revo-lutionary—or fundamentalist—flames.

Others demand that the World Bank and IMF return totheir original mission, when the Bank, they believe, was smalland effective and its loans were highly discriminating (Finne-more ; Pincus and Winters ; Wade a).4 Today,these “development has gone astray” analysts see the octopus-like Bank and arrogant IMF fueling corruption and under-mining these institutions’ mandate for democracy by politiciz-ing development. These observers assume that by becomingleaner and more discerning, the Bank and IMF can return towhat they imagine these institutions once were: shrewd cata-lysts for economic development in the third world.

H A S D E V E L O P M E N T G O N E A S T R A Y ?

As a leading scholar on the World Bank, Robert Wade of theLondon School of Economics makes a strong case for a partic-ular cause of the recent demise of development: U.S. hegemonyover the World Bank (Wade b; Wade ). The argumentWade puts forth in a article starts with the observation

Introduction

that U.S. foreign and national security policies during the coldwar were defined by a tension between the United States’ de-sire to open the world’s markets to U.S. capital, goods, and ser-vices and its policy of containing and excluding communist-influenced states and populations. But after , the U.S.replaced its doctrine of containment with one of enlargement.As U.S. national security advisor Anthony Lake argued in a speech: “During the Cold War, even children understoodAmerica’s security mission: as they looked at those maps ontheir schoolroom walls, they knew we were trying to containthe creeping expansion of that big, red blob. Today . . . wemight visualize our security mission as promoting the enlarge-ment of the ‘blue areas’ of market democracies” (Wade ).

According to Wade, the World Bank and IMF have be-come the primary vehicles for the United States’ enlargementstrategy. “Powerful segments of [U.S.] national elites” realizethat Southern and former communist markets could be trans-formed into U.S.-influenced “blue areas” more cheaply throughmultilateral arm-twisting by the Bretton Woods institutionsthan through direct coercion by the U.S. state and its military.As a result, the United States has created a dilemma of its ownhegemonic power: by forcing the World Bank to become sub-servient to its political interests, the United States underminesthe multilateral character and personality of the Bank, whichthe Bank needs in order to maintain its legitimacy and spreadits agenda worldwide. Yet without control over the Bank andIMF, the United States’ brand of market fundamentalismwould lose sway, as not only its borrowers but even Europeanand Japanese states find this ideology offensive, and the UnitedStates might then consider pulling its support from these insti-tutions. Without U.S. support, the World Bank and IMF coulddisappear into the dustbin of history. In sum, Wade argues,

Introduction

“the Bank would be a better development agency if the U.S.—both the federal government and American-based NGOs—had less control over it” (Wade ).

Throughout his recent writings on the Bank, Wade em-phasizes what other critics have also demonstrated: the Bank isan extremely arrogant institution that commits more egre-gious mistakes the more it expands its scope and aim in re-sponse to criticism (Finnemore ; Pincus and Winters ).Wade and others call for a trimmed-down development bankdriven by sharp and flexible development models that comefrom “successful” polities besides the United States, such asSouth Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and countries in Western Europe.The Bank could learn from these recent success stories tomodernize its own development agenda.

Whereas Wade’s strength is his ability to demonstrate thehubris of the Bank’s U.S.-centered policies, he falls short in ex-plaining the political economy of the Bank’s work. He under-stands hegemony as the intricate power plays inside and between Bank headquarters and the corridors of power inWashington. But the World Bank as a global institution canthrive only if its hegemonic power can be maintained throughpractices outside of Washington as well, in a wide variety of so-cial arenas and borrowing state agencies. Moreover, the Bank’smost important clients are not residents of Washington, evenif their lobbyists might work there. They are multinationalfirms located around the world, firms that depend on the Bankto mobilize resources for, and generate laws to promote, capi-tal accumulation in the “undervalued” South. When Wade dis-misses the “governance, participation, environment” agendaof the Bank as conjured by a narrow constellation of U.S.-based NGOs that ignore the value of economics and economicgrowth as the catalyst for poverty alleviation in the South

Introduction

(Wade ), he misses the important role of the Bank’s “civil-society agenda” in creating political consent and ensuring thatcivil-society actors gain ground, albeit only within the param-eters set by this institution. Moreover, by ignoring the centralrole the World Bank plays in enlarging the scope for globalcapital accumulation, Wade underplays the significance of theWorld Bank in the making of the highly inequitable globaleconomy.

Indeed, Wade and other development advocates do notseriously consider the connection between relatively stablegrowth rates in the North and the lack of growth in the South,except in terms of “good” models of development that capital-poor countries should emulate. But how can Zimbabwe emu-late South Korea, for example, when the latter’s postwar growthwas predicated on the tremendously privileged status affordedit by the United States, with its massive flow of capital for geo-political reasons (the war against communism in Asia) and thesubsequent inflow of Japanese capital for Japan’s regional ex-pansion (Amsden ; Hart-Landsberg ; Lie )? Bycontrast, Zimbabwe, like many other no-growth states, hasplayed a much different role in the global political economybased on its historical location in the world system. WhileKorea’s economy was blossoming, Zimbabwe was pushing Eu-rope out of southern Africa and fighting U.S.-backed counter-insurgents, as well as supporting the struggle against apartheidin South Africa (Bond ; Moore ). These political andmilitary efforts did not endear Zimbabwe to Western Europeancountries or the United States. For us to reduce our analysis ofdifferent trajectories to good or bad development modelscompletely elides these and other historically distinct reasonsbehind differences.

In general, it is naive for development scholars and spe-

Introduction

cialists to speak of the gains of global economic integrationfrom one side of their mouths, and then speak of nationaleconomies as being the product of domestic models con-structed by national actors on the other. Such a position deniesthe ongoing dialectic of localized and transnationalized poli-tics, as well as the realities of a global political economy char-acterized by vast power inequities. Markets, by this thinking,are national in character and are most successful when they areleft alone or gently prodded by entrepreneurially oriented butnoninterventionist states. In this modernization worldview,each country becomes an isolated case, hardly rubbing shoul-ders with others except in trade or war. What fanciful world isthis? As I will show in this book, fundamental links betweencountries within the North-South world system are made in-visible through the everyday discursive practices of develop-ment, such that today development is still interpreted as a giftof the North and any specific failures are attributed to theshortcomings of leaders or cultures of the South, reductivelyassumed to be mired in corruption and irrationality. The oc-casional failure emanating from the North—disastrous proj-ects of the World Bank, Enron-like corporate corruption, andU.S. abuses of power—are reduced to institutional idiosyn-crasies and discrete irrationalities. This double standard hasdeep colonial roots, and it profoundly affects our capacity toanalyze the project of development and locate it within thelarger political economy. As long as we perpetuate the claimsthat there is no connection between increased poverty in theSouth and increased wealth accumulation in the North, andthat such global institutions as the World Bank are composedof mere technocratic experts offering transhistorical truths tothose who lack know-how, experience, and skills, we are merelyretelling imperial-modernization myths.

Introduction

P O S T D E V E L O P M E N T S C H O L A R S H I P

Not all development scholars share the assumptions and world-view of the modernization model; indeed, there are many al-ternative analytic frameworks. In recent years, one set of de-velopment observers has produced a highly influential canonthat can be called the “postdevelopment” literature.5 Led bysuch Southern and Northern intellectuals as Arturo Escobar,Majid Rahnema, Gustavo Esteva, Vandana Shiva, and Wolf-gang Sachs, the postdevelopment view makes a persuasive ar-gument that since World War II and the creation of the Bret-ton Woods accords, development has emerged as a singular,top-down project of institutionalization, professionalization,and domination by Northern states, Northern capital, andprofessional experts (Escobar ; Sachs ).

Starting from an anticolonial perspective on the historyof colonialism and successive regimes, postdevelopment schol-ars suggest that the World Bank’s sixty-year history reflects aseamless and self-expanding venture that started in the Westand spread throughout “the rest.” Whereas the WashingtonConsensus/modernization scholars interpret this perpetualexpansion of development as (imperfectly) paving the road forSouthern progress and improvement, postdevelopment schol-ars argue that the project of development is linked to largestructural forces within the world system that produce wealthand poverty. These social inequities become masked and/or le-gitimized through “development talk,” a series of discursivestrategies that explain development failures as the result of cul-tural, psychological, and biological traits of Southern popula-tions. Consequently, some of the most powerful actors in de-velopment are the experts who invent and disseminate newidioms and knowledge that enable forms of domination to be-

Introduction

come normalized within civil society. Development, therefore,becomes interpreted as both a set of institutions (e.g., capital-ist markets, global organizations) and discourses (i.e., fightingpoverty through capital investment) that combine to engenderand legitimatize the highly exploitative social relations be-tween the world’s wealthy and the poor.

As a sweeping critique of Western-imposed institutionsof modernity, development, and progress, the postdevelop-ment scholarship is enormously effective. Indeed, no one whohas read these writings should ever be so naive again as tothink of development as some gift of charity or neutral act oftechnology transfer. From Esteva to Escobar, these scholarsstress the power dynamics and assumptions that permeate thisapparent “gift” from the West. In emphasizing how the Northimposes its will on the South, exercising power from top tobottom and from core to periphery, these scholars construct ahistorical narrative of inevitable and unidirectional expan-sion. In this highly deterministic history, we lose the sense of avariegated landscape with diverse sites of production, resist-ance, instability, and political opportunity. With such an im-posing history, it is hard to see spatial and temporal uneven-ness, historical ruptures and structural crisis, or alternativepolitics and social change. Simply put, the postdevelopment lit-erature makes the imposition of domination sound so simple;it is like a steamroller running roughshod over the third worldwith no one in the driver’s seat and nothing to stop it. In thissense, the postdevelopment literature shares a certain meta-narrative reading of history with that of the developmentboosters even as the former demands that development itselfbe discarded. To the question “from where will radical socialchange arise?” they give a truncated answer: new social move-ments composed of people excluded by the modernization

Introduction

project of development. But is it really possible to speak of al-ternatives that arise from people who stand outside North-South development relations, and who, they suggest, reject allaspects of development? After all, as we shall see, developmentas a discourse has been rallied for very different political proj-ects, from taming the rebels of colonial rule to supporting independence movements throughout the South. Under-standing development within its uneven historical and cul-tural contexts is essential for a critical analysis of it and its alternatives.

A Third Way: An Analytics of the “Terrain of the Conjunctural”

Missing from these perspectives is a narrative of the actualproduction of development hegemony, the contested sites andthe tussle over specific policies and interventions that wouldgive us a clearer sense of the historical conjunctures and polit-ical volatilities of hegemony making. For a more complete pic-ture, we need to develop an approach that enables us to seethese sites of encounter in the South and the North as beingfilled with diverse groups of conflicted people (Cooper andPackard ; Crush ; Moore ; Peet and Watts ;Young ). People do not simply agree or consent, or fullystand with or against universal notions of progress, develop-ment, and modernization. They do not build up the scientificcase for a tropical forest highway or pour the concrete for amegadam without some reflection, reservation, or fight. If wealways assume its success or failure without first looking at howhegemony gets constituted, we lose all sense of why people offertheir consent without force, and why they do not. We lose theability to discern where the political openings are, the sites and

Introduction

spaces where dominant structures get constituted, how peopletry to subvert them, and from where alternatives arise. It isonly within the specific interstices of hegemony’s productionthat we can observe concrete organic struggles over power.

In fact, we find these terrains of struggle within the spaceof development only if we understand the project of develop-ment as embedded within the uneven and contradictory his-tory of capitalist development. By offering a few observationson the history of the World Bank, I seek to show the value of acritical ethnographic approach that emphasizes historical con-junctures and the analysis of specific production processes (ofcommodities, knowledge, environments, capital, and subjects)in order to reveal vulnerabilities and contingencies (Hall ;Hart ). In sum, what is missing from most scholarship ondevelopment is an explanation of the processes by which itshegemony and counterhegemony are constituted, producingthe whole spectrum of political and cultural closures and op-portunities—from the extremes of societywide approval tomajor resistance—with full understanding that most socialactivity occurs in the spaces in between.

R E R E A D I N G D E V E L O P M E N T H I S T O R Y

To many scholars who study the World Bank and development,Harry Truman’s inaugural speech was a critical momentin the invention of the contemporary development project, forin it the newly elected Truman appealed to the American pub-lic to solve the problems of the “underdeveloped areas” of thepostwar world (Escobar ; Sachs ; Saldana-Portillo). “Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace,”Truman declared. Hence, “we should make available to thepeace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical

Introduction

knowledge” (Escobar , p. ). Supposedly, the Truman doc-trine sparked a new era of North-South relations via the proj-ect of development. But in designating this speech as a sign ofa dramatic shift in global politics, development scholars typi-cally ignore the terrains development had traversed up to thatpoint, such that these words could ring true. By taking seri-ously development as a colonial and capitalist project, steepedin conflict and convulsions, we can see that development prac-tices were always changing and always volatile and that devel-opment as an ideology was produced by different actors fordifferent reasons amidst historically specific political projects.In other words, most approaches to development (with theWorld Bank as its global trailblazer) fail to explain develop-ment as shaped as much by historical and geographic contin-gencies and ruptures as by continuities and inevitabilities. It isfrom an understanding of these shifts that we begin to see howand why development power proliferates and gets subverted.By emphasizing the historical conjunctures, we can begin tounderstand—and imagine—possible alternatives.

One place to start is with the observation that develop-ment under colonialism was never simply an enlightenedproposition but rather a set of strategic tools designed to quellheightened political tensions and uprisings in the colonies bybringing in new forms of colonial rule that bridged new eco-nomic liberal policies with—in some cases—the colonial cul-tural politics of trusteeship. For example, in the mid-s, theBritish were forced to contend with an unruly and rebelliousIndian subcontinent. John Stuart Mill, an employee and ideo-logue of the East India Company, argued that India needed to beruled by an “incorruptible”imperial corps exercising trusteeshipin order to create the conditions under which development (e.g.,prosperity, progress, civilization) could occur (Cowen and Shen-

Introduction

ton ). After a steady stream of rebellions against colonialofficers, factory owners, and landlords, peaking during the

Indian Mutiny, in which the East India Company had nochoice but to transfer control to the British crown and military(with brutal consequences for Indians), Mill’s principle oftrusteeship through development became the basis for the newadministration.

Yet it should not be forgotten that rapid capitalist indus-trialization in the mid-s also squeezed European peasantsand small producers, igniting widespread resistance and sabo-tage throughout Western Europe. In England, this strife pro-duced the Luddites, radicals, trade unionists, Chartists, demo-crats, and utopian socialists (Cowen and Shenton ; Shenton). These incendiary times also generated some of the coretenets and development institutions of the day, namely, eco-nomic liberalism and social welfarism. In England, the deathof the Speenhamland period (–) and the Poor Law re-form of coincided with an industrial working-class move-ment from which came a flurry of demands for protective fac-tory laws and social legislation (Burawoy ; Burawoy ).The minds of “Bentham and Burke, Godwin and Malthus, Ri-cardo and Marx, Robert Owen and John Stuart Mill, Darwinand Spencer” (Polanyi ) turned to a new anguish of con-cern about the “great transformation” that was occurring. Thisanguish provoked what Karl Polanyi called the “birth of so-ciety,” the social space that required active intervention anddevelopment by government in order to survive the violent tu-mult of industrial capitalist development (Polanyi ). De-velopment by government unfolded differently over space andtime, but it always invoked new management roles for impe-rial state institutions in both the metropole and the colonies.In short, regimes of development (Ludden ) were con-

Introduction

stantly being reshaped though political struggle. Moreover,that which surfaced in the colonies cannot be understood inisolation from those regimes that emerged in the core—suchas economic liberalism and social protection laws—as they re-sulted from overlapping imperial-colonial tensions.

The predecessor to the current development policies of economic neoliberalism, safety-net welfarism, good gover-nance, free trade, global integration, and investments in “civilsociety” can be found within the context of highly explosiveand violent colonial-metropole relations. New idioms did notcome “from the brow of the colonial officer” but from thecrossfire of mass rebellions and violent state responses (Cooper). That the ideologues of the World Bank and the Wash-ington Consensus mobilize similar types of arguments and ra-tionales as the East India Company did one hundred and fiftyyears earlier should give us pause. It should strengthen our re-solve to understand both the particular historical violence andthe au currant common sense in which development gets en-acted and proliferates.

In contrast to this colonial context, during the twentiethcentury and entangled with World War II, development lookedvery different. At certain moments and places, it was both a de-vice for weakened imperial powers to extricate themselvesfrom the colonies and a tool for anticolonial liberatory politicsamong the movements pushing the imperial powers out. InIndia, development planning continued to be the primary po-litical discourse in the years following independence (Bose), but instead of merely playing out existing British-fueleddiscourses, the political field became more diverse, with anti-colonial, autarkic-Gandhian, nationalist-socialist, and otherpolitical positions filling the void. In many African countries atthe time of independence, “the notion that seemed to envelop

Introduction

every ambition, practice, and discourse was unquestionablythat of development.” According to Mamadou Diouf, the term“was synonymous with modernization, cultural reconquestand renewal, economic progress, and the achievement of socialequity; development implied the construction of nation andcitizen as much as the reconstruction of the economy” (Diouf, p. ). Liberation movements produced their own power-ful development discourses as they sought to hold Europe ac-countable to its broad claims of universal rights, making theserights the basis for extracting certain types of independenceand justice from the modern world system (Cooper and Pack-ard ; James ).

These and other historical insights into the changing re-gimes of development should eclipse the facile view of devel-opment as either an obvious and rational technocratic plan or,in contrast, as the subjugation of “docile”third world subjects byunchanging Northern organizations like the East India Com-pany or the World Bank. Indeed, the political space of develop-ment generated through relations with the Bank also becomekey sites of counterhegemonic mobilization, even if, as has beenthe case of some revolutionary movements, they may embraceWestern-inspired ideas of development in ways that may under-mine radical social-justice agendas (Saldana-Portillo ).

R E I N T E R P R E T I N G T H E R O L E

O F T H E W O R L D B A N K

We need not repeatedly invoke the colonial past when inquir-ing about the World Bank of the present. Rather, critical read-ings of colonial history suggest that when we consider fromwhere World Bank power erupts and wanes, we need to payclose attention to the “terrain of the conjunctural” (Gramsci,

Introduction

Hoare, and Nowell-Smith ) and consider the actual prac-tices that make certain development regimes hegemonic whilesubjugating and silencing others (Hart ). From this per-spective, we can see that typical approaches to the World Bankare only partially correct. It is true that one of the biggestchanges in recent development history occurred through thecreation of the Bretton Woods institutions (the World Bankand IMF) in , but at that time, the World Bank was not pri-marily engaged in what many assume to be the “bread andbutter” work of the contemporary world of development, thatis, investing in poverty reduction and supporting the “basicneeds” of the world’s poor. Contrary to conventional wisdom,in its beginning, the World Bank principally lent money toNorthern countries to rebuild their war-torn infrastructure at home and abroad, in their former or existing colonies (seechapter ).

When the U.S. government introduced interest-freeloans and grants to Europe through its Marshall Plan, theWorld Bank was forced to switch gears and start lending to re-build infrastructure in Europe’s (ex-)colonies. Typically, theBank channeled its capital through the same European-basedcolonial banks, using Western currencies and hiring Europeanand U.S. firms to rebuild the railways, ports, and mines. Hence,in the post–World War II era, the World Bank played a pivotalrole in the global economy by introducing new actors—theU.S. Treasury Department, U.S. investment firms and banks,and U.S. contractors—into the center of existing inequitabletrade and production relations between Europe and the thirdworld. Not coincidentally, in the first decade after the war, theUnited States controlled the highest proportion of the vote inthe World Bank as well as the highest percentage of foreignprocurement from the Bank’s loans (i.e., U.S. firms received

Introduction

the contracts for projects in borrowing countries). After all,this so-called global institution did most if its business trans-actions with clients working just a stone’s throw from its Wash-ington, D.C., headquarters. By agreement between the UnitedStates and European leaders, the World Bank’s president wouldalways be a U.S. citizen, usually a power broker from Wall Street,while the IMF’s president would always be West European. Atthe start, the original Bank staff was composed mostly of colo-nial officers from Europe’s overseas offices who were reanointedas the midcentury’s transnational experts on North-South trade,capital investments, and rule.

In spite of these particular details of history, the litera-ture on the World Bank emphasizes one theme when high-lighting the Bank’s origins: poverty alleviation (Caufield ;Kapur, Webb, and Lewis ; Pincus and Winters ; Rich). During the Bank’s early history, however, poverty wasnever on the agenda. It never presented development as a pro-cess of working with the rural poor or directing its capital in-vestments to social upliftment. In the s, that would havebeen a highly suspect claim and an “irrational” endeavor. Theearly World Bank invested in capital projects to rebuild oldcolonial infrastructure for its main clients and constituents,which were New York and London banks and investment firmsand the West’s capital good sectors. In those days, few expectedthe World Bank, based in Washington and run by Wall Streetbankers, to be concerned with the downtrodden and impover-ished. So, then, from where did such expectations arise?

The idea of fighting poverty with large capital interven-tions came from the historical conjuncture of a number of re-lated events: the bloody and costly U.S. war in Indochina; thecrash of the U.S. economy; the yearning of capital-flush West-ern Europe, Japan, and OPEC nations to find investment op-

Introduction

portunities outside of the U.S. economy; a revolutionary spiritspreading through the global South; and a world crisis in the“international food order” spurred not by food shortages butby a flood of cheap U.S. food exports (Friedmann ). Thismomentous conjuncture became a great opportunity forRobert McNamara, the new World Bank president, to harnessthe North’s capital surpluses and the South’s economic woesinto a new development regime that helped transform theWorld Bank into a global “defender of the world’s poor.” As Iwill show in chapter , a completely different set of historicalcircumstances would precipitate the rise (and fall) of subse-quent development regimes, that is, structural adjustment andgreen neoliberalism.

T H E R O L E O F K N O W L E D G E P R O D U C T I O N

Although by the end of this book it will become abundantlyclear that the Bank wields enormous political-economic powerin borrowing countries, my emphasis is actually less on pureeconomic power than on the complementary power of itsknowledge-producing activities. I think that the way the Bankexerts its power through lending is fairly straightforward.Much less understandable is how such power and authoritybecomes strengthened and normalized over time. To grapplewith this question requires a thorough interrogation of theways in which common sense is produced and how the terrainof ideas on which the “practical consciousness” of people is ac-tually formed. “Common sense is not rigid and immobile,”Gramsci once wrote, “but is continually transforming itself,enriching itself with scientific ideas and with philosophicalopinions which have entered ordinary life. Common sensecreates the folklore of the future, that is as a relatively rigid

Introduction

phase of popular knowledge at a given place and time” (Gram-sci , p. n). We should not take for granted popular be-liefs and scientific ideas because they merely exist in the life ofthe mind; on the contrary, they are themselves material forcesthat have a direct impact on the world in which we live andwhich we struggle to change.

So we need to ask: how do new society-wide projects,such as the projects of modernization, development, or neo-liberal capitalism, emerge and become common sense? Al-though these society-wide projects may reflect the interests ofspecific elite social classes, they are made dominant and sensiblethrough processes of what Gramsci called “civil hegemony,” orthe dispersal of power through civil society, such as throughschooling; religious life; scientific, cultural and voluntary or-ganizations; and popular forms of communication and media.These knowledge- and idea-producing processes do not, how-ever, occur simply to legitimate or make more palatable thesour-tasting effects of, say, neoliberal capitalism. On the con-trary, the realms of knowledge production and political eco-nomics are mutually constitutive and codependent. The WorldBank’s latest regime of green neoliberalism did not arise froma corporate or bankers’ plot, but through a series of events andpractices centered on professionals working in government,firms, NGOs, and the scientific community.

Therefore, we need to focus on the particular sites wherethese ideas, concepts, policies, and loans get debated, crafted,and challenged. These production sites exist where these di-verse and dispersed professionals meet, and they together gen-erate the world of development without which the World Bankcould not exist. Hence, a highly volatile and tense dynamic hasemerged between the Bank and its offspring, and the Banktoday has become much more dependent on its knowledge-

Introduction

production capacities than its ability to raise capital. The Bankhas never had trouble raising money; its trouble has alwaysbeen in lending it. To drum up continuous business in a cir-cumspect world, the Bank depends on its capacity to generatethe ideas of new global problems as well as on its own globalexpertise, new mechanisms for intervention as well as new rea-sons for countries to borrow, new development subjects andsubjectivities as well as new forms of its own legitimation. TheBank works hard to create its own demand through the pro-duction of new transnationalized institutions, networks, norms,beliefs, and professionals (who have become a class in itself).In this odd space of “transnational society,” some governmentagencies and civil servants can participate in a potentially lu-crative neoliberal agenda even while their peers in governmentand society do not. The future of the World Bank lies in thebalance between these countervailing positions on the ground,between those benefiting from and those losing out to neo-liberal activities. In these places where the Bank plies its trade,knowledge production has become a highly important and yetfragile affair, one that matters much more to the Bank than itwould like to acknowledge.

How did neoliberalism become so convincing, so quickly,worldwide? One cannot assume that a sea change in philoso-phy conjured up by a handful of leaders in Washington wouldso simply become the rule of law around the world. On thecontrary, the World Bank’s sponsorship of a neoliberal agendaoccurred because it was able to mobilize a well-financed insti-tutional architecture that was already in place, with people andagencies well situated to participate. The evolution of theBank’s knowledge-production machinery occurred in fits andstarts; in the s and s, the Bank focused primarily ontraining a small group of elites, some of whom became prime

Introduction

ministers, ministry heads, and senior Bank and IMF staff. Dur-ing the early period when infrastructural investment was cen-tral, the Bank helped nurture national-level development banksand quasi-state electricity and power boards, often trainingtheir directors. Under Robert McNamara (–), the Bank’sefforts expanded rapidly into the agricultural and industrialsectors and generated a whole new cadre of state bureaucrats(Kapur, Webb, and Lewis ). McNamara’s Bank funded anew scientific-bureaucratic infrastructure in borrowing coun-tries to produce the knowledge necessary to support its loans;these investments fueled the growth of national agencies, in-stitutes, universities, and a burgeoning class of professionalswhose budgets and livelihoods depended on developmentagency funding. As development institutions grew in size andstature, so did the roles of the knowledge being produced, theknowledge producers, and the “underdeveloped” social groupsthat were being scrutinized in development’s name.

D E V E L O P M E N T ’ S C O N T R A D I C T I O N S

After a decade of the “McNamara revolution,” the contradic-tions inherent in large-scale development lending and policymaking became manifest. The World Bank’s program of capital-intensive development forced large populations off the land,out of the forests, and away from their fisheries, alienatingthem from the ecological conditions of production (Caufield; Kapur, Webb, and Lewis ; O’Connor ; O’Connor; Pincus and Winters ; Rich ). In Indonesia, theBank-sponsored Transmigration Project forcibly dispossessedhundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities and destroyed hugeareas of wetlands and tropical forest. In the Brazilian Amazon,Bank-financed highways and timber, mining, and agricultural

Introduction

colonization schemes sped up deforestation, river contamina-tion, and the death of forest-dwelling indigenous peoples. Largedams, power projects, and industrial agriculture had similareffects in the Philippines, India, Thailand, and elsewhere. Ifone could find a silver lining in these disastrous clouds, it wasthat these projects helped stimulate the formation of mass op-position movements critical of Bank-style development. Incountries (such as Indonesia and the Philippines) where pro-test against the state was met with murder and torture, protes-tors targeted supranational “external” actors, such as the WorldBank and the U.S. government. In places where the state wasless brutal to dissenters, communities organized themselvesinto an array of activist networks, leading to the flowering ofwhat has been called the “public sphere” or “civil society.” Insum, on the coattails of highly destructive World Bank inter-ventions a flurry of political activity has emerged, which theBank did not intend and could not effectively control.

Meanwhile, capital-poor states were becoming seriouslyoverextended. They had borrowed dollar-based developmentcapital in the hopes of producing export-quality commodities,the income from which could be used to pay back the debt andreinvest in society. But the glut of World Bank capital pushingfor the export of a handful of commodities—sugars, cookingoils, grains, cotton, rubber, coffee—helped spark a dramaticfall in commodity prices (George and Sabelli ; McMichael). The millions of people displaced by these projects beganmaking demands on the state for reparations, protection, jobs,land, housing, water, and food. Cities swelled with a steadystream of dispossessed rural producers. The common nomen-clature describing the ill effects of this period of development—an accumulating “debt crisis” of national-level finances—doesnot adequately capture the magnitude of the devastationwrought upon large segments of society.

Introduction

After the explosion of capital investments during Mc-Namara’s “Basic Needs” era, the World Bank’s job becameoverwhelming. Its work became heavily criticized around theworld, leading to a temporary legitimation crisis. And yet, evenwhile the Bank was at the center of disapproval, developmentremained a vibrant if disputatious discourse and industry. Acreative effervescence sprouted from development’s “failures,”helping to generate new actors and networks, from influentialaid agencies to NGOs. Whereas in , less than . percent ofoverseas development assistance was channeled through de-velopment NGOs, by , the U.S. government alone waschanneling percent of its aid funds through NGOs (Donini). The World Bank learned to work with, and even culti-vate, NGOs, hiring them as consultants to conduct project-related research or to help implement and improve World Bankprojects (Nelson ). These new opportunities for NGOs andacademics enabled them to get off the sidelines and becomeinvolved in expanding the business of development.

As it became more commonplace for the internationaldevelopment institutions to hire NGOs as consultants andcontractors and as some NGO staff began to feel less adversar-ial toward the Bank, these trends became highly divisive. ThoseNGOs that worked with the Bank prospered appreciably, whilemany of the most vocal NGOs either refused to take on thisrole or, if they remained critical, were rarely rehired. Most ofthe scholarly literature explains this proliferating world ofNGOs within a static analytical frame in which NGOs are sit-uated within a middle space of “civil society,” separated by theimagined walls of the “state,” on the one side, and the “market”and corporate actors, on the other (Florini ; Fox andBrown ; Frey et al. ). Yet as I show in chapters and ,the world of development is one where individuals often wearmultiple hats and move across agencies and structural loca-

Introduction

tions. Indeed, in the early s, the Bank created an employeeexchange program with firms, NGOs, and its own staff, so thatone now finds staff from Monsanto and Cargill in the Bank’sagricultural division and NGO staff sharing projects and re-view board assignments with Bank staff.6

T H E B I R T H O F T H E E N V I R O N M E N T A L S T A T E

In sum, the Bank’s achievements in the world of transnationalnetworking have been truly remarkable but hardly remarkedupon.When a wide range of actors, such as World Bank lawyers,U.S. management firm staff, and NGO scientists, contribute torewriting property rights laws, redesigning state agencies andretraining their staff, and reconfiguring local production rela-tions in borrowing countries, it seems obvious that we need torethink our old assumptions about the nation-state and its“public” employees. Focusing on the development practicesemerging from a “greened” World Bank, we find the prolifera-tion of hybridized state actors who have become responsible forthe fundamental activities of natural resource management,and yet who are often employed by agents outside the borrow-ing state, such as U.S. AID, the World Bank, the World Conser-vation Union (IUCN), and even PricewaterhouseCoopers.

These hybrid state actors are incorporating a set of greenneoliberal practices that circulate through transnational pro-fessional-class networks and help produce ways of valuing na-ture as well as ways of valuing rights of access to environmentsand natural resources. They also staff newly formed agencieswithin national boundaries and in the world system. Hence, asI argue in chapter , the World Bank’s practices are facilitatingthe birth of environmental states in the global South, markedby new roles for state actors and new forms of legality and eco-

Introduction

rationality that have fragmented, stratified, and unevenly trans-nationalized Southern states, state actors, and state power. En-vironmental states are characterized by government agenciesthat are no longer run solely by nation-based citizens whohave risen through the civil-servant ranks. Some are employ-ees of PricewaterhouseCoopers or of a British engineeringfirm; others may be paid from a particular development proj-ect rather than from the typically small pot for bureaucraticsalaries. Some government employees work alongside Euro-peans in air-conditioned computerized offices whereas othersremain at their old typewriters trying to find a second job tosupplement their shrinking (neoliberalized) government sala-ries. Some receive overseas training in neoliberal practices ofstate management while their job security becomes linked tothe longevity of a particular eco-development project, thus en-couraging consent on controversial projects receiving WorldBank or bilateral financing.

The idea of the environment has risen in official dis-course but the meaning may be completely foreign and mayreflect better the wishes and paradigms emerging from thewave of privatization policies sweeping through governments,especially those highly indebted to the World Bank, IMF, andprivate Northern banks. Environmental states are definingsuch public goods as river basins, forests, wetlands, and aqui-fers as undervalued in an effort to use natural resources as thecatalyst to integrate countries into the global economy and tomove out of debt. In the process, the ideological and practicaldifferences between finance and environmental ministries havenarrowed appreciably. By successfully restructuring environ-mental agencies in its borrowing countries, the World Bankhas implemented a decade-long plan of the “EPA-ization” ofministries of the environment, forests, agriculture, mining,

Introduction

land management, and water. This has become a perverselytop-down undemocratic reorganization that reflects an unre-alistic image of the origins of the U.S. Environmental Protec-tion Agency (EPA), an agency born from sustained social-movement activism of the s and s. (Ironically, thisEPA-ization process has occurred at the same time the EPA inthe United States has been completely gutted by domestic neo-liberal forces of a different ilk, leaving it as a faint shadow of itsformer self.)

One result of these sweeping changes has been the rise ina new global water initiative, the “Water for All” policy. As a re-sponse to the horrible reality that percent of the world’spopulation has no access to clean water, over the past decade,seemingly arising from nowhere, water privatization has be-come the singular solution of choice by most global institu-tions. In chapter I focus on this phenomenon, asking thequestion: how did so many leaders in governments, globalagencies, NGOs, and the scientific community so quickly em-brace this particular water policy, using the same language andarguments in major policy forums in Kyoto, The Hague, Jo-hannesburg, Casablanca, and elsewhere?

This new water policy has temporarily transformed theway water is supplied in the global South. State responsibilitiesare being downgraded from a provider of an essential publicgood to a mere regulator of a privatized commodity. The poormajority is being asked to become a “good customer” and yetis unable to afford the newly commodified goods, which is ag-gravating public health and sanitation problems. At its worst,the state becomes an absentee landlord and the poor becometemporary tenants in their own countries—a global phenom-enon that exemplifies David Harvey’s notion of “accumulationby dispossession” (Harvey ). The new overseers of land,

Introduction

water, energy, and other basic public goods have moved off-

shore, far from the civil-society spaces that the green neo-liberal regime of development in rhetoric promotes. Not co-incidentally, from to , most World Bank and IMFloans to countries on the African continent were conditionalon the agreement by borrowing governments to have a priva-tization water policy on tap (Grusky ; Hall, Bayliss, andLobina ). Today, a highly indebted country cannot get aloan from a foreign bank or multilateral institution withoutfirst proposing a national privatization plan for the sale ofpublic goods, such as water, medical care, and electricity tolarge Western corporations, such as Bechtel,Vivendi, and Suez.

A Fragile Hegemony

Privatizing water has become one of the most inflammatoryand controversial neoliberal policies yet, with mass mobiliza-tions rising up against it in South Africa, Ghana, Bolivia, Ar-gentina, the Philippines, and even France (headquarters to thetwo largest global water firms). From a Gramscian perspective,hegemony is a concept that points to exercises of power madeup of both force and consent, the latter of which reflects a “ne-gotiated compromise [that] replaces irreconcilable interests”(Burawoy , p. ). The central questions of hegemony—how is it constituted? whose interests does it represent? howdoes it mask power?—help us think about how green neo-liberalism becomes palatable even to those who might other-wise be opposed to it, such as environmentally or socially ori-ented nongovernmental organizations and social movements.Hegemony can occur within the realm of production, as it didin the case of the mid-twentieth-century U.S.“Fordist” factoryregime in which higher wages and a new consumer culture

Introduction

brokered the destruction of trade unionism. It can also emergewithin such civil-society institutions as public education, masscommunications, and religious and civic organizations. Gram-sci understood the expansion of civil society and its layered in-terweavings of popular organizations and networks as anarena in which modern class formation becomes articulatedand class struggle becomes contained and absorbed, especiallyin its close connections to the mediating “expansive state”(Burawoy ). It is within civil society that dominant classesoften make their values and interests those of the larger soci-ety, such that popular consent becomes constituted througheveryday practices of social interaction. Gramsci’s idea ofhegemony pushes us both to think seriously about the motivesbehind the current “rise of civil society” in the agendas ofsuch disparate actors as chambers of commerce, developmentNGOs, and multilateral development banks and to interrogatethe new realms that have become common sense in the worldof development, and which have overtaken or redefined local-regional political agendas.

For the moment, the World Bank has successfully madenonnegotiable certain demands for global normative stan-dards on questions of state restructuring, good governance,an activated civil society, and environmental sustainability—standards that are constituted within the parameters of a highlyauthoritative, hydra-headed, and capital-driven World Bank.Yet because we find so many other social actors far from theBank’s payroll ascribing to the same truths and tenets, we needto understand the World Bank’s hegemonic power within acontext of numerous other social institutions and political-economic projects, as I seek to do here.

At the same time that World Bank hegemony reflects asuccessful degree of mastery of popular and elite consent that

Introduction

inculcates a moral and social authority worldwide, it remainsfragile. As I will show in chapter , many times in its sixty-yearhistory the Bank has almost disappeared into obscurity due todisinterest from investors and borrowers, trenchant protestfrom social activists, and a mountain of bad and unrepayableloans—all of which have threatened the World Bank’s abilityto raise capital and its political authority to lend. Although theBank is not a private capital-accumulating firm, its mainsource of capital since the early s (besides loan interest re-payment from its Southern borrowers) has been the globalbonds market, not Western taxpayers. And bond investors arenotoriously squeamish and never loyal when it comes to athreat to the rate of return on their investments. There is noreason to think that investors could not retreat in a flash fromWorld Bank bonds if they felt that their profits were beingthreatened. Confidence is the Achilles’ heel for firms that de-pend on publicly traded stocks and bonds, and the same is truefor the bond-dependent World Bank. If a cluster of African orLatin American leaders were to refuse to repay what manySouthern country citizens consider odious and unfair WorldBank and IMF debts, market confidence in what are now “AAA”World Bank bonds would plummet and access to capital (andtherefore power) for the Bank could easily vanish.7

Nor is such pressure purely hypothetical. As many bor-rowing countries are forced to pay back to the World Bank andIMF in interest alone more than they invest in public health,welfare, and education, some national election campaigns inthe South are focusing on debt repayment as a threat to na-tional sovereignty. Joblessness, deep social spending cuts, pri-vatization of public utilities and goods, landlessness and thefailure of land distribution programs, and a newly liberalizedcapitalist landscape dominated by foreign corporations are all

Introduction

being attributed, rightly or wrongly, to the power of the WorldBank. Indeed, many political elites in the global South invokethe World Bank as “an enemy of the nation” as a way to unifythe country against an external adversary, even as these samestate elites continue to tap into the Bank’s bountiful credit ac-counts and buy public industries sold on the auction block atbargain-basement prices.

At the nonelite grassroots, millions of people have mobi-lized to challenge the status quo and produce alternative polit-ical agendas, as I discuss in this book’s conclusion. Even beforethe sleeping giant Western media awoke to the antiglobaliza-tion politics at the WTO meetings in Seattle in late , socialmovements in the global South were hitting the streets en masseto protest a series of deprivations imposed on them by theneoliberal policies of the World Bank, IMF, and WTO. Whilemedia in the West presented the “battle of Seattle” as a majorevent, yet often dismissing protestors as the misguided middleclass wanting to deny development to the poor, mass move-ments were energetically taking to the streets in Ecuador, Thai-land, Bolivia, Argentina, Haiti, South Korea, South Africa,India, Brazil, and Mexico. At great personal risk, people haveorganized against water privatization, job loss and wage cuts,police crackdowns, and the loss of national sovereignty due to government commitments to the World Bank and IMF.Twenty million Indians walked off the job one day and half ofSouth Africa’s workforce went out on strike on another, de-manding that their governments repudiate their subordinateposition with the World Bank and IMF (Bond ).

These movements represent a cross section of peoplechallenging development authorities on issues of right-to-livelihood, military repression, environmental destruction,and the privatization of natural resources and public goods.

Introduction

Broad-based coalitions of various shapes and sentiments haveformed over the past decade, bringing together people fromthe Annamite Mountains to the Mekong Delta, from Cocha-bamba to Buenos Aires. They get tremendous support fromtransnational networks, fighting on multiple fronts againstmegadams, human rights abuses, genetically modified foodimports, corruption and cronyism, and development-led in-debtedness. In sum, just as certain arenas of national civil soci-eties have become dominated by neoliberal hopes and desires,other arenas have become hothouses for transformational pol-itics with limitless potential. They are engaged in a series of“wars of position,” to use Gramsci’s phrase, which are “not somuch a matter of creating movements outside the hegemonicorder but rather on its terrain, radicalizing the meaning of de-mocracy, appropriating the market, democratizing sovereignty,and expanding human rights” (Burawoy ).

In the face of seemingly intractable global hegemony, theWorld Bank remains extremely vulnerable, which might ex-plain why the institution currently spends more on public re-lations than it does on research (Finnemore ; Kapur andCulpeper ; Kapur ; Pincus and Winters ; Rich; Standing ). Although the World Bank does not existas an independent actor, but only as one that is deeply embed-ded in many institutions located across the global politicaleconomy, it could crash as quickly as the Iron Curtain or theSoutheast Asian and Latin American currencies did. If it does,it may become a world-historical event for which there are fewparallels. I hope that my ethnographic exploration of WorldBank power reveals not only how this powerful global institu-tion has constructed fragile hegemony, but also the possibili-ties for emerging counterhegemonic forces and political op-portunities for profound social change.

Introduction

IIThe Rise of the Bank

The New World had to be yoked, and kept yoked, to the Old

World, if the latter were to enjoy durable peace and prosperity.

—John Maynard Keynes, , personal correspondence

(Skidelsky )

s World Bank/IMF officials gathered in Washington,D.C., for the annual meetings in the face of an

ailing global economy the mood was anything butgrim. The meetings marked the fifty-first anniver-

sary of the Bretton Woods conference, which led to the estab-lishment of these institutions and the Bank’s stewardship ofthe global development project. But the party had its gate-crashers—an energetic global activist network that stormeddowntown Washington with an impressive “ Years Is Enough”campaign. The protesters successfully undermined the anniver-

sary celebration and shocked the complacent Bank and IMFleadership. Over time they have played a major role in the re-forming of the World Bank and giving shape to its next devel-opment regime. Inside and outside this oppositional cam-paign, a broad range of observers identified Bank policies asthe catalyst for the collapse of economies throughout LatinAmerica, Africa, and Asia, and for the two “lost decades” dur-ing which whole regions of the world suffered from substan-tial backsliding in per capita income, GDP, and health and so-cial indicators. Representatives of the displaced, aggrieved, andangry stakeholders of Bank/IMF projects had crossed oceansto come speak out at street protests, teach-ins, and workshopsscattered throughout the city. From their perspective, we shouldhave all been wearing black. Few officials and delegates at theBank/IMF annual meetings, however, seemed to agree.

The majority of those attending the annual meetingswere not members of the development community one learnsabout in development studies courses or through the media.They were not associated with church-based charities or foodaid NGOs. None spoke the language of charity or of desper-ately poor third worlders. There was no discourse of resuscita-tion or emergency aid to avert catastrophe. In fact, they spokeonly of business. Packing Washington during the week of theBank/IMF meetings were the world’s central bankers and fi-

nance ministers, and they were obviously on a shopping spree.At one hotel, they met with Henry Kissinger, Bill Gates, and theCEOs of Westinghouse, Bechtel, Citicorp, and major banking,insurance, finance, defense and armaments, telecommunica-tions, energy and power, and computer companies. At the mainhotel, they had breakfast courtesy of Bear Stearns, Baring Se-curities International, the Istanbul Stock Exchange, ING Cap-ital, Banco Portugal, and Standard Chartered Bank. Lunch was

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hosted by Chemical Bank, Creditanstalt-Bankverein, and ABN-AMRO in the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Mu-seum of Women in the Arts. In the late afternoon, the officialprogram brought all delegates and guests back to the SheratonHotel to listen to the Bank president and IMF managing di-rector officially convene the annual meetings. But by p.m.,the early round of cocktail receptions commenced, courtesy ofthe Bank of Tokyo, Brown Brothers Harriman & Company,Unico Banking Group, Citicorp/Citibank, Arab Banking Cor-poration, and Bank of America, among others. First ChicagoBank hosted a dinner party at the Meridian House, MorganStanley at the Phillips Collection, Chase Manhattan Bank atthe Decatur House, and ChinaTrust Commercial Bank at theTwin Oaks. An elite group of high rollers attended a black-tiedinner with J. P. Morgan executives. Later, guests were invitedto after-dinner parties, which included the p.m. live show,“Broadway Meets Berlin,” hosted by Bankgesellschaft Berlin.Delegates looked exhausted after the first day of the meetings,but there was little to suggest they were anything more thanweary revelers.

Running concurrently for the scientific community wasa conference sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences(NAS) and World Bank that included Vice President Al Gore;UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali (by video);World Bank President James Wolfensohn; Jacques-Yves Cou-steau; Harvard Professor E. O. Wilson; Worldwatch InstitutePresident Lester Brown; the director general of World WildlifeFund, Claude Martin; Mali Prime Minister Ibrahim BoubacarKeita; the administrator of China’s National EnvironmentalProtection Agency, Xie Zhenhua; and CEO and chair of EnronCorporation, Rebecca Mark. For three days, in panels and ple-naries, scientists and officials from the World Bank, govern-

The Rise of the Bank

ments, NGOs, universities, research institutes, and private cor-porations discussed “Effective Financing of EnvironmentallySustainable Development” at the prestigious National Acad-emy of Sciences. In his welcome address, the academy’s presi-dent, Bruce Alberts, announced his gratitude to the WorldBank for helping the academy incorporate the concept of en-vironmentally sustainable development into its scientific work.The conference was glamorous and upbeat in ways uncom-mon to the tweedy world of science and academics.

The business of development is a profitable and inclusiveone, and the topics discussed at these and other World Bankmeetings are not typically hunger or poverty. Whereas mostwritings on the World Bank claim that some combination ofthe “poor” borrowing states, Northern aid agencies, and devel-opment NGOs are the main constituents and partners of theWorld Bank, my observations of the Bank’s annual meetingslead me to suggest that the actors in the world of developmentare much more diverse, with powerful ties to familiar for-profitinterests. Moreover, there is nothing intrinsic or inevitableabout the specific discourses of development the Bank has pur-sued or its role in the global political economy during its sixty-year history. Most authors assume as inevitable the Bank’s riseto prominence as the world’s premier global institution, andthey take for granted the authority of global institutions ingeneral. By contrast, in this chapter I will explain the political-economic contexts and discursive strategies that helped theBank to become a globally hegemonic institution by empha-sizing the historical conjunctures that others have glossed over—in particular, the phenomenal way that Robert McNamarainserted the World Bank into the global economy as a power-ful institutional force. Although historians of the World Banknote the Bank’s growth under McNamara, they do not exam-

The Rise of the Bank

ine the key historic shifts in the global political economy andhow the technologies of power/knowledge (Foucault ) es-tablished under McNamara enabled the Bank to grow andprosper even during difficult times. These technologies havebecome crucial for the Bank as it tries to maintain its reputa-tion in a world where anti-Bank social movements have gainedconsiderable legitimacy.

Four distinct periods mark the history of the World Bank:the “reluctant Banker” period of –; the Bank’s “rise topower” in the period of – during which the calls for“poverty alleviation” and meeting “basic needs” for the “abso-lute poor” reflected a new rhetorical turn in development; the“debt and adjustment” period of –; and the “green ne-oliberal” period from to the present. This first period wasshaped by the absolute control over the Bank by the U.S. Trea-sury, the State Department, and Wall Street bankers, who werethe Bank’s main constituents during its early years.1 These ac-tors were primarily interested in having the Bank lend forbricks-and-mortar types of projects. They kept tight controlover Bank expenditures based on conservative banker ethics,except when the State Department insisted that providing sup-port for its cold war allies was more important. Under theseconstraints and conflicting rationalities, the Bank remainedsmall and ineffectual. During its first two decades, the Bankwas unable to articulate a universal project of liberal capitalistdevelopment, and as a consequence, it played a very minor rolein the realms of development and political economy during itsfirst twenty years.

It was only during the McNamara era (-) that theWorld Bank emerged as a powerful organization, spurring thecreation of a new transnational space that the Bank helped fillwith professional networks and discursive regimes of rule,

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truth, and government. During his thirteen-year reign as WorldBank president, Robert McNamara, a former U.S. secretary ofdefense, converted the Bank into a major transnational insti-tution as well as the world’s foremost authority on develop-ment. Ironically, the engines of growth for the twin BrettonWoods institutions fired up only after the longstanding Bret-ton Woods agreement on currency and capital controls failed.As no single institution had before, the World Bank under Mc-Namara facilitated an explosion of financial capital invest-ment in the global South as well as a surfeit of developmentknowledge, which repositioned development as a global proj-ect. By bringing together the ideas of economic growth, socialupliftment, and global security, and making it into a “science”backed by World Bank finances, McNamara created a power/knowledge leviathan of a completely new sort. Not a state, notan international agency, not a finance bank, the World Bankbecame something quite unique in the world—a one-of-a-kind supranational development institution.

After a decade of growth in the s, the Bank’s capital,ideas, and institutions set root and flowered in many differentforms around the world: national development banks, na-tional development institutes, national centers for agricultural(or green revolution) research, large dams, highways, powerplants, mines, and national forestry projects. A major learninginitiative sparked by the World Bank, United Nations agencies,and universities in the North fueled studies in developmenteconomics, poverty, and the green revolution. This researchbecame meaningful when it was supported by Northern foun-dations, used by major agro-industrial corporations, and situ-ated in Bank-financed research institutes in borrowing coun-tries. In short time, the Bank’s large capital flows into theSouth were explained in terms of the financing of poverty al-

The Rise of the Bank

leviation, basic needs, and the green revolution. As a conse-quence of the Bank’s well-financed knowledge production ma-chinery, one could find middle-class people almost anywherewith an opinion about how to help poor peasants in India,Brazil, or Kenya.

In no small part because of the World Bank’s metamor-phosis during the s and early s, development power/knowledge writ large became common sense. The Bank’s roleas global economic and political manager became more en-trenched during the s, when the Third World debt crisis ithelped to create further reduced the political autonomy ofborrowing countries while increasing its own. The Bank’s phe-nomenal rise to power, however, also induced the conditionsfor its own legitimation challenges. The Bank could no longerpretend to be the dispassionate technical expert offering ad-vice from an apolitical distance when it was also making thedaily decisions for finance ministers and central bankers in itsclient countries (i.e., Mexico, sub-Saharan African countries).As a consequence, at the height of the World Bank’s hegemony,the Bank became a target of a growing worldwide movementwith street riots, parliamentary demands, and mass mobiliza-tions to try to close it down. Forced to “reform or die,” theWorld Bank experienced yet another transformation in thes, an equally profound shift, to green neoliberalism.

An Auspicious Start

In the beginning, the World Bank was just an afterthought. InMay , the U.S. government invited forty-four countries toparticipate in a conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire,to consider creating an international monetary fund to rebuildinternational currencies sunk by the war (George and Sabelli

The Rise of the Bank

; Mason and Asher ). The invitation included the ideaof “possibly a Bank for reconstruction and development,” butJohn Maynard Keynes and the British were against it. Of thefourteen days spent in Bretton Woods, one participant esti-mated that no more than a day and a half was dedicated to dis-cussing this possibility (Kapur, Webb, and Lewis , p. ).Keynes did see the sense in some international coordinationover the rebuilding effort, but “international” clearly meantEurope, which in turn translated only to the imperial West. Heargued that with “proper” economic management, govern-ments could “have a boom that would raise the standard ofliving of all Europe to the levels of America today.” WhenKeynes was asked, “Does this apply to India and the rest of the(British) Empire?” he replied, reflecting the colonial view ofthe day, “That must wait until the reconstruction of Europe ismuch further advanced” (Kapur, Webb, and Lewis , p. ).In the mid-s, much of the South, with Latin American ex-ceptions, was still colonized, and Western leaders still had em-pire on their minds, even as the war was destroying Europeaneconomies and attenuating their colonial power. Consequently,although some delegations from the South were invited to at-tend, they knew enough to articulate their needs in ways thatemphasized imperial self-interest.

Indeed, as one observer noted,“at Bretton Woods, the de-veloping countries tended to view (or at least present) them-selves more as new, raw-material-producing nations and less ascountries with general development problems” (Bauer, Meier,and Seers , p. ). Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, and Bolivia hadtheir own proposals on how to steer the global postwar econ-omy: recalibrate prices for raw-material goods from the Southand manufactured goods from the North, which were “notori-ously far out of proportion” before the war. To Southern dele-

The Rise of the Bank

gates, the price gap was the fundamental reason their econo-mies were imperiled. At Bretton Woods, Southern delegatestried to put this issue on the table. A Mexican delegate tactfullyargued that Europe could not be reconstructed without theraw materials and the markets of the South: wouldn’t capitalbe best spent in the colonies to help reconstruct Europe (Kapur,Webb, and Lewis , p. )? In the end, it did not mattermuch what these delegates argued; proposals from the Southwere not taken seriously by the organizers from the UnitedStates and the United Kingdom.

Keynes, in fact, anticipated such arguments. He preferreda completely different meeting format: a one-on-one meetingbetween the British and the United States. In private, Keynesremarked that with “twenty-two countries which clearly havenothing to contribute . . . [the meeting will be] the most mon-strous monkey-house assembled for years” (Kapur, Webb, andLewis , p. ). But Harry White, assistant to U.S. TreasurySecretary Henry Morgenthau, was much more sanguine andstrategic: “There’s nothing that will serve to drive these coun-tries into some kind of—ism—communism or somethingelse—faster than having inadequate capital” (Kapur, Webb,and Lewis , p. ).

Just as the British perspective on the Bretton Woods con-ference was starkly summarized by Keynes in this chapter’sopening epigraph, the U.S. position is outlined in the follow-ing State Department press release from the first day of the(July) conference:

The purpose of the Conference is . . . wholly withinthe American tradition, and completely outside po-litical consideration. The United States wants, afterthis war, full utilization of its industries, its facto-ries and its farms; full and steady employment for

The Rise of the Bank

its citizens, particularly its ex-servicemen; and fullprosperity and peace. It can have them only if cur-rencies are stable, if money they receive on the duedate will have the value contracted for—hence thefirst proposal, the Stabilization Fund [i.e., the IMF].With values secured and held stable, it is next desir-able to promote world-wide reconstruction, revivenormal trade, and make funds available for soundenterprises, all of which will in turn call for Ameri-can products hence the second proposal for theBank for Reconstruction and Development [i.e.,the World Bank]. (U.S. Department of State ,p. , as cited in Peet , p. )

From these “monkey house” histrionics emerged the Interna-tional Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), orthe World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.2 Be-ginning without much direction or trust in it by the leadingWestern powers, the World Bank began to find its personalityunder its second president, one of the most powerful men inthe “American Establishment,” Wall Street veteran John Mc-Cloy (Bird ).3 McCloy’s initial measures clearly reflectedthe type of institutional character he sought to create. For ex-ample, when the first three loan applications came in to theBank from France, Poland, and Chile, McCloy worked quicklyto select only France as a recipient, sending a strong tough lovemessage to the watching world. As his biographer notes:

By April , . . . McCloy decided that the first loanwould go to the French. . . . The terms would betough: The Bank would lend only half of the re-quested $ million, Bank officers would monitorend use of the funds, and the French government

The Rise of the Bank

would have to pledge that the repayment of theBank’s loans would have absolute priority over anyother foreign debt. Furthermore, the Bank wouldclosely supervise the French economy to ensure thatthe government took steps to balance its budget, in-crease taxes, and cut consumption of certain luxuryimports. The French protested that such conditionsinfringed on their sovereignty. But when McCloyrefused to budge, they reluctantly agreed to histerms. Simultaneously, the [U.S.] State Departmentbluntly informed the French that they would haveto “correct the present situation” by removing anycommunist representatives in the Cabinet. TheCommunist Party was pushed out of the coalitiongovernment in early May , and within hours, asif to underscore the linkage, McCloy announcedthat the loan would go through. Even then, hewarned that the French would not receive the loanuntil the Bank successfully floated $ millionworth of bonds on the New York market. . . . Thiswas exactly the message McCloy intended to conveyto Wall Street. For the next two years, he planned torun the Bank as if its clients were private Wall Streetinvestors and not the forty countries that had joinedin the hope of receiving development aid. (Bird ,pp. , –)

Selectivity, caution, and Wall Street respectability werethe mantras of the early World Bank and the signal sent to po-tential borrowers as to what lay in store for them. These ideals,however, rapidly gave way to the reality that the Bank’s poten-tial client base in Europe and Japan had been erased by the U.S.government’s Marshall Plan. In direct competition with the

The Rise of the Bank

Bretton Woods institutions, the Marshall Plan, a multibillion-dollar giveaway by comparison, was the antithesis of the WorldBank’s mandate: it was indiscriminate, massive, and seeminglyfree (Kolko and Kolko ; Wood ). The Marshall Planwas a social welfarist project deployed to jumpstart Europe’scapitalist economy through a large infusion of capital. Indeed,because of the Marshall Plan, the Bank had to reinvent itself asa bank for the non-European world, albeit one guided by strict(colonial) rules and regulations that stood in stark contrast tothe ones catering to postwar Europe. As highly inequitablecolonial-imperial relations had been the norm, the differentapproaches to Europe and the colonies easily passed as legiti-mate, dispassionate, and rational for leaders and constituentsfrom the United States and Western Europe.4 In this fashion, amajor postcolonial discourse of development was launched.

Wall Street had a clear revulsion for anything but themost “sound” financial investment, as defined by Wall Streetand its officials employed by the Bank.5 For example, as theBank’s treasurer from to , Robert Cavanaugh under-stood that his main priority was to allay Wall Street’s fears offinancing risky investments in the colonies. For Cavanaugh,the Bank was constrained in the early years by Wall Street’s re-fusal to allow the Bank to invest in what later became its stapledevelopment areas, namely, public education, health, andhousing: “If we got into the social field . . . then the bond mar-ket would definitely feel that we were not acting prudentlyfrom a financial standpoint . . . if you start financing schoolsand hospitals and water works, and so forth, these things don’tnormally, and directly increase the ability of a country to repaya borrowing” (Cavanaugh ).6 During the Bank’s first twentyyears, only the most direct investments in “productive capital”(i.e., roads, ports, power plants) were promoted.7 Interviewswith the managerial elite who served the World Bank in its first

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few decades demonstrate that every decision regarding thefundamental architecture of the World Bank, and its potentialstability and growth, hinged on pleasing the five nations withthe largest vote in the Bank—the “Big Five” countries (theUnited States, Japan, Germany, the UK, and France) and theirfirms.8 Every project was negotiated in terms of which of thesecountries’ currencies would be used and whose financial inter-mediaries and capital goods would be purchased.9 Only inhindsight might this seem abnormal: foreign currency and in-vestment were extremely scarce and precious, and for the re-building economies of France and Japan, every yen and franccounted. In discussions of the third world, there was no rea-son to bring up such concerns as poverty alleviation or localneeds. That this should surprise us today precisely reflects thehegemonic effect of just a few decades of contemporary WorldBank developmentalism. At the start, the role of the Bank wasunambiguous and its beneficiaries so few that they were all ona first name basis.

Meanwhile, U.S. political leaders demanded somethingquite different from the World Bank. While senior Bank man-agement strove to persuade economists, including some of itsown, that the non-European world was more predictable, vis-ible, and attractive than they might believe (Kapur, Webb, andLewis , p. ), the U.S. government pushed the Bank to actfor U.S. strategic purposes. Whereas McCloy’s Bank preferredstrict and unforgiving loan policies based on “economic” cri-teria, the U.S. government insisted that the Bank work onlywith countries identified as friends of the United States. TheBank could not lend to Guatemala and Ceylon, for example,because of the political position of the parties in power (Kapur,Webb, and Lewis , p. ). When conservatives within theBank and on Wall Street objected to the idea of generous or

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“soft” loans with low interest and long repayment schedules—now the Bank’s modus operandi—Secretary of State Dullesargued: “It might be good banking to put South Americathrough the wringer, but it will come out red,” that is, commu-nist (Kapur, Webb, and Lewis , p. ). Because of U.S. po-litical power, Turkey, Egypt, and brutal authoritarian regimesin Latin America received generous and unscrutinized loansthat were matched by substantial U.S. military and foreign aid(Payer , p. ), while more “economically worthy” coun-tries received none.10

Clearly, in this first period of its history, the Bank washeavily constrained both by the conviction it shared with WallStreet that “loose lending” had precipitated the pre–WorldWar II financial collapse and by political pressure from theUnited States . Each loan was a painstaking process marked forits ability to ruffle the fewest feathers in Washington, NewYork, and London. It quickly became clear to Bank presidentsand staff that the Bank was doomed to stagnate. Indeed, thefirst president, Eugene Meyer, stayed on only from June to De-cember , saying after his abrupt resignation, “I could stayand fight these bastards, and probably win in the end, but I’mtoo old for that” (Kraske , p. ). John McCloy lasted fortwo arduous years before he had enough.

To navigate out of these political straits, the Bank had toprove it could provide steady profits to its bondholders whilesustaining the confidence of political elites—two different butrelated constituencies. Postcolonial “public” banking was newto the world; it had to be invented in a form agreeable to theBank’s Western founders and constituents before it could takeroot. As one of the Bank’s first senior officials noted, people atthe Bank “didn’t know much about the developing world ex-cept as colonies. They didn’t know much about development

The Rise of the Bank

lending, didn’t know much about development economics.”11

In fact, these ideas of economy had to be invented, and Keynesand his colleagues were the early inventors (Mitchell ).This suggested that the World Bank had to invent more thanjust “safe” loans. Rather, it needed to construct a whole new wayof thinking about its role in the world and the institutional in-frastructure to cultivate and reproduce that new vision.

In sum, after its inception, the Bank’s mission shiftedfrom reconstruction of Europe to development of Europe’s re-maining and former colonies, and from intervention not as bi-lateral representatives of eroding empires but as a multilateralapolitical doyen of the new global economy. The odds of suc-cess were not good. Northern political and financial institu-tions insisted that these worldly endeavors were irrational,wasteful, and counterproductive, as this type of developmentlending looked to them like preferential “subsidies” to the for-mer colonies. Under such overwhelming skepticism and criti-cism, it was slow going for the Bank in its first two decades. Infact, the World Bank remained a rather minor player untilRobert McNamara, the man who ran the ignominious war inIndochina, took over.

The McNamara Era

In addition to devastating Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, theU.S. war in Indochina undermined the United States’ domi-nant position in the global economy. It also had a profoundand generative effect on the World Bank. As the United States’share of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) fell precip-itously, from a high of percent in the early s to a low of percent by the early s (Gwin ), so too did its abilityto dominate the Bank and its capital flow. With the decline of

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U.S. hegemony in the international political economy arosenew opportunities for the Bank to assert its own limited power.

President Johnson, mired in a war he was losing badly,had no choice but to fire Secretary of Defense McNamara, buthe wanted to do it in a face-saving way. So he gave McNamarathe less-than-glamorous job of running the World Bank. Uponreceiving the position, and amidst worldwide acrimony to-wards him and “his war,” McNamara, in his characteristicallyobsessive manner, sequestered himself in his office, immersedhimself in numbers, charts, and tables, and two weeks laterresurfaced with two main goals for reorganization. As he wrotein his personal notes, his strategies were, first, to “develop newsources of financing: try to increase the holdings of the Bank’ssecurities by the central Banks. Break into the European pen-sion trust market. . . . Obtain approximately $ million peryear from Kuwait, the head of the Kuwaiti Fund is young, ed-ucated at California and HBS [Harvard Business School]”(May, , cited in Kapur, Webb, and Lewis , p. ).12 Hissecond strategy was to develop new mechanisms to protect theBank against funding risks: “In the event the U.S. Governmentrefuses permission for large borrowing for FY , develop aplan for standby credit with commercial banks.”

Realizing from the start that the Bank he inherited wasweak and ineffectual, McNamara wanted to increase its powerbase by finding—or creating—new sources of finance. In-deed, he riled everyone when he announced with a franknessuncharacteristic of the staid Bank, that the project of develop-ment he had inherited had failed abysmally. Poverty increasedand lending was sluggish; populations were growing and theBank’s resources were shrinking. Something had to be done,and quickly. Institutionally, the Bank had little autonomouspower to expand and innovate upon the project of develop-

The Rise of the Bank

ment; it had become a supplicant to the old-boys’ network thatMcNamara himself, as a former Harvard Business School pro-fessor, Ford Motor Company CEO, Ford Foundation boardmember, and secretary of defense, knew so intimately. None-theless, as the newly anointed World Bank president, he soughtto wrench control of the Bank from these Northern elite net-works while tapping into their capital and power: have themwork for the Bank rather than the other way around. In , theBank was stagnating under the weight of the U.S. and Europeanbond markets, which were demanding fiscal prudence and highreturns; the U.S. government was continuing to support loansin its political interest; and the U.S. Treasury and key corporatelobbies wanted American firms to benefit from (or certainly notbe hurt by) World Bank loans. The World Bank was financiallysolid but, despite its grandiose name, it was weak and severelyunderutilized. McNamara made two bold moves.

First, he turned to his staff and board. Apparently at hisinaugural senior staff meeting, he listened to senior staff boastabout the successes of their organizational turfs—a long-standing tradition of optimistic spinning for one’s superiors(George and Sabelli ; Wade )—until he had no morepatience. He abruptly ended the meeting with a pointed re-quest: “I am going to ask you all to give me very shortly a listof all the projects or programs that you would wish to see theBank carry out if there were no financial constraints” (Georgeand Sabelli , p. ). He made his conservative staff ex-tremely uncomfortable by suggesting that the Bank needed tounleash its potential. He demanded from them a developmentplan for every borrowing country with a list of top priorityprojects and persuasive explanations as to their worthiness.His next move was at his first board meeting, where he told hiscautious directors that he planned to double the Bank’s lend-ing (Kapur, Webb, and Lewis , p. ). He then expanded

The Rise of the Bank

his personnel by percent and started a new staff promotionpolicy, in which productivity would be measured by the sizeand turnover rate of a loan officer’s loan portfolio. Conse-quently, in his first five-year term, the Bank financed moreprojects ( versus ) and loaned more money ($. billionversus $. billion) than it had during the previous twenty-two years combined (George and Sabelli , p. ).

McNamara then turned to Wall Street to promote hisidea of what the Bank could be if it changed its modus oper-andi. Surprising all, five months into McNamara’s tenure, theBank had borrowed more funds on capital markets than in anycalendar year of its history. The Bank was rolling under thenew chief; miraculously, he was able to finance virtually all ofthe Bank’s increased lending without soliciting any new paid-in capital from the Big Five countries. In short time, he hadeffectively nullified past controls on the Bank’s access to capi-tal. “The Bank’s capacity to lend is now based almost entirelyon its capacity to borrow,” claimed the Bank’s new treasurer,Eugene Rotberg (Rotberg , p. ). It was Rotberg who re-alized how to unleash the Bank’s borrowing potential by uti-lizing the nascent market for global bonds—and to do itprofitably. With this remarkable growth in the Bank’s capacityto borrow and lend, the “McNamara era” began.

T H E F A L L O F T H E B R E T T O N W O O D S

D O L L A R - G O L D A G R E E M E N T , T H E

R I S E O F T H E W O R L D B A N K

The backdrop to political change inside Bank headquarters wassome substantial structural shifts in the global political econ-omy and a series of momentous decisions made by the U.S.president, just a few strides from McNamara’s new office. Stillwithin the loop of decision making in Washington, McNamara

The Rise of the Bank

was able to quickly insert his Bank into the middle of newU.S.-centered plans and help the Bank to grow in tandem withU.S. power. As a result of the tumultuous period of to, when a wave of events hit the global economy, the con-servative banking agenda of the pre-McNamara Bank disap-peared in a flash (Block ; Helleiner ; Kapstein ).

In spite of money managers looking for good invest-ments to absorb the worldwide glut of Eurodollars, OPECpetrodollars, and Japanese yen, a floundering U.S. economydid not attract foreign investors to its currency, governmentbonds, real estate, and firms. In a brilliant move aimed at stem-ming the free-falling U.S. economy, on the recommendation ofhis economic advisor Paul Volcker, President Nixon pulled outof the postwar Bretton Woods system of fixed currency thattied all world currencies to a gold value through the U.S. dol-lar. By forcing the gold-dollar standard to collapse and then byliberalizing international financial relations against the will ofWestern Europe and Japan, the United States skillfully placedthe burden of its huge deficit upon other states and investors.When foreign investors purchased U.S. assets and dollars inorder to participate more actively in global markets, they werealso assuming the U.S. deficit risks as well as buoying the U.S.economy. This move to deregulate international finance capi-tal also shifted the balance of power away from state-managedfinancial institutions (and national development projects) toprivate financial institutions and capital investors. Nixon’sbold decision sparked an incredible rise in speculative capitalactivity that would, by the s, shift hundreds of billions ofdollars across national borders and national currencies withthe bat of an eye and beyond the control of national govern-ments. But more immediately, holders of the abundant finan-cial capital were enticed by McNamara to invest in World Bank

The Rise of the Bank

“global bonds,” which would help finance large productivecapital investments in undercapitalized markets in the thirdworld. By promising a range of risk guarantees to these in-vestors, McNamara tapped into their surplus capital assets,dramatically expanded the Bank’s lending base, and began tofinance his vision of large projects in the highly volatile post-colonial world. But Rome was not built in a day, and Mc-Namara had much work to do before he could take full advan-tage of this momentous historical conjuncture.

F I R S T R E V O L U T I O N : G L O B A L B O N D I N G

Within weeks of assuming the Bank’s presidency, McNamaraasked his newly hired treasurer, Eugene Rotberg, whether andhow the Bank could increase its access to capital.“Do you thinkwe can raise one billion dollars a year?” McNamara queriedRotberg. “Sure, why not?” was Rotberg’s reply. In a inter-view, Rotberg explained that fifteen years later, the Bank waseasily borrowing $ billion a year (Institutional Investor ,p. ). “I think I helped create an environment,” Rotbergclaimed, “where my [Bank] colleagues could raise $ billionfor poor people and where we could attract those funds frominstitutions that do not ordinarily lend, directly or indirectly,to that constituency.”

Rotberg opened a trading floor in Bank offices and tradedassets at highly competitive yields. By the end of the s, the“pit,” as it came to be called, was earning . percent, or $

million, a year on liquid assets of $. billion (Shapley ,p. ). These profits not only funded the Bank’s new palatialheadquarters and staff expansion; they enhanced its independ-ence from its Big Five executive directors. This was a majorbreak from the past, when each currency transaction had to be

The Rise of the Bank

approved by the central bank in the country whose currencywas being sold—a disciplinary device imposed by Westernbankers and ministers to prevent the World Bank from spiral-ing out of their control.

Rotberg searched the world for underutilized capital. Heapproached the Japanese for a few billion dollars even though,at the time, their international bond market was relativelysmall. But he knew they had a high savings rate, and so hetapped into their growing interest in the global financial market(Institutional Investor , p. ). German markets, then thecoffers of the capital-flush, oil-producing OPEC members, wereequally alluring. Rotberg summarized his strategy in this way:“What one must focus on is who has the wealth, how fast it isaccumulating and what kind of instrument do the controllersof wealth want in order for you to take it. Do they want equity?Do they want to be liquid? Long? Short? Leveraged or not lever-aged? Fixed or floating? That is essentially what every govern-ment, private corporation and quasi-public institution has tofigure out worldwide. And once you know that, creation of theinstrument is child’s play” (Institutional Investor , p. ).

By the s, the Bank was successfully borrowing fromcountries as diverse as Kuwait, Japan, Libya, and India andwas working with large pension funds and multiple broker-age firms, not just the U.S. undersecretaries of treasury. TheBank also diverged from its traditional source of currency, theU.S. dollar, borrowing in franc, Turkish lira, yen, Kroner, bo-livares, and rupees.

The McNamara-Rotberg revolution was as transforma-tive for the World Bank as it was for the world of internationalfinance.13 Because of the Bank’s new ability to borrow globally,it gradually ceased to rely on Northern governments and theirpaid-in capital. Whereas in the Bank received $ billionworth of paid-in capital from twenty Western countries and

The Rise of the Bank

borrowed $. billion from financial markets, by , it col-lected $. billion in paid-in capital and a whopping $ billionfrom the global bond market (Rotberg ). Its power alle-giances became much more dispersed because it never bor-rowed too much in one place or currency and it worked to cre-ate new markets and investment tools in new locations aroundthe world.

As remarkable as these feats were for the new World Bank,it paradoxically suffered from an inability to stimulate—of allthings—demand for its capital. After twenty years, the Bankwas still short of borrowers and loan packages that could sat-isfy its rigorous approval requirements. Borrowing countries,soured by political and institutional constraints on the loan-approval process, had difficulty agreeing with Bank staff onprojects. To utilize effectively this huge influx of “developmentcapital” required a few more revolutions from above.

A N E W A G E N D A

The World Bank’s first twenty-five years were marked by a cau-tious approach to investment. Most Bank loans went into areasof infrastructure deemed necessary to stimulate economicgrowth, but not to actually grow the Bank, which would havebeen frowned on by the U.S. Treasury and Wall Street. To as-sure secure results, the Bank also loaned only to the moreaffluent countries. From to , the Bank loaned ap-proximately $ billion, most of which went to high- andmiddle-income borrowers, including Japan, Italy, France, andthe Netherlands.14 When McNamara assumed control, hemade public his astonishment about how little the Bank actu-ally loaned in the name of “equity” and “poverty alleviation”and about the failure of its development model in general. Inhis early speeches and in private, he argued emphatically that

The Rise of the Bank

most Bank loans completely bypassed the “poorest percent”(McNamara ; McNamara ).

McNamara, by contrast, wanted to lend to the poorestcountries and for concerns that had been consciously avoidedby the Bank’s economically prudent managers. In his first pub-lic speech as Bank president, McNamara noted that since ,in the developing world “the average annual growth thus farhas been .%. . . . And yet . . . you know and I know that thesecheerful statistics are cosmetics, which conceal a far less cheer-ful picture. . . . [M]uch of the growth is concentrated in the in-dustrial areas, while the peasant remains stuck in his imme-morial poverty, living on the bare margin of subsistence”(McNamara , pp. –, as cited in Kapur, Webb, and Lewis, p. ).

In a dramatic shift, he began to use the language and po-litical strategy of “development” rather than “investment bank-ing,” borrowing liberally from old and new political discourses.Whereas today this new development discourse may seem for-mulaic and predictable, for the time, and the institution, it wasdisconcertingly novel and risky. From the beginning of hispresidency, McNamara wanted to put Bank money into thehands of the “absolute poor,” a radical concept to his bankingclients. Loan composition also greatly changed as McNamarainsisted on shifting the focus to agriculture and rural develop-ment, a sector universally shunned for being much too diceyand unproductive for capital. Yet, McNamara argued boldlythat no amount of investment in coal production or port de-velopment would directly help the poor, since their lack of ac-cess to new technologies, capital, and know-how—and theirabsolute numbers—were the primary reason the investmentbanking model of development had failed.

According to McNamara, the Bank needed to turn its fullattention to third world rural peasants if it wanted to solve

The Rise of the Bank

the problems of poverty and underdevelopment. From hisvantage point, the key question became: what was the mostefficient vehicle for reaching the peasantry so that their livescould be transformed? This, of course, was precisely the con-cern of elite policy circles in the nascent U.S. Agency for Inter-national Development, the Council on Foreign Relations, theCIA, and the Defense and State departments, and it reflectedthe fears of many who believed that the war in Indochina wasmaking it harder to win the hearts and minds of third worldpeasants, whose participation in rebellions and revolutionsaround the world seemed to be growing. Perhaps he under-stood better than most from his experience in Vietnam that in-stabilities around the world would not be ameliorated by pri-vate capital investment but required public funding and a morecomprehensive approach.15 Hence, over time, the McNamaraBank, with its virtually unlimited access to capital, blanketedwhole regions with new kinds of projects, shifting from indi-vidual loans in specific types of infrastructure to society-wideinterventions.

In one of his earliest speeches, to the annual meeting ofthe board of governors of the World Bank in September ,he spoke at length on how deep he expected Bank interven-tions to go in “poor” countries: “to help them rise out of the pitof poverty in which they had been engulfed for centuriespast. . . . Our aim here will be to provide assistance where itwill contribute most to economic development. This will meanemphasis on educational planning, the starting point for thewhole process of educational improvement. It will mean ex-pansion of our support for a variety of other educational ac-tivities, including the training of managers, entrepreneurs, andof course, agriculturalists. . . . To carry out this program wehope over the next five years to increase our lending for edu-cational development at least threefold.”16

The Rise of the Bank

But the most significant expansion was in agriculture,which McNamara defined as the “stepchild of development.”“Here again there has never been any doubt about [agricul-ture’s] importance. Two-thirds of the people of the developingworld live on the soil, yet these countries have to import an-nually $ billion of food from the industrialized nations. Eventheir diet is so inadequate, in many cases, that they cannot doan effective day’s work and, more ominous still, there is grow-ing scientific evidence that the dietary deficiencies of the par-ent are passed on as mental deficiencies to the children” (Mc-Namara , p. ).

To resolve the problem, McNamara proposed to bring toAsia, Africa, and Latin America the green revolution, an inte-grated project of high-yield-variety seeds, fertilizer, irrigation,capital, and technical support. “In the past,” he noted:

Investment in agricultural improvement producedbut a modest yield; the traditional seeds and plantsdid better with irrigation and fertilizer. But the in-crease in yield was not dramatic. In the past twentyyears, however, research had resulted in a break-through in the production of new strains of wheatand rice and other plants that can improve yields by three to five times. What is more, these newstrains are particularly sensitive to the input of waterand fertilizer. Badly managed, they will producelittle more than traditional yields, but with correctmanagement they will give the peasant an unprece-dented crop.

Here is an opportunity for irrigation, fertilizer,and peasant education to produce near miracles.The farmer himself in one short season can see thebeneficial results of that scientific agriculture that

The Rise of the Bank

has seemed so often in the past to be a will-o’-the-wisp, tempting him to innovation without benefit.

Our task now is to enable the peasant to makethe most of this opportunity. (McNamara ,pp. -)

Although McNamara’s idea for poverty alleviation fo-cused heavily on the rural sector and the undercapitalized“small farmer,” his ambitious plans for the developing worlddid not end there. Whereas in the pre-McNamara era, the Bankloaned no money for primary school education and very littlefor nonformal education, by the end of his tenure, lending foreducation increased substantially, almost half of which went toprimary and nonformal education to attack the problem oflow literacy rates. McNamara also pushed for nutrition, popu-lation control, and health components to rural projects, whichrepresented a marked shift for the Bank; he also increasedlending for urban poverty concerns, starting projects for low-cost housing and slum rehabilitation. At first, these invest-ments dismayed the dominant powers in development financ-ing. His staff lacked the resources to fend off critics from thebanking sector and to demonstrate how Bank projects wouldcontribute to productive capital expansion and overall eco-nomic growth. By the s, however, these types of poverty al-leviation investments became standard for the Bank, the trans-national development agency network (bilateral aid agencies,NGOs, and charities), and borrowing-state bureaucracies.

O V E R C O M I N G R E S I S T A N C E

Despite the availability of megaplans and money, McNamaralearned that it was not going to be easy to embrace his newagenda without losing the confidence of the Bank’s main con-

The Rise of the Bank

stituents, namely, Wall Street, the U.S. Treasury, and the BigFive political elites. In fact, it required an intensive lobbyingeffort as well as a whole new discursive approach: the capacityto produce a social imagery to rationalize the lending and bor-rowing of large sums of capital for things other than roads,mines, and power plants, the bread and butter of the old in-vestment regime. To convince institutional investors that theBank would remain financially strong as it expanded its port-folio to include many more capital-poor countries and invest-ments in such intangibles as poverty alleviation, the McNamaraBank needed to generate a major shift in perceptions and theinstitutional means to put theory into practice. Even withinthe Bank, McNamara’s new vision was met with considerableresistance. To win support for his interventionist and expan-sive development agenda, McNamara needed to sell it as ra-tional, politically and economically necessary, and profitable.The effort required a new organizational culture and a muchgrander development science.

For inspiration and support, McNamara looked outsidethe Bank’s traditional intellectual and financial networks tonew ideas and approaches that were emerging in U.S. andWestern European academic and policy circles. If the postwarera from to was the “development as growth” era, aseconomic historian H. W. Arndt has suggested (Arndt ),then the to period was the “social objectives” era.Amidst worldwide social protest, such influential develop-ment scholars as Dudley Seers of the Institute for Develop-ment Studies in Sussex and H. W. Singer of the United Nationswere officially dethroning the hegemony of GNP (gross na-tional product) as a determining marker of development. Sincesubstantial poverty and inequality could clearly be generatedin the midst of high GNP growth rates, Seers and others ar-

The Rise of the Bank

gued, it was time to discard an approach that was exclusivelyconcerned with economic growth (Arndt ).

The larger political-economic context helped McNamaraconvince skeptics that his Bank expansion plans were not onlysound, but also necessary. Growth rates in high- and middle-income countries were falling, unemployment and povertyrates were rising, and the war in Indochina had substantiallyweakened the U.S.-dominated world economy. The late sand early s were also a period of street protests and revo-lutionary challenges to colonial and imperial orders aroundthe world, the effects of which were to unsettle Northern po-litical elites, economists, and McNamara himself. Even as sec-retary of defense, he began to borrow liberally from such en-lightened policy makers as Barbara Ward, Mahbub ul Haq, andDavid Morse (head of the International Labor Organization),and ideas from the decade-old war against poverty in the UnitedStates. Moreover, as Bank president, McNamara proselytizedalongside powerful third world leaders, such as Indira Gandhi(who called for a “new international economic order” or a rad-ical re-balancing of power between North and South), to ad-dress the poverty question in terms of North-South inequities.If development experts continued to “concentrate on the mod-ern sector in the hope that its high rate of growth would filterdown to the rural poor,” McNamara declared in numeroushigh-profile venues, “disparities in income will simply widen”(McNamara , as cited in Caufield , p. ). Further, heasked, how will the world’s nearly million people, whomhe called “the absolute poor,” continue to survive on cents aday? Rich countries had the responsibility to redistribute theirwealth to the poorer countries, for moral and ethical reasons,as well as the more pragmatic reason of stemming the tide ofrevolution. Vietnam, of course, was the elephant on the table.

The Rise of the Bank

R E O R G A N I Z I N G T H E B A N K

Once McNamara reinvented the Bank’s mission, he had to re-fashion the Bank. Robert Strange McNamara had entered theBank riding on his reputation of having modernized the autoindustry at Ford Motor Company and streamlined the Penta-gon as secretary of defense (Shapley ). Described as “anIBM machine with legs” by Senator Barry Goldwater, McNa-mara was one of the business world’s whiz kids who trans-formed corporate managerialism through a completely ration-alized and numbers-based systems analysis. He then went onto be part of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ “bestand brightest,” the elite Ivy League boys who navigated thecountry through the tumultuous s and s, albeit notwithout some very serious miscalculations. To many observers,taking over the World Bank was to be a salve on his tormentedconscience (Clark ; Shapley ). As defense secretary,his public speeches claiming “there can’t be security withoutwealth redistribution to the poor” fell on deaf ears (McNa-mara ); from the pulpit of the Bank presidency, theysounded like prophetic activism. He believed in a frontal as-sault on poverty, but he found the potency of the World Banklacking. At the Defense Department, McNamara worked withan annual budget of more than $ billion, and he was takenaback that the Bank lent less than $ billion a year. Accordingto one of his senior managers, “He kept talking in billions andthen he would correct himself and say ‘I mean millions’”(Shapley ).

McNamara had a well-known history of instilling, forthe times, a unique managerial culture onto the organizationshe ran. David Halberstam, author of The Best and the Bright-est, explained it as a pathology that allowed him and his col-

The Rise of the Bank

leagues in the White House to rationalize the devastating warthey were supporting. McNamara’s quantifications may havehelped numb the public with numbers that the U.S. press byand large accepted as a legitimate language for describing thecarnage, but they belied pictures on the evening news as wellas the stories from journalists and soldiers. As McNamara’s bi-ographer noted: “He searched out the enemy, poverty, andquantified it. He and his staff at the Bank were trying to iden-tify the million absolute poor in the fall of . ‘We do notnow have all the information we need to identify the differentgroups in individual countries,’ he said. But they were buildinga database with ‘present and potential levels of productivity ofindividuals in each category.’ Some in the Bank objected thatcounting and classifying people as absolutely or relatively poorwas a poor exercise, so to speak. ‘We did a lot of body countingin those days,’ remarks a staffer, not without irony” (Shapley, p. ).17

Moreover, the Bank of the early s seemed an “un-likely vehicle to fix the slums of Calcutta. . . . The staff

members were overwhelmingly Anglo-American . . . menfrom the former colonies [who] were overwhelmingly angli-cized. . . . Meetings of the Oxford-Cambridge Society were an-nounced in the Bank’s newsletter. The place had the air of aboarding school such as Eton” (Shapley , p. ). The cul-ture of the old Bank was simply not conducive to the McNa-mara regime. As one Bank staffer recalled: “[In those days,] wemade a loan to Ghana and then waited for years to see how itcame out before making another.” At this rate, progress in thethird world would be snail-like at best, a pace McNamarafound intolerable. He told his closest aide that this was “aninefficient way to run a planet” (Clark , p. , as cited inShapley , p. ).

The Rise of the Bank

Upon taking over, McNamara infused the Bank with thesame highly hierarchical and numbers-based managerial stylethat made him famous at Ford and the Defense Department.He started by changing the organizational structure from onethat was fastidious, plodding, and risk-averse, to one that wasfast growing, risk-taking, and reached in many different direc-tions. He insisted that staff members not only increase theirloan portfolios to include new types of investments to reachthe absolute poor, but also that they provide empirical data tojustify the risk. In other words, within an ever-shrinking timeframe as staff promotions became linked to the turnover timeof loans, Bank staff had to simultaneously invent and designnew projects, drum up demand for them, and justify throughdata that these projects were necessary for economic growthand poverty alleviation in borrowing countries and financiallyrewarding for the Bank’s investors.

McNamara was convinced from early on that academiawas incapable of supplying the theories and tools that couldhelp explain and solve the problems he perceived as essential(Stern and Ferreira , p. ). Both the Bank he had inher-ited and the academic professions at large had no good under-standing of, for example, how to get economies to transitionfrom protectionist ones to ones that used price mechanismsand competitive markets as vehicles for luring foreign directinvestment. They had no model or formula for measuring andexplaining poverty and its rise or fall in connection to specificinterventions, such as low-interest credit to small farmers orprimary school education to illiterate youth. McNamara hadno confidence in the trickle-down theory of growth; he in-sisted economists and development specialists had no idea—certainly not one based on hard, quantifiable facts—how tosolve the problems of poverty, malnutrition, ill health, and

The Rise of the Bank

rapid population growth. His strategy was therefore to create anew paradigm in development thinking: to measure, analyze,and overcome.

In the prevailing culture at the Bank and in the worldwhere Bank staff worked, it had been the self-evidentiary as-pect of their carefully packaged productivity-oriented loansthat had kept Wall Street and the Treasury Department con-tent. An institutional support system existed that affirmed andreproduced the Bank’s claims that large-scale infrastructuralinvestments were the way to generate growth and develop-ment in places incapable of achieving them on their own. Butno internal institutional support system existed to make Mc-Namara’s audacious claims ring true that “investing in thepoor” was the most efficient route to growth with equity in thethird world. Nor was anyone in the larger community of con-stituents, development officials, or economists prepared to ac-cept the financial soundness of such investments. That was aperception that McNamara’s team had to create. The WorldBank thus became central headquarters for research, eco-nomic modeling, data collection, report writing, and dissemi-nation of information on the so-called less developed world.

The impetus to develop an institutional capacity to jus-tify the Bank’s dramatic expansion and its involvement in newtypes of work and new experiments in the field of develop-ment rapidly took on a life of its own. The job required data,greater involvement in borrower countries, and the establish-ment of a transnational division of labor that included, overtime, the adoption, adaptation, and the indigenization of datacollection and project design responsibilities. Following Mc-Namara’s mandate, teams of professional staff and consultantstraveled on extended “missions” to conduct economic research.They collected data on standards of living, consumption, pro-

The Rise of the Bank

duction, and poverty; they also generated analyses of barriersto change, the workings of societal institutions, and the statusof natural resources. Staff began to focus their energies onthese economic missions as in-country economic analysis andformal policy discussions with borrowers and other key devel-opment agencies became part of their regular mission activity.

G A U G I N G C H A N G E

To see how much the Bank changed under McNamara, it isuseful to compare the pre-McNamara Bank with the Bank thatemerged after he took control. In the – World Bank an-nual report, the greatest problem cited for the Bank in its earlyyears was a lack of demand: “The principal limitation on theBank’s rate of lending has been the limited number of projectsor programs presented to it, which were ready for financingand execution. The studies and analyses needed to prepare aproject or program are often beyond the capacity of many lessdeveloped countries because of the local shortage of experi-ence and of trained personnel” (World Bank , p. ).

To resolve this problem, the Bank’s third president, Eu-gene Black (whose term ran from July to January ),established a Development Services Department and Develop-ment Advisory Service that offered advice and technical ser-vices in the preparation of loan applications (World Bank). In , the Bank loaned $. million. Electric poweraccounted for more than half of the total, with Argentina,Australia, and Mexico receiving the largest loans. Transport,mainly highway construction (an obsession of U.S. industry),comprised the second largest category, with loans going toJapan, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela; a smaller por-

The Rise of the Bank

tion was invested in railways in South Africa and India; and thesmallest portion was lent for port projects in India and thePhilippines. The only loan for agriculture, for $. million,went to Kenya, for land settlement costs.

Most of the technical assistance in was directed to-ward very specific pre-loan project assessments, such as astudy for a bridge over the Hooghly River in Calcutta, a studyof feeder roads in northeast Nigeria, and a mineral survey inSurinam. A Bank mission helped Spain set up a developmentprogram, and two-man advisory teams were posted in Chile,one in Nigeria, and a few were assisting Thailand and Pakistanon development investment strategies. One hundred and forty-three government officials attended the Bank’s Economic De-velopment Institute (EDI) ten-week courses in project develop-ment and management. The courses were held in English, withan experimental course introduced in French, and one underconsideration in Spanish. Four hundred book libraries were dis-patched to ninety-three different sites in developing countries.

In , a typical Bank loan was described in this way:

South Africa/Railway Loan($ million, -year ¾% loan)This loan will help to meet the current investmentrequirements of a large program of railway expan-sion and modernization of the South African rail-way and harbours. Administration has been carry-ing out since . Earlier Bank loans totaling$. million assisted the program, and the newloan will cover part of the foreign exchange re-quirements for –. About % of the miningand industrial freight of South Africa goes by rail

The Rise of the Bank

and further investment in the railways is essential toeconomic growth. The current expansion programinvolves an increase in capacity, the elimination oftraffic bottlenecks and progressive dieselization.

Participations: The New York Agency of BarclaysBank D.C.O; Girard Trust Corn Exchange Bank,Philadelphia; Morgan Guaranty Trust Company ofNew York; Bank of America, San Francisco; the NewYork Agency of The Bank of Montreal; Fidelity-Philadelphia Trust Company; the First PennsylvaniaBanking and Trust Company, Philadelphia; and TheRiggs National Bank of Washington, D.C., wereamong the banks participating in the loan for a totalof $,,. (World Bank , p. )

For technical assistance, the following description wasquite common:

British Guiana: The Bank is acting as executingagency for the UN Special Fund project to surveythe bar siltation and erosion problems at the port ofGeorgetown. The field study has been completedand the consultants’ report is in preparation.(World Bank , p. )18

Whereas in , the Bank committed just under $

million in new loans for projects in countries (WorldBank ), twenty years later, it was committing $. billion insupport of projects in countries (World Bank b). By, when McNamara retired, projects, and the language to de-scribe them, had changed completely. The Bank was no longersimply providing its clients with money for large-scale infra-

The Rise of the Bank

structure; it was now training staff, supporting local researchfacilities, and doing “integrated rural development” as part ofits mission, as the following project descriptions indicate:

Brazil: Bank—$ million. To assist the country’snational agricultural research agency in expandingits current research programs and to support sev-eral new programs, funds will be provided to trainscientific manpower and upgrade existing researchfacilities. Technical assistance is included. Totalcost: $. million. (World Bank b, p. )

Brazil: Bank—$ million. About , farm fam-ilies and more than , small-scale entrepreneurswill benefit from a second rural development proj-ect in the northeastern state of Ceara that includesagricultural extension services, development of co-operatives, assistance to small enterprises, con-struction of feeder roads, marketing facilities, andirrigation systems, and education, health, and san-itation services. Co-financing ($ million) is beingprovided by IFADS. Total cost: $. million.(World Bank b, pp. –)

Cameroon: Bank—$ million; IDA—$. million.The incomes of , farm families living in aNorthern province will be increased through im-proved rural infrastructure, effective extension andcredit services, training, and research. In addition,financial and technical assistance will be extendedto local agencies to plan, monitor, and evaluate awide range of rural development activities. Totalcost: $ million. (World Bank b, p. ).

The Rise of the Bank

The definition of development’s beneficiaries also changedsubstantially as the Bank’s annual reports became a discursivetool intended for a broader—and more public—audience.Rather than emphasizing the economic benefits that wouldflow to Northern firms and investment banks as these entitiessupplied hardware, technical support, and financial servicesfor projects through the procurement process, the focusshifted to the various civil-society “beneficiaries” of the devel-opment process: for example, the “, farm families” whowould be affected by a loan to Cameroon; the local officials,agronomists, and researchers who would receive “scientific

The Rise of the Bank

Senior government officials participating in an early World Banktraining seminar, Washington, D.C., . Courtesy

World Bank Archives.

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

manpower” training through various Bank projects; and theresearch facilities that would be established or upgraded withWorld Bank capital (World Bank b). In the McNamarayears, it became inappropriate to highlight the Northern bene-ficiaries (that is, Northern finance capital) in the loan descrip-tion itself; in their place were development’s new clients—thethird world poor. Overall, these were not mere rhetoricalchanges, designed to satisfy a discerning left-Keynesian politi-cal elite in the North. Rather, they were changes with deepmeaningful and material consequences.

The Rise of the Bank

Men working the railways, Nigeria, . Both this and the facing photograph come from the World Bank annual report of , a time when such juxtapositions were not perceived

as politically awkward. Courtesy World Bank Archives.

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Sowing the Seeds of Bank Power

World Bank power grew remarkably during the McNamarayears in ways that have now become commonplace to theworld of development and, more generally, North-South rela-tions. Few today would think twice of calling upon U.S. ex-perts to offer their know-how to African or Indian farmersafter a bad harvest. The ease with which such information canbe transferred reflects the Bank’s success during the s increating both the worldwide institutional structure and thediscursive formations to make such ideas realistic and work-able. Part of that institutional structure included the facilitieserected to assist the transfer of green revolution seeds andtechnologies to major borrowing countries. The World Bankhelped bring the green revolution to the South by offering sub-stantial institutional support to state ministries, credit banks,and research centers, and loans for heavy infrastructure, suchas dams, power plants, irrigation systems, and agro-industrialfactories.19

To boosters like Lester Brown (currently director of theWorldwatch Institute), the green revolution bore “witness tothe fact that careful evaluation, sound scientific and economicplanning, and sustained effort can overcome the pathology ofchronic under-production. . . . A formula for success can be de-signed for any area that has available the new adapted plant va-rieties and the other inputs and accelerators that must be ap-plied in logical fashion” (Escobar , p. ). In practice, thepoor’s pathologies were defined in relation to the technologi-cal innovations occurring at international agricultural re-search institutes and agro-industrial corporations.20 Develop-ment planners, meanwhile, began to intuitively “‘know’ thatvillagers have certain habits, goals, motivations and beliefs,”

The Rise of the Bank

according to Stacey Pigg, an anthropologist working in Nepal.To the development expert, “the ‘ignorance’ of villagers is notan absence of knowledge . . . [but] the presence of too muchlocally-instilled belief” (Pigg , pp. , ). By the s,“miracle seeds” were followed into the third world village byan entire power/knowledge complex based on a specific typeof elite knowledge production. This became the terra firma onwhich the World Bank’s hegemony was constructed. The ideaof a green revolution became world-significant primarily be-cause of the size of the World Bank’s financial support, and thenew breadth of its development assistance network.

As McNamara sent his staff into the field demanding thatthey come back with both solid data and projects in hand, theBank generated its own transnational demand for informationabout the conditions of the rural poor, transforming the pre-viously imperceptible millions into visible objects of develop-ment. McNamara was dissatisfied with the pace of collectinginformation. He wanted data collection to match the fast-paced cycle of the Bank’s loan approval process (Kapur, Webb,and Lewis ). To expedite and legitimate new loans, McNa-mara created his own knowledge-generating machinery byadopting two Rockefeller Foundation-funded research centersin Mexico and the Philippines, from which he created the mul-tisited research network called the Consultative Group on In-ternational Agricultural Research (CGIAR). With a growingnumber of Bank-supported research campuses around theworld, the CGIAR quickly became “one of the greatest suc-cesses in the annals of development promotion” (Kapur, Webb,and Lewis , p. ).21 Eventually, there were sixteen insti-tutes comprising the CGIAR system. Through them, greenrevolution technologies swept the South. In , innovativesemi-dwarf varieties of wheat covered less than one-tenth of

The Rise of the Bank

percent of the total area planted in wheat in developing coun-tries. By , percent was planted with CGIAR-promotedgreen revolution wheat, with percent of the total area forwheat in Latin America and India under CGIAR varieties. Forrice, by , almost percent of total area in developingcountries was planted with semi-dwarf varieties, with Chinaplanting percent, India, percent, and the rest of Asia,

percent (Baum , pp. – ).Over the first twenty-five years of its existence, the Bank’s

CGIARs trained approximately , scientists, many ofwhom subsequently took up prominent positions as ministersof state, agriculture, and finance (Baum ), as well as CEOsand research directors for major multinational firms (WorldBank ). This global research enterprise represented amarked change from the early World Bank, which in hadonly twelve professionals working on agriculture, most ofwhom were experts in drainage and irrigation (Kapur, Webb,and Lewis ). During the McNamara years, the Bank’s agri-culture divisions could not hire staff fast enough (Kapur,Webb, and Lewis ).

As the Bank reinvented the professional landscape inwhich the international agricultural scientist worked into oneflush with financial and political rewards, this science-industry-government network enabled the Bank to overcome the his-toric skepticism of capital markets to invest in rural produc-tion. With its huge spillover effects on industry (e.g., energy,fertilizer, chemical pesticides, synthetic seed, farm machinery),the Bank’s green revolution became extremely lucrative for itsNorthern clients. The Bank and its bilateral aid partners cre-ated agricultural universities and research and policy centersthroughout the South to direct the trajectory of this develop-ment (Anderson, Levy, and Morrison ; Anderson et al.

The Rise of the Bank

; Stakman ; Wright ). These prominent nationalinstitutes attracted development dollars and university ex-changes with American land-grant institutions (e.g., the Uni-versities of Illinois and Iowa) and economic and law depart-ments (e.g., University of Chicago), helping to “Americanize”agro-food systems, property-right traditions and statutes, andtrade and investment laws in the Bank’s borrowing countries(Dezalay and Garth ).

Overall, the Bank under McNamara took Norman Bor-laug’s miracle seeds and used them to expand its lending port-folio in many different directions: large dams to electrify andirrigate industry and agriculture, mining and factories forfarm-based capital goods, transportation, the development ofmarket towns, and basic education and primary health in thecountryside to facilitate the green revolution. But the rapidgrowth of the Bank’s loan portfolio, associated with this and itsother endeavors, eventually led to crippling effects in theSouth: high external debt, loss of diverse food production,land enclosures that displaced millions of peasants, the dollar-ization and Americanization of food production, and plum-meting food prices due to a worldwide glut in agriculturalcommodities, for example, U.S. wheat dumped on the worldmarket (Bonanno ; Friedmann ; Wright ). Be-cause of highly imbalanced terms of trade, McNamara’s “endpoverty” decade ended with a highly indebted South and ahighly stratified farming system.22 With the devastation oflocal systems of food production and the triumph of export-oriented production, the South became a net importer offoods from the United States and Europe. None of thesechanges solved the problems of development or significantlyreduced absolute poverty. Instead, poverty grew as a result ofthe Bank’s development industry.23

The Rise of the Bank

Although highly profitable for foreign investors, the newdevelopment regime was too costly for borrowers who did nothave the resources to repay the large Bank loans. Combinedwith the collapse of world food prices and the spike in oilprices, trouble loomed. While the Bank’s newfound large cap-ital assets allowed it to expand beyond its wildest dreams, italso fueled a mounting debt crisis amongst its borrowers.

Debt and Structural Adjustment

The Bank’s long string of loans helped fuel a dramatic increasein the South’s foreign debt, which grew at an average annualrate of percent between and (McMichael ;Mosley, Harrigan, and Toye ; Toussaint ). By the s,much of what the World Bank was lending did not go forbricks and mortar, seeds and tractors, or even research andtraining; most went to pay the interest on national budgetdeficits (Mosley, Harrigan, and Toye ; World Bank ).The twin effects of massive borrowing for rural industrializa-tion and the linking of Southern food and agricultural sectorsto the consumption of Northern-based capital goods and farminputs, contributed heavily to the net flow of capital out of theSouth and into the North.

Although the impending debt crisis could have toppledthe World Bank’s stance in the world, the opposite occurred.Because of the vulnerable position of its borrowers and itsunique role as development master, the Bank positioned itselfas one of the major transnational institutions that could man-age the process of debt restructuring. Despite its deep-seatedentanglement in the roots of the debt crisis, the Bank emergedfrom the era, quite unexpectedly, as the newly anointed globalarbiter of debt relations between the North and the South(Gowan ; Helleiner ; Kapstein ).24

The Rise of the Bank

Ideally, countries could have repaid their developmentloans from revenues generated from the commodities pro-duced from dams, power plants, and seeds, but the world-market prices of many of the goods produced with Bank fi-

nancing had plummeted (George and Sabelli ). Many keycommodities that the Bank assiduously promoted for produc-tion across the South were being replaced by commoditiesproduced in the North, such as corn syrup for sugar, glass fiberfor copper, soy oils for tropical oils, and synthetic alternativesto rubber, cotton, jute, and timber (McMichael ). By ,third world debt had risen to $ trillion and countries wereborrowing large amounts from the Bank and IMF just to ser-vice the interest on their old loans. Many African countrieswere forced to use all their export earnings to service their bal-looning debts.

One of the most significant effects of the debt crisis wasthe dramatic shift in power that took place between borrow-ing states and the World Bank and IMF. As soon as these sib-ling institutions assumed control of countries’ foreign debts,they required governments to reorganize and reorient theireconomies. In particular, they pushed them to produce for export rather than to produce for domestic needs, to reducetrade barriers and tariffs, and to open up key public sectors forinternational competition (i.e., telecommunications, electric-ity and mining, manufacturing, insurance, banking, and trans-port). As private lending dried up, governments succumbed tothese pressures and dramatically cut their spending on health,education, and welfare in order to comply with the new con-ditions placed on World Bank and IMF loans.

The ensuing era of structural adjustment was supposedto have been a short-lived “shock” that would help countriesadjust to the oil price hike and ride out a two-to-three-year pe-riod of economic restructuring, after which liberalized trade

The Rise of the Bank

relations between North and South would kick in to drawcapital to structurally adjusted countries (Dasgupta ). In-stead, shock therapy became a never-ending cycle of large debt-servicing loans and additional policy requirements that fur-ther destabilized borrowers. By , rather than having a netoutflow of capital, the Bank had a net inflow and received farmore from its borrowers in the form of loan repayments thanit was lending (Dasgupta ; Mosley, Harrigan, and Toye). By the late s, UNICEF reported that World Bank ad-justment programs were responsible for the “reduced health,nutritional, and educational levels for tens of millions of chil-dren in Asia, Latin America, and Africa,” resulting in a “lostdecade” for many of the Bank’s borrowers (Cornia ).

This lost decade for many countries affected Northerninterests as well, which only served to deepen the Bank’s in-volvement and commitment to resolving the crisis. For in-stance, in , U.S. banks had almost half their capital in Mex-ican loans at a time when Mexico built up $ billion worth ofdebt and became unable to pay off its loans (McMichael ).To avert a catastrophe, the World Bank and IMF bailed outoverextended Northern banks and investors while forcing amuch more interventionist structural adjustment regime onMexico. In only ten years, Mexico took out thirteen adjust-ment loans from the Bank and six adjustment agreements withthe IMF that completely revamped the Mexican state and econ-omy, eliminating food subsidies, rural public agencies, na-tional food security systems, and state-owned food monopo-lies (McMichael ). Yet commercial banks made windfallprofits in Mexico ($ million) and, under similar circum-stances, in Brazil ($ billion) (Peet , p. ). By , mostnew loans across the global South were adjustment loans anda debt-ridden post-Soviet empire had joined the ranks of the

The Rise of the Bank

borrowers. The Bank’s adjustment regime had definitively be-come global.

With the debt and structural adjustment crises, the Bankreformulated the post- question of democratization andgovernance, and the green-revolution era concerns with re-distribution and equity, into the neoliberal question of thefreedom and sovereignty of capital. The World Bank, IMF, andWTO provoked a global managerial state of mind that eclipsedalternative regional and national politics. If the green revolu-tion transformed North-South relations at the point of pro-duction, giving rise to a new global agro-food system, then thestructural adjustment era affected relations at the point of so-cial reproduction, reconfiguring the way in which states andcitizens interact, in what can be called the “government of thesocial” (Polanyi ). Spearheaded by the Bank, these over-lapping regimes of development—poverty alleviation andstructural adjustment—only deepened and expanded WorldBank power in borrowing countries, intensifying McNamara’smission beyond his wildest dreams.

These overlapping regimes also reflected a major shift atthe Bank and in Washington, as part of the Reagan-Thatcherneoliberal revolution, as well as multiple shifts in many othercountries where neoliberal agendas have hatched. Soon afterPresident Reagan selected A. W. Clausen (president of Bank ofAmerica) as the World Bank president, Clausen cleaned houseof the Bank’s “redistribution with growth” advocates. First hefired McNamara’s chief economist, Hollis Chenery, a world-renowned innovator, and replaced him with Anne Krueger, theMilton Friedman neoliberal. Krueger’s intellectual contribu-tion to the field of development economics was the argumentof the “rent-seeking” state as a significant drag on economicgrowth in the third world (Dezalay and Garth ; Kapur,

The Rise of the Bank

Webb, and Lewis ; Krueger ); she seemed to be an oddchoice because she was not an enthusiastic supporter of theidea of development lending. By the end of the Bank’s

reorganization, many of Chenery’s supporters were fired andnearly orthodox macroeconomists were hired. This wasthe final stage of what one Bank official called “economic geno-cide” for the older generation of development economists (De-zalay and Garth ; George and Sabelli ).

Although structural adjustment became, for the WorldBank and the IMF, the primary program for all countries withtroubled economies, the blueprints for change were based onascending neoliberal tenets. Known as the ideological founda-tion of the Washington Consensus, the neoliberal agenda didnot necessarily originate or evolve in Washington alone. In-stead, the specifics of the agenda were generated through po-litical struggles and compromises unfolding through North-South, as well as World Bank-borrower, relations. This globaldebt crisis, derived from volatile flows of finance capital in andout of the South, catapulted the neoliberal agenda into theglobal arena. In many countries, the neoliberal mandate oflowering trade barriers, opening up markets to foreign im-ports, reducing the role of the state in production and socialservice provision, and eliminating restrictions on foreign cap-ital has led to the destruction of domestic productive sectors.In the s, for example, Michael Manley, then president ofJamaica, described as a “Faustian bargain” the series of struc-tural adjustment policies he was forced to accept, an arrange-ment that subsequently killed off Jamaica’s domestic agricul-ture, dairy, and poultry industries as a result of a flood of cheapimports from the United States (Black and Kincaid ).Moreover, dispossessed rural families had little choice but towork in the new, highly exploitative tax-free enterprise zones

The Rise of the Bank

that obliged them to compete with the world’s lowest wages(McMichael ).

The Bank’s neoliberal turn was supported by a wholenetwork of policy elites based in Washington, as well as pro-fessional lawyers, economists, business leaders, and techno-crats in capital cities like Santiago and Mexico City, working ina variety of state and nonstate institutions (e.g., universities,the legal system, the private sector, even human rights agen-cies) and pursuing their own national agendas (Babb ). Asa consequence, the neoliberalism that evolved in Venezuelalooked markedly different than that which emerged in Chile,and both had little resemblance to the prototypes mapped outin Washington. As Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth brilliantlydocument, the roots of the idea of the “neoliberal revolution”can be traced through these traveling elites and their institu-tions of training and work, constituting a North-South insti-tutional network of neoliberal “technopols” (Dezalay and Garth). The production of actually existing neoliberalism was(and remains) a transnational dialectical process, a product of tension, struggle, and negotiated compromise among theWorld Bank, IMF, powerful bankers and political elites, andscores of actors working in corporations, governments, andprofessional societies around the world. Under the leadershipof the World Bank, one significant strand that has emergedfrom these transnational institutional practices is green neo-liberalism.

Tensions between the Green and the Neoliberal

After decades of being ignored and dismissed, and after work-ing diligently to create a milieu in which there would be few al-ternatives to its rules, the World Bank of the s found itself

The Rise of the Bank

firmly at the helm of the world of development. Yet the twotransnational institutions in charge of the debt crisis, the WorldBank and the IMF, did not have much time to celebrate. Aseconomies crashed and people took to the streets, both insti-tutions became the focus of scorn, anger, and frustration. Nolonger was the World Bank seen as a dispassionate expert offer-ing technical advice at a distance. Instead, it was blamed for re-duced public spending; mass unemployment; currency col-lapse; rising prices for food, fuel, and other goods; and fallingwages and export prices. At the precise moment that the Bankbelted itself into the driver’s seat, many of its client govern-ments were on the verge of collapse.

Adding to these pressures was a series of high-profile ac-tivist campaigns directed at revealing and reversing the nega-tive social and environmental effects of Bank projects. Theimage in the North of the happy recipients of Bank aid—the“objects of development”—was sabotaged as rural peasantsand urban laborers began a series of bread riots and projectprotests, including mass marches and fasts to dramatize theirdiscontent with the World Bank and its policies. In the mid-s, activists “beyond borders” began to organize to increasethe effectiveness of their protests (Fox and Brown ; Foxand Thorne ; Keck and Sikkink ; Smith, Chatfield, andPagnucco ), such that the Bank’s policies and practices inthe most remote areas of India, Brazil, and Indonesia becamefront page news in the North and were the topic of significantparliamentarian and congressional debates in Bonn, London,Tokyo, and Washington (Fox and Brown ). They were alsothe source of high-anxiety political conflict in the streets ofManila, Jakarta, and New Delhi. The global master of develop-ment was on trial in the world’s court of public opinion.

The Rise of the Bank

In Thailand, activists protested dozens of destructivedam, mining, and forestry projects in support of the hundredsof thousands of people, especially ethnic minorities, who hadbeen forcibly displaced by Bank projects with little compensa-tion (Parnwell and Bryant ; Rich ). The list of griev-ances included gross human rights violations and the impov-erishment of large rural populations through projects thatmostly benefited a narrow set of state-class, urban, and indus-trial interests.25 In Indonesia, protests erupted against the WorldBank’s extensive support of General Suharto’s TransmigrationProject, a military-cum-development scheme that forcibly re-settled more than two million ethnic minorities from the innerislands of Java and Bali to the outer islands between the mid-s and mid-s.26

Campaigns were also launched against the World Bank’ssupport of the Narmada Dam project in India, and the Polono-roeste highway project in Brazil. Ironically, the Bank publiclypromoted its Polonoroeste project in the Brazilian Amazon asa leading example of sustainable development, suggesting thatits five successive loans to Brazil would be the key lever to forcea reluctant Brazilian government to take seriously the needs ofthe indigenous peoples who lived in this region. Others, bycontrast, saw this massive highway project as the death knellfor the rain forest and its indigenous population, as it wouldinvite millions of colonizers into a region without sufficientstate authority to prevent clear-felling the forest and harassingits dwellers—which is precisely what happened. As scholarsand activists documented the destruction, this campaign be-came a catalyst for a type of transnational advocacy network-ing that has become remarkably common today (Keck andSikkink ).

The Rise of the Bank

The anti-Polonoroeste campaign became a significantthreat to more than just the Bank’s work in the Amazon. Theexposure of Bank practices evoked strong criticisms on thepart of key Northern policymakers. After sitting through morethan twenty hearings before the U.S. Congress, in which pas-sionate and media-genic speakers from Amazonian indige-nous groups, clad in their traditional clothing, testified to theproject’s destructive effects on their communities, some mem-bers of Congress threatened to cut support to the multilateraldevelopment banks, while others became determined to disci-pline the World Bank and impose upon it some form of ac-countability. As conservative Republican Senator Robert Kas-ten noted in , “When people find out what’s been goingon, you’re going to see people out in the street saying, ‘My God,did you read this information? Why are our dollars being usedto fund this kind of destruction?’” An official in the TreasuryDepartment agreed: “I think it’s a disaster, it’s a mistake, andit’s been going on for years” (Wade , p. ). The fact thatthis campaign coincided with Bank efforts to request addi-tional commitments from European governments and theUnited States to replenish the International Development As-sistance (IDA) fund placed the Bank in an extremely vulner-able position.

To survive this onslaught of criticism that shook the con-fidence of Northern policy makers, the Bank responded withstubborn denial and then, when that backfired, with substantialorganizational change. Through the efforts of a handful ofreform-minded actors within the Bank, the environment be-came the Bank’s chief area of concern. New theories, idioms,images, slogans, departments, priorities, and data were gener-ated at breakneck speed. New World Bank reports determinedthat there could be no sustained economic growth without a

The Rise of the Bank

sustainable environment and just treatment of the ethnic mi-norities and indigenous peoples living on fragile ecosystems.Money and other institutional resources were thrown at theproblem. As late as , the Bank had only five staff people offi-

cially working on the environment; by it had more thanthree hundred. In , the Bank loaned less than $ million inthe name of the environment; a decade later, it was lending al-most a billion dollars. Between and , budgetary re-sources for environmental policy, research, and loans grew bymore than percent a year.27 The small Office of Environmen-tal Affairs ballooned into an Environment Department, with asignificant body of staff. In , the Bank established a new vicepresidency for environmentally sustainable development.

By the mid-s, environmental issues had become socentral to the Bank’s identity and work that its clients couldnot borrow until they had signed off on a National Environ-mental Action Plan (NEAP), which committed them to “main-stream” their environmental concerns in national develop-ment policies. Large-scale projects were no longer approved bythe Bank’s executive directors without rigorous environmentaland social assessments based on a scientific protocol that theWorld Bank, meanwhile, was busy inventing. The Bank im-posed on its borrowers “environmental adjustment” policiesthroughout the s (often in concert with its fiscal structuraladjustment policies), which pressed governments into creatingcookie-cutter-like environmental protection agencies; redraft-ing forestry, land, and water laws; establishing national envi-ronmental policy and research institutes; and training a cadreof professionals to carry out environmental reforms. These in-terventions attempted to make national standards more com-patible with a set of “global” standards that the Bank and itspartners were working hard to create at the same time.28

The Rise of the Bank

Conclusion

Although its birth in the mid-s reflected a noteworthy eventin postcolonial history, the World Bank became a powerful or-ganization only two decades later, under Robert McNamara’sleadership. McNamara seized the opportunity to expand theBank’s role in the global economy at a pivotal moment whenU.S. hegemony was being challenged by Europe, Japan, and theoil-producing OPEC nations, on the one hand, and by anti-colonial insurgents throughout the South, on the other. UnderMcNamara’s stewardship, the Bank instigated new transna-tional spheres of political and economic influence in which itand Southern professional supporters worked together to pro-duce a new regime of development. McNamara’s remarkablesystem of knowledge production and dissemination enabledthe Bank to lend substantial amounts of capital and influencedecision making within borrowing-country institutions as itnever had been able to before. Even after McNamara’s retire-ment and major changes within the Bank, McNamara’s markon the Bank helped it to overcome threats to its authority andlegitimacy and to grow stronger and more powerful, as it hadafter the debt crisis and the anti-Bank street riots and massprotests of the s.

In the late s, the environment became a category ofbroad significance in the world of development in part be-cause of the widespread ecological and social devastation thatresulted from Bank projects and policies. To survive the on-slaught of criticism that made the Bank into an institution nongrata and attracted the critical eye of Northern policymakers,the Bank was forced to engage in major organizational reform.Remarkably, by the late s, the World Bank was setting newglobal standards for environmental management and regu-

The Rise of the Bank

lation such that by the early twenty-first century, no inter-national organization could afford to stake a position withoutworking through the parameters set by the Bank on issues thatrange widely from biodiversity and sustainable forestry, topoverty and public health, to fundamental rights for indige-nous peoples to access environmental resources, to society-wide rights to access safe water. The Bank responded to its crit-ics with renewed vigor, increases in finance capital, and globalexpansion.

The greening of the World Bank has successfully engagednumerous governments and development and environmentalactivists, as well as Bank investors and borrowers, proving tomany skeptical observers, including those within the organiza-tion, that it could lead on the environmental front withoutcompromising its “AAA” bond ratings. But transforming thismassive technocratic hulk from culprit to vanguard would notbe an easy job.

The Rise of the Bank

IIIProducing Green Science

inside Headquarters

Lending capital is no longer the World Bank’s

greatest asset on the global market; knowledge is.

Knowledge is its greatest source of power.

—Senior Bank official, author interview,

January

The dominant internal view at the Bank on how to

best deal with the Board [of Executive Directors]

is often summed up as the Mushroom Principle:

“Feed them shit and keep them in the dark.”

—George and Sabelli , p.

s a data collector, the World Bank is unrivaled, sendingmissions abroad to study everything from govern-

ment budgets to ownership records for village lands.Much of this information is not actually published

by the Bank, largely because governments consider such dis-closures to be national security risks, but the Bank’s publishedreports do not hesitate to draw conclusions from this exclusiveinformation. The Bank, therefore, is doubly well situated as thelargest “research” organization in the world with such remark-able access, yet one that is unable (and unwilling) to release its coveted data, imbuing its reports, conclusions, and policystatements with especially high value. This exclusive cache ofinformation puts non-Bank scientists at a comparative disad-vantage, not just because of their more limited data-gatheringcapacities, but because they cannot replicate, elaborate upon,or refute the Bank’s research methods and conclusions with-out it.1

As a producer of scientific knowledge, the Bank is alsopeerless: not only does its professional staff have access to raredata, but they have been trained at top universities. According toone report, percent received degrees from the same top U.S.or British Ph.D. programs (Frey et al. ; Wade ). At morethan $ million, the Bank’s annual research budget is one ofthe largest among global institutions.2 As one senior Bank offi-

cial exclaimed, “I never had such access or support in all myyears working for a major U.S. university.”3 Moreover, mostBank officials comfortably embrace the dominant epistemo-logical paradigm in their work, which on the surface presentsa scientific esprit de corps that is rare among research institu-tions. For this reason, and because of its consensus-eliciting in-stitutional norms, Bank publications rarely contradict or chal-

Producing Green Science

lenge the latest policy line coming from the top echelons ofBank hierarchy.

When it comes to dissemination of research findings, theBank, again, is tops in the field. In the academic world, univer-sity courses in development economics rely heavily upon Bankpublications (Stern and Ferreira ).4 World Bank publica-tions are cited considerably more often than the average eco-nomics or business journal article in the Social Science Cita-tion Index, another indication of the centrality of Bank ideas,data, and analysis in the production of academic thought. Itslatest publications (and well-timed press releases) are regu-larly featured in major newspapers around the world. On cer-tain topics—for example, structural adjustment; debt; and theeconomies of most African countries, the former Soviet Union(since ), and China (since the early s)—the worldmedia depend almost exclusively on World Bank data and in-terpretations.5 It not only has the respect of the media, it hasthe ear of the world’s most important policy makers, fromprime ministers and presidents, to national academies of sci-ences, to chambers of commerce. In remote rural research in-stitutes of the Indian desert or southern African bush, re-searchers have come to depend on free, regularly posted Bankreports for their daily staple of information. Its flagship publi-cation, the World Development Report (WDR), is the mostcited economic development publication the world over. Withan annual press run of more than , in six languages,WDR is required reading at development research institutesaround the globe as well as at the international desk at the New York Times.6

In sum, Bank knowledge circulates widely and has be-come an important tool in policy making and debate; morespecifically, it lays the groundwork for Bank innovations, new

Producing Green Science

political rationalities, and new ambitions. Over time, we havetaken it for granted and it has become widely accepted world-wide. Knowledge is indeed power for the World Bank. Al-though scholars, activists, and the occasional journalist havewritten about the “quality” of Bank information, especially incriticisms of particular projects or policies, few have writtenabout the actual production process. In this chapter, by con-trast, I will focus precisely on the assembly line of knowledgeproduction inside Bank headquarters and, more specifically,on the production of green knowledge.

In searching for an explanation as to why the Bank neverseems to improve or take environmental concerns seriously,many have pointed to the Bank’s intensely hierarchical andpunitive organizational culture (Caufield ; Pincus andWinters ; Rich ; Wade ). Famous stories circulateabout fierce and humiliating temper tantrums by senior man-agers, including President Wolfensohn, that serve the pur-pose of reminding Bank employees never to step out of line. Inthis chapter I will describe elements of this organizationalform of social control because it helps to explain what staff

members have to watch out for when they participate in theproduction of knowledge on the environment, which is still a controversial issue within Bank headquarters. Controversysurrounding environmentalism looms large within the Bank,not because Bank employees are anti-environmentalism, butbecause the organizational incentive system for promotionpressures staff to make their loans big and move on themquickly. Safeguarding projects against environmental prob-lems is an expensive and time-consuming process that worksagainst an individual’s desire to rise among the ranks. This isthe common explanation for what is seen as the Bank’s failureto create a robust environmental program, but it does not ac-

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count for the fact that Bank environmental assessments, pol-icies, reforms, and projects can be found in every countrywhere the Bank works—indeed, Bank-style environmentalismis state-of-the-art in many governmental and developmentagencies. This is not the sign of failure.

Hence, I describe the way the Bank works inside head-quarters in order to elucidate these characteristics of Bank or-ganizational culture as symptoms of the Bank’s roles as an in-stitutional wedge for Northern capital expansionism and themajor harbinger of development. As I argue in later chapters,these practices inside headquarters have enabled the Bank tobecome a leader both in the global economy and in global cultural production, insofar as it fabricates a powerful greenagenda, political rationality, and tools to institutionalize its approach in the workings of states, organizations, and trans-national policy networks. I describe the organizational cultureand constraints at World Bank headquarters in Washington,D.C., in order to portray the pressures and incentives thatdominate the workplace for Bank staff. But the organizationdoes not exist in a vacuum, and the institutional culture is notmerely the result of obstinate managers. Instead, we need tounderstand this culture as reflective of the larger role the Bankplays in the world. Therefore, in this chapter I will explore thefollowing questions: How does the Bank construct its own ver-sion of environmentalism, based on what criteria, internal andexternal influences, and for what purposes? And on what basisdoes this version of environmentalism become persuasive out-side of headquarters? Indeed, because of the Bank’s dominantrole in the global economy and in the global production ofknowledge, what it produces is very powerful. Its role in theglobal economy shapes the ways in which knowledge is pro-duced. Note that the Bank entered into the business of the en-

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vironment only in the early s, yet today, its interpretationof environmentally sustainable development rules.

On our tour of the assembly line of knowledge produc-tion, we start with a typical research project within the Bank’smain research unit, the Policy Research Department (in whatis called “the Center”), to find out where the policy researchprofessionals get their funding, how they craft their researchquestions, and how research gets defined by the organization.Next, we travel from policy research to project research (in whatis called “Operations”) and learn about knowledge productionintended specifically for project design and assessment. Fromthere we move into the arena of environmental assessment andanalysis, where we meet the environmental science watchdogsfor project loan management. Further down the line, we hearhow Bank reports are produced and examine their content, ar-guments, and bibliographic notes. Finally, our travels take usdown the dark corridors of decision making, from staff hiringto career management. Here we hear about deep-seated staff

frustration and observe some of the microtechnologies of Bankpower that rely on intellectual strong-arm tactics to carve outa unified front on green development that can circulate throughthe Bank’s transnational professional networks.

Institutional Constraints on the Framing of Research Questions

In the World Bank’s Policy Research Department (PRD), themain aim is to develop scientific knowledge on questions thatemerge from policy debates.7 In any given year, the Bank pub-lishes approximately official publications, more than

journal articles and more than working papers, a few of itsown journals (including World Bank Economic Review and

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World Bank Research Observer), numerous departmental mag-azines, and hundreds of in-house “confidential” reports (suchas Staff Appraisal Reports and Country Assistance Strategy re-ports). Approximately $ million, or percent of the Bank’sadministrative budget, is formally allocated for research, butthis figure does not include loan-related research or environ-mental assessments (which perhaps adds another $ millionper year). An additional $– million is spent on economicanalyses of projects, sectors, and policies from PRD, the coun-try departments, and technical assistance offices.

Despite their large research budget, researchers in thePRD are fairly limited as to what questions they can pursue.“This is not like a university,” explained one PRD analyst.8 “Ihave no research assistants I can call upon. Consultants cost$ per day just to work in D.C.; to have them do research inthe field, with travel costs, field assistants, jeeps, fuel, perdiems, well, the money’s just not there.”

More precisely, the money is there, but it is allocated else-where. This analyst specializes in research on energy pricing,an attractive topic at the Bank since it is one of the key envi-ronmental components of structural adjustment policies (Reed). He studies the impact of government-initiated energyprice increases on different income groups. The Bank promotesenergy price increases, or subsidy reductions, to minimize mar-ket distortions and reduce wasteful consumption, believing thatcurrent wasteful energy practices in the South can be changedif national energy prices more accurately reflected real energycosts (“getting the price right”). Although governments typi-cally subsidize the costs of fuels so households and industriescan afford them, these state subsidies are said to have lastingmarket- and behavior- distorting effects. These days, the Bankalso argues that energy subsidies lead to wasteful energy con-sumption that unnecessarily harms the environment.

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There are many questions that arise from such a policy:How do price increases affect the behavior of different groupsof consumers? Should there be a multi-tiered subsidy systemor a special “social fund” to help the lowest-income groupsthat would suffer under increased fuel prices? Which energyresources should be included (e.g., oil, cow dung, forest cover)?What are the secondary effects of reducing energy subsidies—would communities switch to more polluting or more ecolog-ically fragile resources? These are the hard-to-answer ques-tions that could shed light on the wisdom of standardized pol-icy recommendations, research that could show how thesepolicies work in particular contexts and what the implicationsfor the environment are.

Indeed, this is the role that some Bank researchers envi-sion for themselves, but there are institutional constraints thatlimit their opportunities for carrying out such in-depth stud-ies. For example, testing these hypotheses requires elaboratehousehold and community-based data on different types offuel consumption—a formidable task when your research siteis a country as large as India, much less the world. Aggregatedata sets on fuel consumption are generally insufficient forsuch questions; what is required are disaggregated, local-leveldata that can describe why some resources are preferred overothers and what price levels would get consumers to reduce orswitch, and to what fuels they would turn. For the closest ap-proximations, one would need to know the physical, economic,and cultural terrain; however, the national data sets Bank ana-lysts use cannot begin to reveal such specificity and nuances.

Although PRD and the Environment Department (alsoin the Center) are both uniquely positioned to answer thisquestion in that they have the best-trained staff, some moneyto hire consultants in the field, contacts in all the right min-istries, and access to hard-to-get data, there are plenty of ob-

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stacles and disincentives to doing so. One major barrier is thatdemand (and money) for such assignments comes from Op-erations, and the professionals in Operations (i.e., loan man-agers) want reports quickly in order to support their policiesor projects.“But to do household studies—to find out why dif-ferent households choose certain fuels for certain uses—re-quires time, money, and lots of field research,” one analyst ex-plained. “How can I do a medium-term study if they alwayswant the results in the short term? That’s why [that] type of re-search is not done here. It’s just not realistic when the loanmanagers are the ones funding us.”

Another serious problem is finding a unit within theBank to fund the research. “I wanted to do a study on energypricing impact on the poor,” said this Policy Research Depart-ment analyst, “because we can’t know the impact of our policyuntil we actually test the idea. The problem is that it’s hard toget anyone to fund it.” Like his colleagues, approximately halfof his salary and research budget comes from project man-agers who work in Operations; they submit requests, or bid,for his time to do research for them.9 Although many loanmanagers are sympathetic to his research concerns and wouldlove to have a comprehensive study that confirms their beliefsabout the effects of their energy loans, none is interested inspending the $, or more to perform the study.

Other constraints shape the research that is done as well.As this policy analyst explained:

I got one manager to agree [to fund my study], sincehe needed data in a few states [in that country]. Butwe disagreed as to which states. I was planning amedium-term study over a few years, comparing afew states picked based on a comparative methodwith a decent-sized sample. But he only wanted to

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fund research in states where he was working. So, inspite of my hesitations, I accommodated him. Butby the time I designed the study, the state ministersweren’t interested in his projects, so he had toswitch to other states. This happens all the time; ifone project doesn’t fly, they try another one, else-where. Well, it’s not so easy for us to switch researchsites in the middle of a study. Yet, they expect us todo the background work for their projects.

In a recent interview on intellectual innovation at theWorld Bank, former president Robert McNamara referred to anumber of “pathbreaking” ideas that emanated from the Bank,often despite vehement protests from U.S. administrations: his Nairobi speech on the centrality of the issue of poverty,his invitation to China to enter the World Bank in the lates, his speech on structural adjustment. McNamaraargued that in many of the significant international policyshifts of the s and s, political leadership in the Northfollowed the lead of the World Bank. In the early s, Mc-Namara planned to establish a semi-autonomous research sub-sidiary of the Bank to formally institutionalize the Bank’s globalintellectual leadership. He hoped to raise an annual budget of$ million, with $, research grants distributed to each ofhis best and brightest World Bank “brains”—McNamara’svision for solving the world’s problems in the most expedi-tious, technomanagerialist fashion.10 His plans never came tofruition. Instead, as the previous examples indicate, Bank re-searchers depend heavily on loan managers to fund their brainpower. When project loan managers are paying the bill for re-search—whether they are shepherding a small and simpleroad project or a massive and complex structural adjustmentpackage—they tend not to be interested in findings that com-

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plicate or throw a shadow upon their project objectives. Thisbasic tension is endemic to the production of knowledge at theWorld Bank.

Although McNamara failed to produce the institutionalmechanisms to finance the Bank’s brain power in the way hewanted, his dream of producing a unified voice within theBank to lead the world was, to a certain degree, realized. Thatis, one learns from Bank staff that Bank researchers and ana-lysts receive unambiguously clear messages to pursue their sci-ence in such a way that leads to a unified policy voice. This isone reason the Bank was able to quickly build a cache of ex-pertise in environmentally sustainable development and toutilize it in its many borrowing countries.

Environmental Research and the Project Cycle

From the Policy Research Department in the Center, we travelacross the World Bank complex to Operations, where loanprojects are conceived. Here, we gain some insights into theproduction of scientific research that is utilized for project de-sign and assessment. Research—green or otherwise—is justone component of the Bank’s objective to design and sell“quality” loans. For the Bank to exist it must sell loans; the suc-cess of an individual’s career, too, is contingent on his or herability to sell loans. As other critiques of the Bank’s organiza-tional culture have shown, this staff incentive—indeed, im-perative—has created serious problems for the Bank’s capac-ity to design quality loans (Pincus and Winters ; Wade). Yet this is not the only factor that shapes outcomes here.

To understand the relation between research and projectloans, it is useful first to discuss where research fits into theproject cycle. Picture a line diagram of the typical World Bankproject cycle: stage starts with project design, cost-benefit

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analysis, and (often) environmental assessment. Then loanmanagers must package the loan for approval by Bank uppermanagement and executive directors, and after that, the loanmust be negotiated with the borrowers. The loan cannot passthrough these steps without a complete plan for procurementof goods and services and the creation of the legal contracts forthe loan. Once approved by lender and borrower, which mighttake a couple of rounds, the next step (stage ) is the actual im-plementation of the project, which typically takes several years.At the end of the project cycle, there is follow-up, aimed at en-suring that all is well years after the loan agreement has beensigned (stage ).

According to Bank documents and interviews with Bankstaff, more than half of project-related staff time is devoted tojust two tasks of stage : procurement, or the contracting for allproject-related goods and services, and legal affairs (e.g., thedrawing up of the loan contract between lender and borrower)(Wapenhans , p. iii). Despite years of environmental re-forms, less than percent of a project’s budget (and an averageof only four weeks of a task manager’s time) is dedicated to en-vironmental assessment, conducted during the project’s designphase.11 Compared with stage , the staff time and money allo-cated for project implementation, supervision, evaluation, andfollow-up (stages and ) is minuscule, despite the fact thatthese parts of the project take longer to execute than stage (.years versus . years, on average).12 To conduct increased re-search and additional scrutiny based on new green criteria addscosts and tension to the already long time frame of the project.

Moreover, less than percent of Bank projects actuallykeep the same staff for more than two years, even though a proj-ect life cycle averages nine years (Wapenhans , annex A,p. ). That means that few project managers and their supportstaffs actually see a project through beyond stage ; in fact, their

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careers depend on their success rate in packaging and sellingloans, not on following them up in the field. Indeed, across theBank, loan managers are leaving their loans before they evenbegin disbursing funds, but usually after they are approved.

A look at the project cycle shows that the opportunitiesfor data collection, research, environmental assessment, andproject evaluation are small. At the start, much staff time andmoney is focused on legal and procurement matters. Then themain task is to sell the project to the Bank’s executive directorsand government officials, which is obviously not the momentfor squeamish loan managers to divulge controversial factsand analysis. By stage , when the project is actually being im-plemented, most loan managers have moved on to the next setof loan preparations. None of my interviewees could come upwith an institutional incentive that encourages them to allo-cate resources to research the project while it evolves: the in-stitutional disincentives far outweigh the incentives to collectenvironmental data, observe problems with the project, andmake adjustments throughout the project’s tenure, when thereal environmental and social externalities unfold. In this highlyroutinized project cycle, in which every staff-hour is accountedfor in the budget, loan managers are not rewarded if they addmonths to their budget for careful research in stage or tacksalaries for a team of data collectors and analysts onto stages and . This would be stepping way beyond the norms and cul-ture of the World Bank.

Staff Training on Environmental Assessment

Conducting environmental assessments (EAs) for the Bank’slargest projects is no easy task. As official Operational Direc-tive (OD) guidelines state: “[Through an EA,] all environmen-

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tal consequences should be recognized early in the project cycleand taken into account in project-selection, siting, planning,and design. EAs identify ways of improving projects environ-mentally, by preventing, minimizing, mitigating, or compen-sating for adverse impacts.”13 Comprehensive EAs are requiredfor investments that are certain to have “significant adverseimpacts that may be sensitive, irreversible, diverse, compre-hensive, broad, or precedent-setting.”14 These types of invest-ments are categorized as “A” projects. If investments will leadto environmental impacts that are only “site-specific in natureand do not significantly affect human populations or alter en-vironmentally important areas,” partial EAs are required forthe particular issues in question (World Bank EnvironmentDepartment , p. ). These are categorized as “B” projects.Investments that do not require an EA fall into the “C” cate-gory; they are typically in the fields of health, education, andwelfare, and structural adjustment loans, which comprisemore than percent of the Bank’s annual lending portfolio.15

Interestingly, the total amount of Bank loan money invested incategory A projects has risen significantly between and, from percent of the Bank’s nonadjustment loan port-folio to percent.16 Eighty percent of category A projectscomes from the Bank’s three main sectors: energy and power,agriculture, and transport. With an increase in category Aproject investments has come a demand for more complexEAs. Environmental assessment has become a veritable growthindustry in and outside of the Bank.

To transmit the basic concepts, norms, and proceduralrules of EAs to loan managers, the World Bank Institute (WBI)and the Environment Department have teamed up to offerregular day-long training seminars for Bank staff. At the staff

training seminar I attended as a participant-observer in ,

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the Environment Department official running the workshopspent the morning presenting the Bank’s approach to environ-mental assessment; in the afternoon, he invited two Washing-ton-based consultants to walk through case studies of “strong”and “weak” EAs. Throughout the day, staff received straight-forward explanations as to what an environmental assessmentis, its significance for Bank projects, and the strengths andweaknesses of the Bank’s past EA performance. From this ex-position, we received a boiled-down version of the conceptsconsidered important by the Center’s Environment Depart-ment, as transmitted to Operations’ loan managers.

According to EA specialists, environmental assessment isan opportunity for loan managers to conduct a study of pos-sible future environmental problems—“[to] create a risk sce-nario,” our staff trainer explained—before the project gets ap-proved, so that funds can be allocated and project componentsredesigned to reduce these risks. If a dam is being built, for ex-ample, it is important to estimate the probability that a glacierlake will burst and create havoc for the project (as well as forthe project manager).17 The staff manual on EAs lists the fullrange of what is meant by the environment: water, air, noise,biodiversity, flora and fauna, and even human health. By theend of the day, Bank staff were quite clear on what conceptsand definitions were considered important and appropriate touse and which were not.

In the morning session, the trainer reviewed findingsfrom the Environment Department’s recent evaluative studyof World Bank EAs, suggesting that current EAs are a vast im-provement over those from the old days. There is less reluc-tance among staff to follow procedures, and in many cases EAshave helped both borrowers and Bank staff to agree on thecritical environmental issues. Although EAs rarely stop a proj-

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ect dead in the water, they do add an important dimension toproject design: they force the Bank and its borrowers to collectbaseline data that, it is argued, can translate into better-designed projects (World Bank Environment Department; World Bank Environment Department ). Yet thereare some basic shortfalls in the Bank’s EA work, according tothe report and the trainer. One of the most obvious is thenumber of EAs that fail to provide an analysis of alternatives.Although it is required, only half of project EAs actually lookinto the question of alternatives—that is, study the option ofnot building another power plant (a supply-driven project)and consider replacing it with a plan to reduce energy con-sumption (a demand-driven project).18 A second shortcomingis in the area of public consultation, which most EAs avoid. Forexample, it was only through a public meeting for a Caribbeanlandfill and waste disposal project, our trainer noted, that oneBank project manager learned of an endangered species mak-ing its home at the proposed site. Since the project had not yetbeen implemented, it was moved to another site and the prob-lem was averted. (Seminar participants gave a collective moan,signaling their sympathy toward their colleague who had tostart over because of a rare grasshopper.) “Remember,” thetrainer instructed, “the public can be a great source for data.”A third weakness is in the area of supervision. Fewer than

percent of Bank A projects are supervised.19 Of the unsuper-vised A projects, the trainer admitted, “We really don’t knowwhat the environmental impacts are.”

These EA problem spots can be overcome through carefulplanning, he suggested, which will lead to fewer hassles for man-agers downstream. To illustrate his point, the trainer offered acase study of an EA that “handled percent of the issues well,but missed a few.” The participants were asked to find its weak-

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nesses and suggest ways to overcome them.A Washington-basedconsultant helped run the exercise. The following discussionillustrates some of the institutional incentives for Bank staff toconduct “good” EAs and some of the conceptions of natureand environmental management that are deemed relevant.

The trainer introduced a project of a Ghana gold mineexpansion, assessed as a category A project, which requires anextensive environmental and social assessment because of thepotential high risks. The gold mine, active throughout the pastcentury, is failing; it is owned and operated by the Ghana gov-ernment ( percent) and by a British company ( percent).Its gold production represents one-fifth of Ghana’s foreign ex-change, making it a project of “national concern.” The Bank’sinvestment is supposed to increase the life of the mine by onlya decade and increase production to tons. For mine expan-sion and processing, the Bank developed a $-million proj-ect to improve infrastructure for power and water supplies,underground and open pit mining, and ore processing. Tosafeguard against future liability, the trainer and a visiting con-sultant explained, the project needed a baseline study; there-fore an EA was essential. According to the trainer, category Aenvironmental assessments safeguard loan managers from anyproblems, environmental or legal, in the future.“The Bank hasto document where it started to get involved, so it cannot beheld responsible for what has occurred before.” At a cost of$ million, this particular EA covered four main concerns: haz-ardous and toxic materials, involuntary resettlements, occupa-tional health and safety, and watershed preservation.

The baseline study conducted by the Bank’s British con-sultants showed that poisonous emissions from previous yearsof gold mining had denuded the surrounding hills, filled theair with high concentrations of toxic chemicals, and con-

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taminated the rivers and groundwater. Sulfur, cyanide, and ar-senic are some of the chemicals that are used either for pro-cessing or get extracted along with the gold in “gold roasting.”Out of concern for these toxins, the EA recommended scrub-bers for air quality but found no reason, or legal obligation, tomitigate future effects—or remediate previous damage—onflora or fauna, water supplies, or human health.“Since no floraor fauna remains in the micro-area,” the consultant stated,“this new project has no effect on them.” Hence there would beno obligation to spend additional funds. In the case of waterpollution, he added: “Although arsenic emissions would behigh for this project, river levels are already much higher thanWHO standards for drinking water.” That is, even with expen-sive technological alterations, future emissions would have noappreciable effect on water quality since the river will alwaysbe undrinkable. Moreover, the community has long ago be-come accepting of the poisoned river. For example, he said:“The children even swim in it.”

To get local feedback, a concept that was heavily pro-moted throughout this staff seminar, the consultant explainedthat public information sheets were distributed and public dis-cussions were held at local schools and at the royal palace.When a seminar participant asked why the information sheetswere not printed in the local language, the consultant repliedthat because only percent of the locals were literate, localteachers and leaders were given the task of disseminating theinformation. Someone else asked how likely it was that localswould question elements of a project if the meeting was heldat the royal residence. The consultant said that the communityalways held important meetings there, and no one, he sur-mised, seemed to mind.

As the session wound down, the trainer asked the Bank

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staff what was missing from the project’s EA. When no one an-swered to his satisfaction, he replied that what was missing wasan overall plan delineating who was responsible for specific en-vironmental externalities—local groups, state agencies, or themining company. The EA study, he pointed out, never defineda role for the government and its new environmental agency,which is important for the purpose of delineating ownership,responsibility, and, of course, liability. Everyone nodded. Whenthere were no more questions, we broke for lunch.

So what did we learn from this staff training? For one, welearned that the “environment” refers only to that which thespecific project will affect, and that measurement is actuallyquite important and is open to interpretation. Hence, decidingthe exact parameters of the temporal and spatial dimensionsof a project is a significant outcome of a World Bank environ-mental assessment. It helps define, with an apparent aura ofprecision, the question of liability and responsibility of a pro-ject’s impact on, for this mine project, flora, soils, air, water, andhuman health. Questions about the range of impact for whichproject backers are responsible are very important to determineat the outset and is the job, in part, of a good EA. Is it hundredsof yards or hundreds of miles? How can we determine what thedownstream and upstream responsibilities are? Is the projectresponsible for subsoil and underground aquifer conditions?At what point in time or on the terrain can we stop worryingabout project impact and responsibility? These are complexquestions that could have any number of legitimate answers,especially in front of a claims court or in public opinion.

On the one hand, we learned that EAs can serve as a prodto challenge engineers and planners to design a project thatmitigates negative effects for human and nonhuman popula-tions and environments at great distances from the site, over

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great time periods, down to the most minute WHO health andsafety specifications. On the other hand, EAs can precisely de-lineate the parameters of a project, its measurable impact, andthe backers’ liability. The difference between measuring down-stream effects as yards or miles from a project site cantranslate into millions of dollars in compensation, land andwater cleansing, or population resettlement. The incentive,hence, becomes to minimize project risk through the processof constructing environmental assessments and its compo-nents, such as the baseline (i.e., was the area already poor anddegraded?), the definition of what counts as a natural asset(i.e., the river and the surrounding flora were already dead andhence not the project’s responsibility), human health (i.e.,people’s health was already contaminated), and what counts as an impact (i.e., how much additional damage could ar-senic and mercury inflict if existing conditions were already oflow value?).

The science and art of constructing EAs, therefore, be-comes much more than a smokescreen of good intentions or amindless bureaucratic exercise; EAs can serve as a very impor-tant legal, scientific, and economic tool to help mitigate thepotentially high costs of future claims against the project andits owners. They can have a lasting impact on how environ-mental costs and risks are measured and defined. The stampthat the World Bank puts on the making of environmental as-sessments—a process with a very particular U.S.-based liti-gious history (Espeland ; Porter ; Scott )—is thepressure to conjoin discourses of the environmental, legal,proprietary, and economic into one tool. As we will see, the sci-ence and art of environmental assessments is being sculptedunder the auspices of the World Bank, as it is the main sourceof so much of the demand, and supply, of EAs worldwide.

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Since the Bank is also financing the restructuring and retool-ing of the national environmental ministries of its borrowers,Bank-style EAs are being used around the world by state agen-cies to assess the value of nature, natural resources, and humanhealth under the influence of large capital-intensive projects.

We also learned that a Bank-style environmental analysisuses as its yardstick an economic cost-benefit analysis thatweighs “national” benefits, such as gold earnings, against “local”costs, such as community and environmental poisoning. ToBank staff, a multimillion-dollar investment in a poor and en-vironmentally degraded area is usually considered a good idea,even if such investments historically have led to further sitecontamination and a limited number of years of income gen-eration. In this case, for instance, the project’s goal was to ex-tend the life of the gold mine for only ten more years. BecauseGhana is highly in debt, however, and its commodifiable re-sources, besides gold, are quite limited, making such a capitalinvestment will always be viewed as beneficial as long as it gen-erates hard currency for the country. Within this political-ecological rationality, the alternative of “no gold mine invest-ment”—which is, in theory, always an option for EAs—doesnot merit serious consideration. (No one in the seminar broughtup such a ludicrous idea.)

Environmental assessments also offer Bank staff the op-portunity to strengthen the claims of the project’s value bydowngrading existing conditions. That is, the EA can providea baseline measure against which the future outcome can al-ways look, comparatively speaking, rosy. If the site can be rep-resented as impoverished and ecologically degraded, as wasthe case of the gold mine site in Ghana, then the environmen-tal assessment can reproduce the long-standing Bank traditionof describing prospective project sites and beneficiaries in

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terms of their “lacks.” Environmental assessments can con-firm, with all the backing of an environmental cost-benefitanalysis, that the government and its poor populations needthis Bank loan. In the process, EAs also clarify what counts asnature and what counts as development by predicating theseconcerns on a scientific, economic valuation. The only ques-tions left involve the assignment of responsibility and liability:Who is responsible for a mine-related chemical spill or sup-plying potable water to the workforce and surrounding com-munity? Even though these elements of the project are definedas costs—specifically local costs—they are juxtaposed to thelarger national benefits of an income-generating investment,such as a gold mine.

Environmentalism, however, is also a discourse that proj-ect critics can claim as their own, which presupposes its ownpossible dangers. Interestingly, in the discussion of the Africangold mine, no one in the training seminar seemed at all enthu-siastic about the project as it seemed ripe for public contro-versy. Why put yourself and the Bank at risk by investing in ahighly toxic site, even if it will produce gold? By the end of thediscussion, the issue was less whether people would support theproject than the overriding importance of a well-documentedenvironmental and social assessment. Without it, you not onlycan get “zapped” by scrutinizing critics, but worse, the projectcould become an expensive liability down the road. Within thishistorical moment of contentious development, the signifi-

cance of doing a thorough EA becomes self-evident.By the end of the daylong seminar, those attending felt

better equipped to confront the critical public, the demandingbosses, and the lawyers and financial advisors who apply pres-sure on Bank staff to increase their ability to “due diligence”around these large risky investments. It was a painful but re-

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warding seminar for all. I, for one, certainly will not look at en-vironmental assessments in the same light as I did when Istarted the day—as just a tool to appease the environmentalists.

Environmental Monitoring: A Herculean Task

Going from theory to practice is always difficult. Most Bankloan managers are trained in neoclassical economics, and en-vironmental assessment is a trying proposition for them. De-spite in-house trainings, most managers feel ill qualified forthe task. (Fortunately, they can hire consultants to conductthem.) Nonetheless, loan managers are obliged to ensure thattheir loans are being monitored for environmental concernsthroughout their project work. But many Bank projects are solarge and so complex that no one could possibly monitor everyaspect for its negative (or positive) environmental effect, evenif an infinite amount of time and money were available. BelowI describe some of the most obvious constraints for projectoversight, however well one may have anticipated problems atthe environment assessment stage.

Our first example comes from a loan manager, whom Iwill call Ted, a recent and young Ph.D. from the University ofChicago’s economics department with no previous foreign ex-perience. He is in charge of managing a $-million ruralmodernization project, cofinanced by the World Bank, the In-terAmerican Development Bank (IDB), which lends to LatinAmerica and the Caribbean, and the borrowing country. Thismassive loan responsibility was a big step forward in his career;he started out at the Bank as a consultant, helping others ontheir projects, and this one fell into his lap after consecutiveloan managers moved on to other jobs within the Bank. Ted isnow overseeing the financing of multiple investments underthe rubric of rural infrastructural development: roads, irriga-

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tion, drainage, electrical power plants and distribution griddevelopment, land mapping and titling, fishing docks, farmertraining, seed distribution, farmer credit, and more.20 Theloan affects every aspect of rural productive life in order to, asthe loan’s official title suggests, modernize the countryside.

One small component of the project is farmer credit,which Ted estimated would affect more than , farmers.He could not begin to speculate as to how many people wouldfeel the effects of the main components of the loan, which in-cluded a huge power plant and road and irrigation construc-tion projects. When asked about the environmental impacts ofthis mammoth intervention, he pointed only to the credit pro-gram and explained the difficulty of monitoring it. The pro-gram’s objective ideally is to speedily distribute loans between$, and $ million to farmers to modernize their farms.Ted’s main environmental worry is not soil erosion, landflooding, chemical runoff, elimination of traditional seed va-rieties, or other common environmentalist concerns associ-ated with agricultural intensification. Local NGOs brought tohis attention an unintended consequence of his loan: farmerswere using these low-interest loans to invest in clearing adja-cent forested area so they can extend their property underagricultural production rather than using the funds to inten-sify production on existing plots, as lenders intended.

To deter illegal encroachments into the forests, the Bankinstalled a monitoring system whereby each loan applicantmust fill out a two-page environmental compliance form,which is reviewed by local officials, then by the Ministry of En-vironment, and finally by the Bank task manager. Loans aredenied to farmers who acknowledge that they will use thefunds to clear trees on public land. Any closer supervision, forexample, actually monitoring borrowers’ activities, is not fea-sible, Ted said. As it is, when he travels to the country—once

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every three months—his agenda is packed with meetings andcommitments: “I may look into the files [collected in the cap-ital city] and see one or two applications rejected, and for me,that’s a measure that someone [in the ministry] is paying at-tention. Otherwise, there’s no way for me to know what’s goingon—I have to go on faith. Look, there are so many compo-nents to this project. I bring a team with me and we look intoeach component maybe twice in the year, but we can’t possiblylook over everything in one week.”

Ted says he can barely talk to all the necessary officialsduring his visits to the capital, let alone do spot checks in thecountryside. Most of his time is spent trying to settle technicalproblems having to do with delays in construction, or incor-rectly ordered supplies, or any number of routine problemsand minidisasters that would bog down the smooth imple-mentation of a massive development scheme. This is, after all,a $-million loan shared with the InterAmerican Develop-ment Bank and the national government. There is plenty forTed to oversee in his quarterly visits: “If a farmer is using hisloan to cut down trees, well that’s not good, but realisticallywhat can I do? I can’t stop the whole loan disbursement, thatwould be a big headache for us all.”21

Many Bank staff members with whom I spoke made itclear that much rides on the successful completion of loan dis-bursements; the World Bank cannot afford to be slowed downby surveys or on-site inspections that reveal environmental de-bacles. Loan managers work under the constant pressure tomove loans swiftly, and environmentally degrading projectcomponents inevitably slip past these project gatekeepers.

One of the environmental specialists who joins the teamwith the loan managers on their country visits says these insti-tutional loopholes make his job quite stressful. Recently, thistechnician, whom we will call Raj, worked on a large loan pack-

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age that included a credit program similar to the one just de-scribed, although this program lent money to individual in-dustrial entrepreneurs rather than farmers. As part of a largein-house team hired to focus solely on environmental assess-ment, Raj found himself constrained by the institutional normsof project support: “I’m working on a loan in which we’reoffering credit to small industrial firms. I’m supposed to assessthe environmental impact of a line of credit for thousands ofsmall entrepreneurs. Well, believe me, it’s not so easy to patrolsuch projects—it’s not possible to pursue every loan. I don’thave the resources to do a sample survey. Instead, I have tolook around for clues of people complying or not complyingwith our rules. But, who knows how individuals will use theircredit, maybe for good or for bad. . . . An environmental as-sessment in these cases is fairly meaningless, yet required.”22

Although employed by the regional technical units to in-dependently evaluate ongoing projects, Raj and his colleagueslack the time, resources, and institutional support to make astudious analysis; instead, they are left with highly fungible,anecdotal evidence, some of which could satisfy or anger theiremployers, depending on which anecdotes they choose to uti-lize. Without sufficient information to challenge the validity ofprojects, environmental specialists inside the Bank have nochoice but to affirm project success. In other words, faced withan inability to ask basic questions and gather adequate dataduring seasonal whirlwind country tours, staff are left with thechoice of either demanding more money and time—to thedisapproval of their superiors and colleagues—or merely nod-ding affirmatively. Forced to choose their battles, staff typicallychoose the latter.

But this freedom to choose is really beside the point. Moretime, bigger teams of experts, and more money will never tacklethe fundamental concern of mitigating the negative effects of a

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multimillion-dollar investment because project decision mak-ing occurs within a temporal milieu dictated by more sub-stantial political-economic concerns. The amount of time al-located for research, assessment, and monitoring of Bankprojects is largely determined by the worries, pressures, andthreats coming from the private firms that help finance theproject (alongside the Bank) or build the dam and run thepower plant (with the borrowing government as a minorityinterest). These multinational firms invariably want the proj-ect to start yesterday, and they want to start making money onit now. Bidders on Bank projects will pull out if they do notsee an attractive rate of return on their investment due to de-lays, added costs, and stipulations. The turnover time of cap-ital requires a speed that not even adrenaline-rushing Bankexperts can keep up with. The result is not that no environ-mental assessment or monitoring is done, but rather, that atype of assessment is done that becomes the protocol fortransnational development professionals, NGOs, and govern-mental agencies complying with World Bank conditions. Thisprotocol is shaped by the rhythms and parameters set by theBank in conjunction with its corporate investment partners,rather than in conjunction with its expert hydrologists and soilchemists.

The Knowledge Hierarchy

World Bank staff are also constrained by the Bank’s informa-tion flow structure in which policy directives typically ignorecontradictory findings from the field. In the Bank, informa-tion flows through the corridors of Bank hierarchy downwardto the rank and file.23 Few decisions are made by those at thebottom, and Bank staff learn to be careful with what informa-

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tion they choose to send up. One learns quickly what data andanalysis please management and what will either be sent back,ignored, or heavily edited. Staff expend a tremendous amountof stressful energy trying to anticipate their superiors’ re-sponses to their draft reports.

One Bank economist discussed his experience, first as ayoung professional (called YPs) producing research reports fordifferent regional departments and then as an analyst workingon his own project. He explained that “most decisions are madefrom above, and projects just follow the framework.”24 As aproject analyst, he is asked to produce reports that offer evi-dence to substantiate policy claims. “I was asked to do an envi-ronmental costing of future subsidies. But, what data could Icome up with? My boss told me to try anything, so the only en-vironmental data set I could find was on soil leaching. I had toplay with it until I could come up with something. What couldI know sitting in headquarters about this? But that’s what I wastold to do. There’s great pressure to come up with something,just so you and especially your boss, don’t come up empty-handed. When I first came here, I’d protest about how unrea-sonable these tasks were; but now I realize it’s just a crazy partof this place.”

An environmental unit economist offered another ex-ample, noting: “When the authors of WDR ’ [The highly in-fluential World Development Report that featured the en-vironment] were drafting the report, they called me asking forexamples of ‘win-win’ strategies in my work. What could I say?None exists in that pure form; there are tradeoffs, not ‘win-wins.’ But they want to see a world of win-wins, based on arti-cles of faith, not fact. I wanted to contribute because WDRs areimportant in the Bank, [because] task managers read [them]to find philosophical justifications for their latest round of

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projects. But they didn’t want to hear about how things reallyare, or what I find in my work.”

Some observers note that these influential reports read asif they were sculpted by a Madison Avenue PR firm, full of im-pressive graphs and sidebars but rarely rooted in what they de-sire to be known for—serious scholarship.25 After a few mis-sions with the World Bank, a young economist said that onelearns quickly what must go into a report and what must not.“It’s hard to deviate from it. This is especially true with thisgreening thing. I personally think it’s absurd to make the linkbetween devaluing currency [part of structural adjustmentpolicy] and environmental issues, as there are so many inter-vening factors. But that’s the policy that’s being promoted,that’s what I’ve been told to find data on, and it’s hard to thinkotherwise.”

This hierarchical relationship makes it difficult for staff

to produce what the Bank’s recent chief economist calls “seri-ous scholarly research.” Referring to the high-profile WorldDevelopment Report series, Nicholas Stern, Oxford economicsprofessor and former World Bank chief economist and seniorvice president (–), wrote,“many of the numbers comefrom highly dubious sources or have been constructed in wayswhich leave one skeptical as to whether they can be helpfullyused” (Stern and Ferreira ). Stern argues that despite itssupreme ability to gather and analyze data, the Bank’s work isneither innovative nor scholarly. Stern finds that the Bank’s“documentation has fallen far short of that which would be ac-ceptable in a scholarly publication” (Stern and Ferreira ).Why is this so? According to Stern: “Researchers are not free tofollow intellectual inspiration. They are under constraints ofdesignated priorities. . . . Further, there is the strong hierarchyand an atmosphere much more deferential than would be

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found in universities. Among researchers there is a consider-able concern with what superiors will think of conclusionsreached” (Stern and Ferreira , vol. , p. ).

Knowledge is a highly political, cultural, social, histori-cal, and economic phenomenon, deeply reflective of the con-ditions in which it is produced (Haraway ; Hess ;Shapin ). Whenever we engage in a debate as to what is“bad science,” we often neglect to scrutinize that which we as-sume to be, in the world’s scientific hierarchy, the good. We tooquickly forget that the supposedly “civilized and sophisti-cated” European scientists of just a few years ago were provingthrough science the existence of a “Jewish race” with its smallerinadequate brains, an “African race” with genetic shortcom-ings, and so on, ideas published in the premier journals andtaught at the most enlightened universities in Europe (Beck-with ). Indeed, our premier academic disciplines—fromeconomics to anthropology to forestry—were born within thebloody frontiers of Europe’s colonial empires, which desper-ately needed experts and expert science to explicate the per-ceived inferiority of colonial populations, their natural ten-dencies to degrade and destroy, and their supposedly intrinsicneeds for Europe’s civilizing support (Grove ; Moore ;Stoler and Cooper ; Stoler ). In other words, science isalways produced within and not outside of history, so we cannever assume that it is objective and impartial, with discover-ies emerging from a pure environment untainted by social in-fluence. We should be equally careful to scrutinize the sciencethat comes out of Harvard, the World Bank, or a developmentresearch institute in Botswana.

In observing the ways in which knowledge is producedby the World Bank and its counterparts, it does not serve uswell to adopt the sentiment of some Bank staff members who

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feel like the neglected stepchild of serious scholarship, pro-duced at their very own alma maters of Oxford, Cambridge,and the Ivy Leagues. After all, many of the experts who work atthe World Bank, uncomfortable with the quality of the sciencethey produce, base their assumptions, models, worldviews,and hypotheses on what they learned from their mentors atelite universities. Moreover, much of the work produced underthe Bank’s auspices plays a crucial role in Oxford, Yale, andCambridge, as well as in New Delhi and Ouagadougou, in cre-ating consensus around specific elite ideas and practices. Thepoint here is not to castigate the Bank for its deeply flawed sci-entific production process, even though, of the hundreds ofstudies produced by the Bank every year, all roads of inquiryhappen to lead back to the Bank’s latest policy stance. Instead,we should learn about the knowledge production process it-self, in situ, questioning why it is treated as truth and expertiseand asking what larger project such faith in global knowledgeserves (Jasanoff ). When the Bank claims that its globalauthority and comparative advantage are based on its ability toproduce universal knowledge and global expertise, it is impor-tant to then try to understand what this knowledge is based onand why it is so important for the Bank’s legitimacy and sur-vival. Scholars and economists who demand that the Bank havehigher standards for knowledge production only reinforce theassumption that objective and all-encompassing knowledgecan be and is produced. Believing that the Bank needs only totry harder is a stance that lacks a historical and reflexive per-spective on knowledge production in general, and on these in-stitutions in particular, ignoring such questions as knowledgefor whom, knowledge for what, knowledge backed by whom,and knowledge that silences what alternatives (Fairhead andLeach ; Foucault ; Haraway ; Mitchell ).

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Narcissus Redux?

Many Bank publications, in addition to the influential WorldDevelopment Reports, suffer from the problem of dubious sci-entific claims making. In recent years, the Bank’s African envi-ronmental unit has produced some important publications,but these works often seem to be in debate with themselves,faithfully avoiding current scholarship and external politicaldebates. Crisis and Opportunity: Environment and Developmentin Africa (Falloux ) is a lengthy book written by seniorBank officials that at first glance promises to be an analysis ofthe complexities of Africa’s environmental troubles. In realityit is a self-referential institutional diary of how the Bank per-suades government policy elites to adopt its policy of writingNational Environmental Action Plans (NEAPs) as a precondi-tion for Bank loans.

The NEAPs, high-profile documents that summarize anation’s plan to tackle national environmental problems, mustbe drafted by borrowing governments with public participa-tion. Many Bank staff who have worked on NEAPs have dis-missed their content, echoing what one Bank NEAP expert ex-claimed to me, that “most NEAPs are a joke.”26 They are mostlywritten by Bank staff members, or by an obliging governmentofficial, reflective of the latest Bank policy (down to the word)and absent of inputs from cross sections of society.27 SinceNEAPs are required for International Development Assistance(IDA) countries (which includes most of Africa) applying forloan disbursement, and since most actors within the Bank andin client countries do not take them seriously, NEAPs havebeen recycled from political speeches and from project wishlists generated by Bank staff.28 In many African countries,NEAPs were written by “favorite sons” of the environmental

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minister and were not, as Bank guidelines require, the result ofserious consultations with all sectors of society.29 (Of course,how common is serious consultation to the production of gov-ernment reports in general?)

For instance, two books written by one of the African divisions, the above-mentioned Crisis and Opportunity andCleaver’s and Schreiber’s Reversing the Spiral: The Population,Agriculture, and Environment Nexus in Sub-Saharan Africa(), are full of airy proclamations, offering up an image ofAfrica as it is reflected in the looking glass of World Bank poli-cies. Distinctions over time and space hardly exist; benchmarkscholarship is ignored; historical events are confined to a se-lective Bank policy timeline. Nonetheless, Bank reports be-come an important source of authority on Africa’s environ-ment and are subsequently cited in other Bank reports, as wellas in numerous studies of Africa that depend on Bank refer-ences for documentation. Interestingly, if one works back-wards and looks into the data used to support the claims madein these documents, one finds that similarly produced Bankmaterials were their sources. Although Crisis and Opportunityfeatures approximately ninety citations in its bibliography, al-most percent refer to Bank publications and a full per-cent can be attributed to individuals and organizations affili-ated with, or financed by, the World Bank. This is true of manyof the Bank’s major reports on the African continent, all ofwhich are equally self-referential.30 One internal documentdepends on another for its evidence and argumentation, andin this way, an internal body of knowledge is introduced andthen reinforced.31 (Of course, this is not too different fromsome subfields within academic disciplines.)

I asked a number of Bank staffers why it is that Bank re-ports, studies, and books never begin with a standard of the

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academy, an academic literature review of the latest scholarlydebates and controversies, nor include many scholarly refer-ences in their bibliographies. One suggested that such tasks, rou-tine within the academic community, are too time-consuming,expensive, and beside the point for Bank staff. A second saidthat such a culture of scholarship at the Bank is strictly pro-hibited. A third official thought it naive that I would even putBank research and reports in the same category of scholarship.Instead, he suggested the Bank’s publications are more in therealm of spin: “Why does the Bank only cite itself? It’s like ask-ing why IBM doesn’t refer to the literature on computers.When they say that ‘IBM is going to conquer the world’ withits latest computers, they don’t need to explain or reference.They’re selling a product, and so are we.”32

It is fine to be dismissive of Bank information, except forthe fact that Bank expertise and knowledge have a tremendousimpact on policy makers and researchers around the world.Bank knowledge is a tactical technology whose power shouldnot be underestimated, whatever one’s interpretation of itstruth value. Despite their questionable history, NEAPs havebecome important gateway reports that define where in a na-tional economy the Bank should invest. Under the Bank’sprodding, the idea of the environment in the world of devel-opment has been stretched to mean something far beyondwhat a typical ecological conservationist (and certainly an old-fashioned banker) means when she or he defines the term.

Today, the Bank’s green neoliberal approach pushes gov-ernment officials—and therefore environmental NGOs, de-velopment consultants, and university scholars—to rethinkthe way they perceive and manage forestry, mining, agricul-ture, and aquaculture projects, as well as municipal water sup-plies and eco-tourism and game parks. As we will see in subse-

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quent chapters, these Bank-driven eco-priorities are also trans-lated into the latest form of structural adjustment policy—“en-vironmental adjustment”—that compels borrowers to restruc-ture their regulatory institutions, reframe land reform andnatural resource use policies, and change tax and capital-flowlaws as preconditions for new Bank loans. Again, the point isnot to debate the relative truth value of Bank environmentalscience and compare it to a higher order of academic scholar-ship—after all, World Bank texts and data sets are crucial touniversity-based knowledge production, as are World Bankhigh-paying consultancy contracts. Rather, it is more useful toconsider how these truths and knowledge become constitutedinside the Bank; how they become codified into rules, policydirectives, and norms that travel outside of the Bank; and howand why certain aspects become authoritative, however briefly,around the world.

Maintaining Hierarchical Control

There’s a saying in the Bank, that the job is hard onyour rear end: in the office, it gets kicked; on theroad, it gets licked.33

The World Bank is a hierarchical institution, and the internalcontrols over this set-up, according to Bank staff, influencesthe nature of their intellectual work. The Bank’s internal au-thority structure has an impact on more than just the selectionof research questions; it also affects who is hired to do re-search, how consultants are used, who gets promoted and whogets left behind, whose analysis is legitimated, and whose ismarginalized. There is an explicit link between knowledgeproduction and career development or, put more directly,what types of research and analysis can get you in trouble.

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At the Bank, full-time professionals are hired throughtwo narrow openings. One is the World Bank’s Young Profes-sionals (YP) program, which recruits top candidates from theworld’s most elite universities; and the other is through mid-career appointments. After competing within a massive poolof highly qualified candidates from throughout the world, thehandful of successful YPs go through a trial period duringwhich they are taught the tools of the trade in a number of dif-ferent positions across the Bank. After a year or two, a managerrecommends that the trainee receive permanent status; if nomanager wants to hire the YP, she or he is released. As gradu-ates of the YP program have explained to me, new hires learnearly on how the system works: energetic and happily en-sconced in their new environs, YPs learn first and foremosthow best to comply with their superiors.34

Although many at first find the institutional norms andculture disconcerting, most YPs hang on to become long-termBank staff. Social scientists who choose to leave the Bank oftendo so out of concern that they are rapidly becoming ill qualifiedto compete on the academic or professional job market. Theanalytical work conducted at the Bank, especially by staff intheir first five years, does not count for much in the non-Bankworld of scholarship. Bank reports are, as one senior econo-mist put it, “primarily vehicles for selling projects.” By contrast,experienced midcareer appointees learn in their first officialmeeting that whatever respect they may have earned in theirprevious academic or professional careers is immediately over-shadowed within the highly structured Bank hierarchy. Oneclimbs methodically through the Bank system, moving gradu-ally up the patronage ladder through loyalty and compliance,not “through the side door.”As a consequence, midcareer hires“can’t accomplish much inside, they’re hardly ever promotedand tend to leave at the same stratum which they entered.”35

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A third entryway for researchers and analysts is muchless restricted. It is the competitive market of consultants,many of whose careers involve shuttling back and forth amonginternational development agencies. This group, with homes(and mortgages) in the Washington, D.C., area, is quite vul-nerable to red pen marks in the margins of their reports. Bankconsultants survive with “just-in-time” flexible work habits; bythe nature of the job, they are enthusiastically available andloyal to Bank task managers. Consequently, task managers viewthe consultant reserve army and their research reports as a use-ful vehicle for getting their inner thoughts scripted for them.36

Through its employment and training practices, the Bankleaves its institutional markings on its workforce, rewardingthe “champions” and dismissing the “contrarians.” In this way,upper management sees its policy prerogatives confirmed, trans-lated, magnified, legitimated, and disseminated.

An Anthropologist among the Economists

Sociologists and anthropologists at the Bank have to adapt to the dominant culture, one where neoclassical economics isthe sole language of communication and rationality. Every-thing one sees and understands must be explained in terms ofAmerican-style economics. Many sociologists and anthropol-ogists at the Bank have shifted from academic positions at uni-versities; this is a tremendous epistemological leap that requiressome serious professional retooling, if not soul-searching.

One senior anthropologist whom I interviewed was work-ing on a politically charged topic: the social and environmen-tal aspects of population resettlement in China. In his attemptsto analyze and “put a value on” the unvalued aspects of resettle-ment in a country that, until recently, has been closed off to

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most Western researchers, he conceded, “It’s quite difficult tomeasure value in this respect, as it has to be based on localneeds.” Placing an economic value on the intangibles runscounter to his field of training, which recognizes that notionsof land, place, and community are deeply embedded in reli-gious, kinship, and other political and cultural practices—practices that include markets but not exclusively determinedby them.37 His assignment, however, forces him to overlookthese complex debates. He is paid to figure out the most effi-

cient way to reduce the potentially devastating social and envi-ronmental effects of new Bank investments in China and tocalculate an appropriate level of compensation for dispos-sessed communities. China is the Bank’s largest borrower anddebtor and the country where the Bank hopes to expand dra-matically over the next decade. The Bank lends billions of dol-lars to China for large infrastructural transport, energy, andwater projects, all of which inevitably displace populationsand submerge or cut through forests, grasslands, villages, andsmall cities.

Anthropologists, according to the norms of the disci-pline, are supposed to develop empathy for the subject’s cul-ture and interpret meaning based on the local context. (Ofcourse, since the discipline emerged from the colonial task ofstudying and codifying the “native” for the purpose of colonialsubjugation, empathy is not the accurate sentiment to describeearly anthropologists [Cohn ; Hymes ].) But what if,as is the case the world over, communities do not want to moveor choose not to accept the terms of compensation for the de-struction of their ancestral land, burial sites, and productiveterritories? On the rare occasion that they are asked, thoseabout to be ousted by development projects typically choosenot to move or receive the monetary compensation that is

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offered (Cernea and Guggenheim ; Fox and Thorne ;McCully ; Thukral ). Hence, this anthropologist’s jobis a difficult one, to understand the conditions and desires oflocal communities that find themselves living smack in themiddle of someone else’s development ambition. Under Bankworking conditions, however, it is physically impossible, andinstitutionally inadvisable, for this anthropologist to under-stand or develop empathy for people in fourteen provincesover weeklong visits. Listening could take years if not decades.Instead, he defers to the prevailing Bank culture that “what’sbest for the national economy is best for its people,” whateverdifferences of opinion people might have. This, of course, isnot the job for an anthropological scholar, but for a claims ad-juster. Because Bank resettlement has become a highly con-tentious issue, Bank anthropologists must come up with alter-native tracts of land for the displaced, an alternate livelihoodscheme for displaced communities, and, as Bank staff see it, theappropriate carrots and sticks for state bureaucrats. Thanks inpart to the incorporation of proficient anthropologists, theBank is able to demand that borrowers follow its guidelines.

But what about the reliability of such development sci-ence? After much external criticism of Bank resettlement activ-ities, and prodded by a retiring Bank sociologist, an in-housereview of resettlement projects (within the time frame of –) was conducted. The study found, as critics had charged, thatBank resettlement work was abysmal and based on shoddy datacollection and analysis (Cernea and Guggenheim ; Foxand Thorne ). Almost percent of the World Bank proj-ects included in the study had failed to include baseline popu-lation surveys; less than percent actually included a budgetto finance resettlement and rehabilitation; and less than one-quarter included resettlement specialists. Moreover, the inter-

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nal review task force revealed that the official numbers frominternal Bank reports underreported by almost percent thenumbers of people displaced by Bank projects. (Since mostproject reports were prepared without baseline studies, thereal numbers of negatively affected people may well have beensubstantially higher.)38

The problem here lies at the crossroads of knowledgeproduction and use. For Bank loan managers, institutionalprocedures require that loans be conceived, packaged, and soldto the Bank’s executive directors and the finance ministers ofborrowing countries in a very short time period, sometimeswithin twenty-four months. Thousands of pages on the envi-ronmental, legal, economic, procurement, and technical as-pects of the loan must be reduced to a short summary for pres-entation to the Bank’s executive directors, who will make thefinal approval. Meetings with borrowers in Caracas or Delhiare swift and to the point; one visit may include meetings withhigh-level finance, legal, and procurement officials, with occa-sional spot site investigations by project designers and otherspecialists, whose job is to assess the possible costs and benefitsof a proposed loan. In China, our senior anthropologist visitsfourteen provinces in thirty months to do his requisite assess-ments. He readily admits he has shed the pristine cloth of theacademy to become a global development specialist, as this ap-proach clearly would not be acceptable as anthropology today.But as development knowledge, it is, wherever the Bank per-forms its work. The dimension he does not discuss, however, isthat as this becomes the big business of development, it drawsin hundreds of applied and development anthropologists as itshired practitioners. Thus the type of anthropology being pro-duced for the World Bank becomes a strong influence on thetrajectory of anthropology scholarship, writ large.39

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Creating Consent

One of the more contentious midcareer hires has been Her-man Daly. In the following excerpted interview he explainssome of the constraints he experienced working at the Bank.With an international reputation as a founder of the field ofenvironmental economics and a leading expert in cost-benefitanalysis, Daly was invited to work at the Bank as a midcareeristduring the s.40

I arrived precisely when the Bank was beginning toexpand its environmental resources. I was hired towork in the environmental unit within the LatinAmerican division. The team had two missions:first, we were to sign off on all Latin American proj-ects. Ideally, we tried to get in on projects as early aspossible. Now remember, this is big stuff: environ-mental auditors with veto power. This was quitenew for our Bank colleagues. Second, we were in-house consultants for projects; for this, we werewell funded and encouraged. The first task, how-ever, was not funded and was very much discour-aged. It was believed to be bad form to do “polic-ing” of other people’s projects. As it was, we wereonly able to audit based on what we found on paper,in reports, as there was no money appropriated forus to actually do an on-site inspection.

One of the first projects for me was a nuclearpower sector loan to Brazil. I looked over the eco-nomic calculations and noted that the benefits ofnuclear were not properly dealt with—not so muchthe costs, as in environmental costs, but simply the

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benefits, as in how the military would benefit fromthis power sector loan. Now, it was clear from theloan statements that the benefits were primarily forthe military [as the Brazilian government arguedthat Argentina had nuclear weapons]; so it seemedobvious to me to disclose what the benefits were ina preparation report. But no one wanted to bring itup; it was only discussed as a positive power proj-ect. When I did so, I was severely reprimanded bymy superiors. As it was, Brazil had one nuclearplant, which was called “lightning bug” because itwould only rarely flash on, yet they wanted twomore at the same site. The Bank’s cost-benefit analy-sis was seriously flawed. As the loans would havebeen heavily subsidized by liability insurance, itseemed that all these issues needed to be consid-ered, but weren’t.

Right after I wrote my short note on the flawedanalysis, the Bank’s central economic unit was draw-ing up a report on funding nuclear power in gen-eral and asked me to submit my note to them,which I did. When the central unit report wasdrawn up, the regional economic unit from LatinAmerica was furious. My loyalty to the region andto the boss was the main problem. Ultimately, thecentral report was used against the Latin Americanregion’s power loan, and my job was immediatelythreatened. Now, I was considered an expert incost-benefit analysis, I wrote and taught on it fortwenty years, so I was ready to defend my work,but, of course, that wasn’t the issue here. The realissue was the fact that I allowed my notes to get into

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a central report without the regional boss’s permis-sion. Hence, my job was at stake for a bureaucraticact. Since I was too high profile to be fired, and . . .I let it be known that it might not play well in thenewspapers, I was allowed to keep my job. But I, andthe whole team, was forced to move out of Opera-tions where all the action is, over to the Center, todo policy research and assessment. In other words,we were sandbagged.

Herman Daly’s most negative experience at the Bank waswith censorship: he had a number of run-ins with his superi-ors related to his published and unpublished articles, speeches,memos, and research. On one occasion, Daly was asked to de-bate the distinguished conservative economist, Jagdish Bhag-wati, in the pages of Scientific American (Bhagwati ; Daly). The topic was NAFTA from an ecological economicsperspective, and Daly was asked to write on the problems withNAFTA. His article was published on the eve of the U.S. con-gressional vote on NAFTA, at a time when the World Bank’sMexico desk and senior management were lobbying Congressfor votes in support of NAFTA. When the piece was publishedas the cover story and widely distributed, the Bank’s Mexicostaff started a campaign to get Daly fired, accusing him of trea-son for breaking the fundamental rules of the Bank’s constitu-tion, which forbid the Bank from intervening in national pol-itics.41 Daly was amused by this accusation. In his view, it washis colleagues at the Mexico desk, feverishly absorbed in lob-bying Congress, who were the ones engaging in politics. Butthen Daly, unlike his accusers within the Bank, believed thateverything the Bank does is politics. “Restructuring the na-tional economy is not politics? Devaluing the Mexican peso is

Producing Green Science

not politics?” he asked. At other times, he had to clear his pub-lic speeches with the External Affairs Department, the in-house censors, and once, he was forbidden from participatingon a panel on environmental economics in Chile, and after ahumiliating protest was allowed to participate only with aBank staff escort.42

As one of the world’s most esteemed environmentaleconomists, Daly was hired by the Bank to offer his opinion onprojects, on general reports, on in-house processes. But toooften, his responses were considered too controversial for theBank, however respectable his work was considered outsidethe Bank. Daly explains:

The Bank considers itself the premier developmentbank, and they’re careful not to publish anythingwithout due consideration. Since the Bank pushesthe concept that affluence through development isgood for the environment, it’s not possible to makea peep about how this might not be true. A few ofus tried to get that point across in World Develop-ment Report, but they would not allow it—noteven a couple of pages. We even tried to publish a“minority opinion” as a separate document, withtwo Nobel prize winners as main contributors, butthe Bank’s censors in External Affairs wouldn’t ac-cept it. The Bank is a tough place to discuss differ-ent ideas.

In my day-to-day work, my job was to evaluateprojects for their environmental assessment. But, ifI ever found a project to be bad for environmentalreasons, the response would always be: “No need toput this on the table, there’s no reason to upset our

Producing Green Science

clients. Besides, if we don’t support it, then privateJapanese investors will fund it without any condi-tions.” The belief is that the Bank’s way is alwaysmore enlightened than private investors’, whichmight be true in some cases. But really, everyone isso eager to push loans, they’re not concerned aboutwhat private investors might do. It’s the same witharguments for structural adjustment loans: Whyare we offering loans for policy reforms, which tax-payers have to repay? Shouldn’t policy reforms comeabout through internal financing and political pro-cesses? This type of policy discussion could neveroccur at the Bank. No one would ever be allowed todo a cost-benefit analysis, for example, on Bankmacroeconomic policies.43

Between In-House Constraints and ExternalInstitutional Power

Despite the many in-house norms that constrain staff fromfreely expressing their opinions and perspectives, the cumula-tive effect of working at the World Bank is one of empower-ment. Bank staffers have unparalleled access to vital and priv-ileged information and are uniquely able to visit capital cities,call meetings with high- and low-level officials, sift throughgovernment materials, and have local or expatriate consultantsbrief them on details. In their interactions with officials in bor-rowing countries, they typically set the agenda, request infor-mation that can help them expedite the loan process, andframe the discussions in an orthodox neoclassical-economicsworldview. Most of all, it is important to remember that theseBank officials would not be visiting the capital city in the first

Producing Green Science

place if they were not selling a loan, discussing a policy imper-ative as a precondition to a loan, or renegotiating an outstand-ing debt. These asymmetric political-economic relationshipsand realities profoundly affect the knowledge production pro-cess. Wherever Bank staff go, they have inordinate power in thesocial relations they establish, even if they often feel frustratedby the limits imposed on them by their superiors or by thestubbornness of borrowers who do not want to conduct thebusiness of development in World Bank style.

An insightful environmental technician working for theBank in Asia explained to me the dilemma he faces in his work,in wanting to make the Bank a more environmentally and cul-turally sensitive place yet realizing the difficulty in imaginingsuch a possibility given the institution’s structural imperatives.“We run our missions every two months to South Asia, bop-ping them on the head with our environmental programs. Weare quite persistent every time, and yet they don’t want any ofit. . . . Sri Lanka gives in, but Bangladesh says, ‘No, thank you,we want to focus on public health and education; environmentisn’t a priority for our borrowing.’ But ours is a supply-deter-mined agenda, and very prescriptive. There’s no culture herefor listening; we just go to countries and sell, sell, sell until theborrowers cave in.”44

On another occasion, he expressed his frustration morephilosophically: “You and I may say that our World Develop-ment Reports are BS. But I go to Sri Lanka and officials therequote from the latest report, word for word. That’s music toour ears.” He continued: “Once upon a time, ‘development’and ‘environment’ contradicted each other. Now, development[has] co-opted environment and discursively they have grownto complement each other.” In the meantime, he and his col-leagues have written a series of documents on the region’s en-

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vironmental woes that include a strong plan of action. In eachcase, the plan introduces World Bank policies and projects, an-alytic frameworks and concepts of environmentally sustain-able development as the vehicle for reversing these trends. TheBank highlights successful local cases where people are man-aging, for example, their flood plains sustainably. But thesecases are rarely interpreted within the complex social reality inwhich they unfold, and the Bank’s role never becomes one ofsupporting these local endeavors as they exist. Rather, these“best practices” cases are plucked from context and resituatedwithin the Bank’s ambitious and multi-tiered action plans.Hence, in Bangladesh, delta flood management Bank-style be-comes an expansive plan requiring substantial loans and im-ported expert technical assistance—the “common sense” al-ternative to what the Bank describes as endemic flood andfamine cycles. Because the World Bank is also Bangladesh’sdebt manager, delta management becomes one of the manystrategies for alleviating debt and stimulating national eco-nomic growth through the earning of foreign exchange.45 Thequaint success story of locals protecting their delta becomes ajustification for a multimillion-dollar Bank project, distortingthis particular meaning of “success.”

Over the years, in fact, this Bank official has seen his port-folio of projects in South Asia grow, however much he may bedissatisfied with the priorities and procedures. Bank-style envi-ronmentalism is firmly rooted in the Bank’s complementarypolicies of capital-intensive problem solving, state restructur-ing, market expansionism, and public-sector privatization. Inpractice, during the s, environmentalism and neoliberalismhave coevolved to become inseparable. As Bank staffers learn onthe job, Bank-style environmentalism begins to gain credenceand spread with legitimacy once they find its “value-adding”op-portunity within projects that promote capital accumulation.

Producing Green Science

Conclusion

Despite the enormous power and global reach the World Bankhas today, relatively little in-depth debate exists on its produc-tion of knowledge.46 A top scholar on East Asian economies,Alice Amsden, has engaged the Bank in a constructive critiqueof the quality of its research and writes, in utter exhaustion,that it is “like a small firm confronting a multinational enter-prise, or a guerrilla army engaging a nuclear power” (Amsden, p. ). Supported by a small cluster of reputable econo-mists, Amsden reviewed the scholarship of Bank publicationson the so-called East Asian miracle development model, theideological pillar of the Bank’s “market friendly” policy onclient states. She writes: “A ‘veil of money’ keeps inquisitivereaders from understanding the actually existing world of de-velopment. The veil comes in the form of expensive ‘back-ground papers’ by consultants, hand-picked and hired by theBank, who collaborate with Bank insiders and personally in-terpret what they believe happened . . . based, in some cases,on extensive bibliographical references mainly to their ownwork. Most experts outside immediate Bank circles . . . arerarely cited, if at all. . . . The failure to recognize classic worksin the debate and cite the original source—‘to get the copy-right’—means that all information to the reader is filtered”(Amsden , p. ).

Amsden finds that since the Bank perpetually fails to sci-entifically prove its conclusions, its policy justifications are“quintessentially political and ideological” (p. ). What makesthe World Bank so powerful? According to Amsden, it has noreal rival. The regional development banks and UN agencieswith much smaller budgets fall over themselves to cooperatewith the Bank, anxious to get a piece of the action from thelarge loans that may follow.

Producing Green Science

Political scientist Robert Wade, a veteran of Bank re-search, believes that the Bank’s legitimacy in the global mar-ketplace of ideas and commerce depends on the authority ofits research and policies. “Like the Vatican, and for similar rea-sons, it cannot afford to admit fallibility.” It cannot admit itsresearch weaknesses because financial markets demand the il-lusion of certainty, an illusion that influences knowledge pro-duction. Moreover, World Bank staff members construct theirversion of environmentalism in terms of a “self-reinforcingcongruence” with “the values of the owners and managers offinancial capital,” the Bank’s ultimate provider (Wade b,pp. –).

In spite of the Bank’s power and authority in support ofits own style of environmentalism, it remains a Sisyphean featto maintain investors’ confidence in the light of real-worldproject debacles, which are easily documented by outsidersand difficult for the Bank to conceal. To succeed, the WorldBank must strictly monitor scientific norms and staff beha-vior. How else could it be that a nine-thousand-person organ-ization, half of whom are high-level professionals, producinghundreds of public and internal documents and working in-plus countries, can produce a singular analysis on thecomplexity of the human condition?

In sum, the Bank wields tremendous power, especially inthe realm of knowledge production. Within the Bank, knowl-edge production is carefully controlled and represents an im-portant arena of social control. When we look inside PolicyResearch, the Environment Department, the regional environ-mental units, and the country departments, we find that datacollection and analysis, report writing, editing, and the nail-biting process of getting approval from one’s superiors (andone’s superiors’ superiors) is less a process of discovery, cre-

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ativity, and refutation than one of manufacturing consent.From hiring practices, to hierarchical pressures, to funding de-cisions for research, to the way information flows are manipu-lated internally and externally, the assembly line of knowledgeproduction is studded with cultural practices of social controlas well as incorporation and hegemony-building.

Ideologically derived findings help Bank staff sell theBank’s version of environmentally sustainable development tothe outside world, with low-interest loans and loan guaranteesas the carrots. In the process, the Bank’s new green sciencespreads and becomes legitimated and reproduced in manyvenues, from the (U.S.) National Academy of Science, to theprofessional guidelines used by ministries of the environmentin borrower countries, to the policy reports written by inter-national NGOs. The Bank’s scientific research on the environ-ment not only supports the reproduction of its own institu-tions (of control, knowledge, and finance), but it also exerts itspower outside of World Bank headquarters in scientific andprofessional circles.

Assumptions that environmental improvement comesonly through capitalist modernization are so deeply entrenchedin these practices that few stop to ask, Why development proj-ects? Why the World Bank and its development apparatusesthat require expensive and inappropriate inputs from North-ern capital good sectors? Can environmental improvementever be conceived of as a project of “no intervention” or oflocal practices that do not require Bank capital and econo-mistic advice?

The greening of the Bank has only intensified the colo-nial gaze with which the North views the South, and which hasrecently come to rest on the environment and those who de-pend on it most directly as a source of sustenance, broadly

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defined. The fate of the project of development depends on it.Development experts continually ask how local environmentsand populations can accommodate another Bank interven-tion. The givens in all of these inquiries are the centrality of theWorld Bank, the development project, and capitalist interven-tion in the pursuit of solutions to the world’s problems, downto the smallest of worries of not enough firewood or potablewater. Although the heavy hand of Bank headquarters intimi-dates Bank staff and consultants into producing a consensuson this approach to the environment, its heavy hand is not theonly or even the main determining factor. Rather it is the inter-play between “big D,” the project of development, and “little d,”uneven capitalist development—always changing and alwaysgenerating the “new,” but always overlapping with older re-gimes of power/knowledge and capital accumulation—thatdefines what counts as nature and sustainable development(Hart ).

Producing Green Science

IVThe Birth of a Discipline:Producing EnvironmentalKnowledge for the World

n Christmas Day in , five thousand villagersthreatened by forced resettlement and their sup-porters set off on a “long march” to a dam site in

India’s Narmada River Valley, hoping to close downthe Sardar Sarovar Dam construction project (Baviskar ;McCully ; Udall ). Eight days into their walk, policeblocked their passage, many were beaten, were arrested,and began a hunger fast on the side of the road. Twenty-onedays later, with the local police and the national governmentrefusing to budge, the dam’s financier in Washington, D.C.—the World Bank—agreed to commission its first-ever inde-pendent review panel (later known as the Morse Commis-sion). Although the marchers never arrived at the dam site justa few miles away, they reached a more significant site of con-testation, the heart of the World Bank, and helped fuel a grow-

ing transnational movement to challenge the legitimacy of thispowerful global institution. This movement has focused inpart on the Bank’s knowledge-production practices.

The deputy chairman of the Bank’s independent reviewpanel, Canadian jurist Thomas Berger, described his experienceas he began to investigate the Bank’s knowledge-productionpractices: “When we first arrived in New Delhi, we had localhydrologists presenting us papers that showed that drinkingwater would never get to the two drought-prone regions. Wehad reports that showed whole fisheries would be lost. Scien-tists came forward with testimony that the irrigation schemeswouldn’t work. Our team hydrologist found fifteen-year-oldengineering reports buried in Bank file cabinets that said theseschemes weren’t feasible. None of this was made available to usby the Bank. In all the information made available to us by theBank, all of the downstream consequences were omitted.”1

For Berger, the contrast between the scientific data he re-ceived from the Bank to do his evaluation and the evidencegiven to him by people in India was shocking. “People wouldstand outside my hotel door in Delhi ready to hand over yetanother report. Retired civil servants showed us their studies,community members spoke up—it became an incredible ex-change of information and ideas.” Yet none of this free ex-change occurred between the independent review panel andthe Bank staff assigned to it by the Bank’s president.

Confronted with the panel’s report and the social pres-sure that brought it about, the Bank’s executive directors hadlittle choice but to vote to pull out of the project.2 This episodewas important not only to social activists around the world,who could now see their potential power, but for the WorldBank itself. The “Narmada effect,” as it has come to be called,is invoked regularly inside the Bank and reminds staff that the

The Birth of a Discipline

Bank must “reform or die.”3 In , the first significant actionof the incoming Bank president James Wolfensohn was to can-cel a large dam in Nepal, Arun , because of claims that the fea-sibility studies failed to account for the likelihood of extremelynegative ecological and social effects. He did so before a fullhearing or, more important, before a social protest movementcould fully ignite on the heels of the Narmada embarrass-ment.4 Wolfensohn’s move sent chilling reverberations throughWorld Bank headquarters, putting staff on alert that any proj-ect without rigorous scientific support could evaporate undersocial movement pressure or presidential fiat. As a result, theWorld Bank started doing business differently. As Bank staff areinstructed in staff training seminars on environmental assess-ment in Washington, D.C.: “Don’t get zapped by the Narmadaeffect, do your EIAs (environmental impact assessments)!”5

In this context, and at the suggestion of a senior environ-mental advisor at the World Bank, I traveled to the Lao People’sDemocratic Republic (Laos) to observe the newly reformedWorld Bank in action. Under the combined force of the Nar-mada and Arun effects, he explained, I would find that Bankprojects now followed a new scientific protocol with environ-mental and social standards. These changes are reflected in oneof its biggest Mekong River investments—the Nam Theun

Dam project.6

Indeed, Nam Theun has become an effective litmus testfor the Bank’s ability to respond to its critics. The project, fromthe beginning, was not merely a hydroelectric dam project, asit would have been designed by the pregreen World Bank ofthe s, but a national project that will consume most of thegovernment’s resources to finance a wide range of compo-nents, including new regimes of law, regulation, and manage-ment of both the country’s natural resources (its rivers, min-

The Birth of a Discipline

erals, forests, wildlife) and the people whose livelihood directlydepends on these natural resources (more than half of the coun-try’s population). As preconditions for this dam project, na-tional laws were rewritten, government agencies were restruc-tured, and the use of the government’s budget was redefined.

Because Laos is one of the most heavily indebted coun-tries in the world, owing most of its external debt to the WorldBank and its colleague the Asian Development Bank (ADB), itscreditors have taken over the traditional role of the govern-ment by financing these institutional changes and hiring North-ern consultants to do the work. Laos’s creditors are introduc-ing a new scientific protocol into the country, one that hasbegun to permeate three prominent spheres of Lao society: thecapital-intensive, national project of development; new na-tional regimes of law and regulation; and retooled governmentagencies, especially the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry(more than half of Laos is forested) and the government’s pri-mary environmental agency, STEA. This new scientific proto-col and milieu are the focus of this chapter.

Whereas World Bank officials in the s insisted that astrong environmental stance would shrink worldwide demandfor its capital and services, today the Bank finds itself in the en-viable position of having an expanding loan portfolio and aglobally adopted environmental agenda, which it calls envi-ronmentally sustainable development. Simply put, the Bankhas transformed an antidevelopment environmentalist agendainto one that works in its favor in many of its borrowing coun-tries. To best understand the milieu in which the scientistshired for this agenda work, it is important to see the world notin simple developmentalist terms detached from the workingsof the global political economy, that is, a technical project ad-ministered by the “haves” transferring capital, knowledge, and

The Birth of a Discipline

technology to the “have nots.” The World Bank, as the primaryfinancier and designer of what we can call “the developmentworld,” is a more complex institution (Crush ; Escobar; McMichael ; Watts ; Young ). From this per-spective, the World Bank functions by borrowing capital froma global bond market (that it helped to create), lending it togovernments that are deemed in need, and then requiring thesegovernments to spend a substantial percentage of these loans toprocure goods and services from firms of the Big Five creditorcountries (George and Sabelli ; Kapur et al. ; WorldBank ). Sixty years of this asymmetric triangular relationamong the Bank, its borrowers, and Northern firms has leftborrowing countries highly in debt from their net capital trans-fer to the North. This bind gives the Bank a particular authoritywithin borrowing countries, which it has mobilized to restruc-ture a broad array of in-country institutions and social realmsaccording to its latest political rationality: neoliberalism. Thequestion posed here is: to what extent does the World Bank’spolitical economy of capitalist development affect, as well asget shaped by, its production of authoritative knowledge?

In answering this question, in this chapter I will invokeMichel Foucault’s arguments on relations of power, right, andtruth (Burchell ; Cooke and Kothari ; Foucault ;Rose ). Rather than pose the traditional question on powerand knowledge or power/knowledge (i.e., what discourse oftruth fixes limits on power?), which assumes that the exerciseof power is always repressive and negating, we can ask the al-ternative question posed by Foucault: what regimes of truthare endowed with potent effects that help generate the laws,shape subjectivities, and drive people to exercise power? Thatis, what enables the exercise of power through social bodiesrather than merely against them, compelling them to act and

The Birth of a Discipline

to act in ways defined in the process of “the production, accu-mulation, circulation, and functioning of a discourse” (Fou-cault )? It is useful to think about Foucault’s triangle ofpower, right, and truth in the context of how societal rules arewritten (or removed), rights bestowed (or denied), and truthsconstructed (or deemed illegitimate), and how these are gen-erated through the practices of many different types of actorsin the world we call “development.”

Although it appears that the World Bank is the newglobal sovereign prince, in fact, many networks of actors havejoined in the production of development knowledge and haveembraced the concepts of sustainability and sustainabilityrights. The focus here is on the knowledge-production processthat has become so inclusive and integral to large capital proj-ects. In today’s climate of vigilant social activism around WorldBank interventions, there cannot be an acceptable plan for in-vestment without a strong sense of the ecological and social.Since the World Bank cannot do the enormous task on its own(in Laos as well as in -plus other borrowing countries), it re-quires a growing network of translocal scientists, technocrats,NGOs, and empowered (or “responsibilized” [Rose ]) cit-izens to help generate the data and construct the discursivestrategies of sustainability. In this case, the production of truthentails the birth of new experts, new subjects, new natures, anda new disciplinary science of sustainable development, with-out which power could not be so fruitfully exercised.

Green Knowledge Production in Laos

Just as its latest self-proclamation as the global knowledge banksuggests (World Bank b, ), the World Bank is the sourcefor cutting-edge knowledge of global significance. Over the pastten years, the Bank has carved out its own green agenda, pro-

The Birth of a Discipline

ducing policies, financing, tools and data for an applied globalenvironmental science, training thousands of professionals inborrowing countries—including Laos—to implement and in-digenize versions of it.

Nam Theun (NT) represents the global flagship of theBank’s green incarnation, a model for other projects in theBank’s portfolio. At the heart of the project is a large dam toproduce hydroelectricity for Thailand, which—until its recenteconomic crisis—had been experiencing a period of sustained(albeit highly uneven) economic growth undergirded by rapidindustrialization. Associated with the dam, and reflecting theBank’s new concern with environmentally sustainable devel-opment, is a state-of-the-art suite of linked projects that in-cludes investments for a Forest Conservation and ManagementProject, Wildlife and Protected Areas Management Project, in-digenous peoples’ extractive reserves, irrigated and modern-ized agriculture with experimental farms, electricity and newroads, megafauna running corridors and eco-tourism, sus-tainable logging and tree plantations, and new housing settle-ments. To help understand the potential impacts of NT, a se-ries of detailed environmental and social assessment studieswere conducted. Because of the controversial nature of theBank’s large-scale projects, two independent evaluation teamswere set up to ensure that this project unfolds according to theBank’s new environmental directives: the International Advi-sory Group, which looks at large dams internationally, and thePanel of Experts, which looks at NT specifically. The WorldBank’s recent annual report expressed the uniqueness of its“Laos model” of sustainable development, explaining that “anunprecedented program of international oversight and localconsultation is accompanying environmental and social im-pact assessment studies” for Nam Theun (World Bank ).

Given the scope of the proposed project—costing more

The Birth of a Discipline

than the country’s annual budget and covering substantialterritory—and the small domestic professional class capableof meeting the scientific-technical demands (“standards”) ofmultilateral aid conditionalities, the Bank has allocated moneyto support a wide range of state-oriented activities related toNT, including state capacity and institution-building, a thor-ough review of government policies, and environmental lawreform. Because neither the World Bank nor the governmentof Laos has the in-house capabilities to study the feasibilityand social and environmental impacts of the proposed invest-ment, the Bank has enlisted an army of Northern consultantsto do these studies.7 In the following sections, I describe howthe practices for hiring these consultants and the conditionsunder which they work reflect shifts in development under theBank’s green agenda.

T H E H I R I N G O F P R O J E C T E VA L U A T O R S

The old system of hiring consultants to evaluate a proposedproject was efficient, cost-effective, and mutually beneficial forthe major players involved. Typically, the World Bank wouldhire Northern engineering firms that had often worked withthe proposed contractors—that is, the firms that were ex-pected to build the infrastructure—to collect and analyze datato assess a project. More often than not, the engineering firmswould find that, indeed, the project was feasible (or would be,with certain modifications) and that its negative impacts couldbe mitigated through some additional investment: for example,a drainage system might be added to resolve a potentially leakyirrigation system. As long as the project was not shown to beinfeasible (a highly unusual occurrence), these impact assess-ments could lead to an increase in the size of a loan and con-

The Birth of a Discipline

sequently more work for engineering firms and builders. Insome parts of the world, the World Bank uses the same firms forall its projects, creating an enduring and comfortable relation-ship between the loan managers and the projects’ reviewers.8

This is precisely what happened, at least initially, with theNam Theun project in Laos. In , the World Bank con-tracted with an Australian engineering firm, Snowy Moun-tains Engineering Company, to conduct a feasibility study forNam Theun .9 Snowy Mountains has worked with the largeststockholder of Nam Theun , Transfield Holdings Ltd. of Aus-tralia, in the past.10 The feasibility report produced by SnowyMountains was quite positive overall; on this basis, the gov-ernment of Laos, the World Bank, the dam investment con-sortium (then NTEC, now NTPC), and the Bank-appointedPanel of Experts recommended that the project be funded.

After NT got the official green light, NGOs based inBangkok and Berkeley evaluated the report and made a strongcase that it was seriously flawed. In the end, the Bank was forcedto admit that the environmental impact assessment (EIA) andsocial impact assessment (SIA) were inadequate, and that therequired “study of alternatives” was missing (e.g., studying al-ternative scenarios, such as smaller dams or energy conserva-tion). It then contracted with another engineering group, theThai-based TEAM firm, another old-time Bank consultant, todo the job. Its EIA for Nam Theun met a similar fate and wasultimately dismissed by the World Bank when challenged byinternational activists.

In , a third round of feasibility studies was commis-sioned, with some responsibilities contracted out to two long-time Bank consultants, the German firm Lahmeyer Inter-national (the study of alternatives) and the New Jersey-basedfirm Louis Berger International (economic analysis). Repre-

The Birth of a Discipline

senting a dramatic shift for the Bank, however, the environ-mental and social assessments were contracted out to twointernational NGOs, the World Conservation Union (IUCN)and CARE International. The decision by the World Bank toincorporate NGOs into the process reflected a highly con-scious sense within the Bank of the need to work with its crit-ics if it hoped to transform them from critical observers intoconstructive participants.

K N O W L E D G E U N D E R C O N T R A C T

As NGOs and private consultants have been incorporated intothe project assessment process, the process has the appearanceof being more open and less subject to conflicts of interest. Yeteven for these independent groups and individuals, importantinstitutional factors shape the knowledge-production process.The most general are the “terms of reference” (TOR) underwhich hired consultants must work. In exchange for high sal-aries, unique research opportunities, and access to formerlyinaccessible research sites, the Bank specifies exactly whatkinds of information are needed, a time frame for completingthe research (and by implication, how long the researcher canbe in the field), and a deadline for the written report. Owner-ship and circulation are also important dimensions of the TOR:the direct contractor—be it the Bank, the borrowing govern-ment, an engineering firm, or an NGO—is given exclusiveright of ownership over the product as well as the raw data.Legally, one cannot use the data for research or distribute thefindings without permission from the contractor.

By far the most pressure comes from the stringent timeconstraints placed on those carrying out the research. Becausesocial and environmental assessments are not stand-aloneprojects but preconditions to a loan process, the amount of

The Birth of a Discipline

time allocated for data collection and analysis is extremelylimited. As a result, the method of development-related socialand environmental research that has come to be most widelyaccepted is “rapid rural appraisal,” a form of applied researchthat well suits the World Bank’s constrained timeline for loanprocessing. Rapid rural appraisal (RRA) is “a systematic meansof quickly and cost effectively gathering and analyzing infor-mation. The method has an extractive purpose in which out-siders learn about local situations . . . an iterative process ofrapid and progressive learning from respondents and second-ary data” (Chamberlain ). Particularly notable here is theemphasis on speed.

Those who do social and environmental impact studiesfor Nam Theun are powerfully affected by the fast pace ofBank projects. One consultant for the most recent socioeco-nomic study of the Nakai Plateau people (the group that will bemost directly affected by the dam and its standing reservoir)described his team’s working conditions in the following terms:

At first, we asked if we could get three days for everytwo villages in the plateau and another four to sixdays’ time for write-up—seven to nine days per twovillages—so the data wouldn’t get confused in ourminds. We figured it would take up to three daysjust to hike into a village. That’s the very least weasked for. But the project was on a very tight sched-ule, as the World Bank needed the report soon.

It’s not easy work, and we were working in com-pletely new terrain. [My partner, an ethnolinguist]discovered at least two previously unknown lan-guages. We were trying to cope with new languages,cultures, lifestyles, and trying to interpret it, allwithin a very short time period.

The Birth of a Discipline

Because so much time was being consumed by the ardu-ous task of getting from village to village, covering hundreds ofmiles of very dense jungle, his team was transported by mili-tary helicopter, at the cost of $, per hour.11 “The helicop-ters saved us some time. But everything else about working inthe jungle takes time. We brought in our own food, which wecooked on our own, and we’d set up camp. We were left withvery little time to enter a village, explain who we were, andlearn about their lives, only to turn back, return the helicopter,and write it all up in Vientiane.”12

Similar pressure to do research quickly was noted byseveral ichthyologists who were hired to assess the effects of aset of proposed projects on the Mekong fisheries. Accordingto these scientists, the task of studying the Mekong fisheries is enormous and requires a large interdisciplinary team togather data all along the river and its tributaries. At the veryleast, they believe, data should be collected over several years.One consultant explained: “Everything is geared to the annualflood-dry cycle. Different species appear at different placesand different times of the year to carry out critical life-cycleevents [spawning, feeding, refuge during the dry season]. Mi-gration enables these habitat shifts to take place and is ofcourse the fundamental reason why any migratory animalneeds to make regular seasonal movements.”

In addition, researchers need to collect data on fishmovements at multiple sites because fish do not migrate instraight lines, and the Mekong is not a single river but a systemof rivers, with numerous arteries that house their own diversefish species. The problem is further complicated by the factthat these rivers are not clear trout streams but are deep, dark,and characterized by dangerous currents.13 The Bank’s ap-

The Birth of a Discipline

proach has been to hire consultants on several different occa-sions to do the job in three to five months.

The fish biologist who told me the preceding story tookcare to distinguish these “jet-setters” from “fish-heads” likehimself, who prefer to go to a village and work with local fish-ers who have generations of experience with the river. He wasasked to study the downstream effects of the recently com-pleted Theun-Hinboun Dam adjacent to the Nam Theun site(Australian Mekong Resource Centre ). (International ac-tivists and local villagers had protested that the fisheries werebeing destroyed, which the government, lenders, and buildersstrongly denied; consequently, he was hired to conduct a study.)Hired on a “four-day input per month” schedule, he found itimpossible to do what his contract required: to study the by-pass flows at this postimpoundment stage of the finished dam.He took the view in his report that a whole team of scientistswas needed to study the dam’s effects on the river over a sub-stantial period of time and space.

Yet, he also emphasized, one did not need to be a biolo-gist to understand that if there should be between and

cubic meters per second (cumecs) of water passing throughthe dam site and if only cumecs were passing through, thiswill cause problems for downstream biota. “If the to

cumecs represents a loaf of bread necessary to maintain thesystem, then the cumecs represents a slice and the cumecsjust crumbs.” In other words, the more water the dam heldback to produce electricity, the more the downstream fisherieswould be destroyed. This was, indeed, the experience of thedownstream villagers. His immediate recommendation was toincrease the minimum dry season bypass flows from to cumecs, which he noted would result in the loss of electrical

The Birth of a Discipline

sales of $ million but would save at least some of the fisheriesin the short term. In spite of promises to post the report on itsWeb site, the report’s contractor, the Asian Development Bank,chose to suppress it, claiming there were no “clear recommen-dations” in the report.14

This incident of suppression is not unique; in fact, it iscommon practice.15 Tyson Roberts, an ichthyologist well knownfor his work on the Mekong fisheries, was hired to conduct afishery study for Nam Theun . Like a number of his peers,Roberts cautioned the Bank and government against makingany rapid assessments without first gathering extensive data onfish migration.16 But, midway through his consultancy, he wasfired and his visa was taken from him:“My [legally contracted]EIA work on Nam Theun was suppressed by the Lao Hydro-power Office, probably in collusion with the Nam Theun proj-ect sponsors (NTEC).World Bank policy of only employing EIAconsultants approved by the World Bank and the host country(thereby assuring the sponsoring company can influence theselection [since they are the ones generating the revenues forthe host]) is totally against any honest concept of EIA.”17

Meanwhile, Roberts and his colleagues have documentedmore than eighty-five different species on the Theun River,and he suspects that several are endemic to the river and willbe threatened with extinction if the dam is built.18 After he wasfired and forced to leave the country, the government, the WorldBank, and NTEC hired another Northern scientist to conductthe rapid appraisals they needed to move the project along.19

Although the reason for particular acts of suppressionvaries with context, the most common motivation is that prob-lematic EIAs and SIAs can delay or, even worse, prevent a pro-ject’s approval. The whole process of having to do these assess-ments is strongly disliked both by Bank staff, whose job it is to

The Birth of a Discipline

make loans, and by borrower government staff, who oftenhave strong political and economic interests in the kind oflarge infrastructural projects the Bank funds. As one veteranenvironmental advisor at the World Bank explained to me, itis never easy to get support for a long-term study unless in-vestors (i.e., multilateral banks, private foreign capital, andgovernments) are certain there will be a project at the otherend.20 In other words, project investors wag the scientific tail.Since there can be no guarantee by the World Bank for a proj-ect investment without the requisite environmental assess-ments—a direct result of social movement pressure—EIAs arebeing done, but the process is neither disinterested nor apolit-ical. For Bank loan officers, the primary concern is to promotetheir portfolio and avoid getting burned by the activists whoare closely monitoring their studies.

In another incident involving the socioeconomic studymentioned above, certain research findings were suppressedalthough neither the Bank nor the Lao government was di-rectly responsible. As one of the researchers (an anthropolo-gist) explained, what he and his partner found did not pleasetheir contractor, IUCN, the world’s largest international con-servation group, which had its own reasons for wanting thedam project to move forward: it was negotiating a $-millioncontract to design and run a series of National BiodiversityConservation Areas (NBCAs) that would enclose more than percent of the nation’s territory. The anthropologist recalledthat what they found in the field was deemed too controversialto publish:

We found that people on the plateau (near the damsite) survived on tubers and foraging, hunting andtrapping, rice and corn cultivation, and animal

The Birth of a Discipline

raising. People in Vientiane (the capital city) hadwarned that there was famine on the plateau be-cause the rice crops had failed. But we saw that thepeople survived fine without rice because of theirnonfarm activities. This would be impossible if thepeople were forced out of their villages and resettled[where they could] only cultivate rice. If they wereleft only with sedentary agriculture and not allowedto forage, hunt, and fish, as current plans call for,they might not survive.

We also knew what happened to other ethnicminorities who have been resettled from the hills tothe plains, as the government has tried with othersfrom the hills. . . . Almost half the resettled popula-tion had died within the first few years. You know,it takes more than three years to adjust to grow riceor adjust to the new environment and lifestyle.Many just can’t adjust fast enough to survive, sothey die and are listed officially as famine victims.That’s why we made the case that the governmentand the Bank needed to take this whole resettle-ment plan slowly.

My partner wrote the section of the report say-ing that these people should not be classified as“ethnic minorities” but as “indigenous people.” Butthat opened a whole can of worms with IUCN. . . Imyself pushed another line that they hated equally.I said instead of moving them out, the best thing forthese people are health clinics, schools, and agro-ecosystem support to keep them going. But IUCNfelt it would make the plateau such a livable placethat others would migrate in and destroy their proj-

The Birth of a Discipline

ect of developing the noninundation parts of theplateau into one large NBCA [National Biodiver-sity Conservation Area].21

The anthropologists found themselves in a struggle withIUCN staff, who disliked their findings and demanded thatthey rewrite their final report. In particular, IUCN staff did notwant the term indigenous people used at all, for fear that theclassification would require that the project fall under the Bank’sOperational Directive on indigenous people, which could fur-ther postpone it. The delay threatened to derail IUCN’s nego-tiations to oversee the NBCA system in Laos.22 These NBCAswould be financed by a percentage of the government’s shareof the revenues from the Nam Theun Dam, and the Bankplanned to set up an international board of directors that woulddirectly receive these revenues for conservation.23 In otherwords, groups like IUCN were on the verge of a remarkablewindfall because Laos is one of a number of sites where largeconservation projects are being linked to controversial Bankinvestments.

In the end, IUCN decided against circulating the report.NTEC, the consortium of private dam investors, subsequentlyhired a consultant from Norway to write up a new social actionplan, which did not refer to the silenced study. In record time,he concluded that these ethnic minorities were in fact no dif-ferent than many other groups living in Laos, and that all thepeoples of the Plateau could be resettled without harm and togreat potential benefit (NTEC ). He specifically describedthe different ethnic tribes as a singular ethnic group, “as awhole, a melting-pot culture,” which could survive and benefitfrom resettlement. This consultant is now the main anthro-pologist on the Nam Theun project.

The Birth of a Discipline

Instances of outright suppression and generation of al-ternate research findings, such as those just described, are wellknown within the research community hired by the Bank andits contractors.24 But an equally significant, and invariably moresubtle, shaping of knowledge occurs through the omission ofinformation. Scientists whom I interviewed spoke at lengthabout their research, yet much of what they discussed withpassion would never be written up in their reports. What hap-pened to these ideas, interpretations, and more nuanced un-derstandings of the complex environmental and social realitiesthey were studying?

The answer is suggested by a biologist who exhaustivelydescribed species interdependence and reproduction along theMekong tributaries, as well as differences in social groups andtheir relations with different flora, fauna, and marine species.25

He spoke to me about the people who depend on the seasonalcycle of river floods that revive soils for rice cultivation, re-plenish river flora for building materials, and increase the har-vest of snakes, fish, and frogs. After the river recedes, thesepeople hunt and gather in the forest. It was a startling image ofcomplexity, reciprocity, and knowledge that I had not comeacross in any official report on the Mekong. When I askedwhere in his report I could read about this, he replied, “No-where.” Why? Because the Bank had hired him to explain theability of the river to accommodate aquaculture aimed at theTokyo fish market. The terms of reference did not permit ananalysis of the intricate relation between the river people andtheir natural environment. Instead, he responded to the ques-tion that he was hired to answer: can this particular MekongRiver ecosystem hold up under the weight of a capital-intensiveaquaculture investment? In this way, knowledges are selectivelyisolated and/or adapted into a larger truth regime (Braun ;

The Birth of a Discipline

Burchell ; Foucault ). It became clear through my con-versations with both natural and social scientists that the mostsophisticated expertise, analyses, data, wisdom, and practiceswould never appear in formal scientific reports commissionedby development institutions if they conflicted with those insti-tutions’ larger purposes and preconceptions.

Of course with omission there is inclusion; for everyconcern, data set, interpretation, and recommendation that isomitted or removed from a report, there are as many that fillits pages and circulate as science locally and oftentimes trans-nationally. In the case of the anthropologists and IUCN, a newframework for understanding ethnic minorities (as a “meltingpot” culture) is created. In the case of the fisheries study, whatgets created is a scientific framework for rationalizing export-oriented aquaculture.

The Birth of a Discipline

Catching big fish on the Mekong. Courtesy Elizabeth Price and International Rivers Network.

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

T H E S U B J U G A T I O N O F S U B A LT E R N

K N O W L E D G E S

Coupled with privileging knowledge of “experts” (Northern-ers, locals, and translocals) is the subjugation of the knowl-edges of the “nonexperts,” the millions of people perceived asthe object of study and of development. Surveys typically con-struct and then characterize populations based on very simplebut enduring social categories, classifying people as fisher,hunter, or swidden cultivator when many people can be all ornone at different times of the year. Some studies define down-stream as being just a few miles away from the dam or projectand hence make invisible the ecological and social down-streams of large projects, which can include hundreds of milesand whole groups of people, such as the seminomadic, who re-main absent from census data or outside of the project’s com-mand area. Although most people affected by Bank projectsare accounted for through processes of census, classification,and project incorporation, they become legible and account-able only within the context of a specific capital investmentand culture of development; qualities that have little to do withcommercial markets are ignored or defined as destructive tothe unquestioned goals of (trans)national economic growthand sustainable development. The noncommodified realms ofsocial interaction are considered to have value only within thecontext of development and become more easily compre-hended when they are incorporated within the project sphere.The effects are to normalize asymmetric relations between de-velopment experts and so-called development beneficiariesand to make scientific stereotypes of the latter as lacking, irra-tional, environmentally degrading, and in need of develop-ment at almost any cost.26

The Birth of a Discipline

In a short time, the remote environments and societies ofLaos—and scientific data, techniques, and perspectives—havebeen judged in terms of their value to the proposed capital in-vestment, and not the reverse. These formally noncommodi-fied realms have been made legible, but only as new sites of sci-entific research, new objects for interrogation and betterment.Unknowns have been made knowable not just because theBank has sponsored research, but also because these objects of knowledge have been translated through the epistemic dis-course of development, in its latest green neoliberal (con)ver-sion. In the Mekong, this has become the framing device throughwhich authorities speak and through which many become au-thorities. Some of the effects of power/knowledge productionalong the Mekong are the rise of new subjectivities of both thesustainable-development expert and the eco-rational citizen(e.g., “destructive” forest dwellers resettled as “ecological” and“productive” rice cultivators).

A small window into the relationship between the WorldBank’s consultants and its development clients is provided bythe story of its public consultations on the Nakai Plateau. TheBank and its contractors have held numerous public consulta-tions on the dam and its affiliated conservation projects withthe people who will be most directly affected. The idea behindthese interactions was that local people could—and should—help planners understand their needs and concerns, whichwould lead to project (and therefore stakeholders’) “improve-ment.” Indeed, public consultation has been honed to a newdevelopment science, especially since the issue of participationhas become politically volatile for the Bank (Cooke and Ko-thari ). The Bank takes it so seriously that for Nam Theun

it hired an evaluation expert (another new development disci-pline) to formally assess the effectiveness of the Nam Theun

The Birth of a Discipline

public consultations. According to her final report, the con-sultant noticed that at these meetings most of the plateaupeople just stared at the presenters (Franklin ). Rightfullyso, she wrote, as the presenters had described the dam projectin a language “more appropriate to an (U.S.) Army Corps ofEngineers meeting.” After the day-long sessions of PowerPointpresentations, she interviewed the attendees—forest dwellerswho had been brought down to the town for the consultation.She learned that a high percentage of them had absolutely noidea what the meeting was about. Of those who said they didunderstand the topic, most had no idea that these meetingswere about moving them from their land and resettling themas rice farm entrepreneurs. In fact, some thought these menhad come to present them with a simple but appreciated gift:not Laos’s largest dam, but a village well.27

Through these costly attempts, the Bank fails at the mostdirect form of information exchange with its “objects” of de-velopment, yet it succeeds at formalizing, indigenizing, andreplicating the new development rituals of participation, self-evaluation, and communication. Each round brings in morescientific intervention, more actors, and more feedback. Subse-quent consultations brought in more local consultants whocould better speak the language and explain the project. As theconsultation process improves, the clear-felling of the forest forthe dam reservoir is almost complete, project stakeholders havebeen identified and debriefed, rules have been rewritten, theproject financing deal has been signed, and the retooled gov-ernment agencies overseeing everything from electricity gener-ation to people’s resettlement are put in place. The subaltern isfinally able to speak, but mostly through the overdeterminedtechnologies of the development world and not as decisionmakers able to influence these powerful capital investments.

The Birth of a Discipline

N A T I O N A L P O L I T I C A L I N T E R E S T S

The institutional forces shaping knowledge production con-verge with the political interests of the borrowing countrygovernment, in this case the ruling party, the Pathet Lao. A toppriority of the Pathet Lao government is to generate as muchhard currency as possible, and developing the country’s hydro-electric power industry works toward this end. Thus the gov-ernment’s interest in getting the NT project funded and itswillingness to go along, however reluctantly, with most of thegreen neoliberal conditions being placed upon it.

Yet it is not just that the Lao government is cooperatingwith the World Bank to make NT a reality; the World Bank iscooperating with the government. For example, it has figuredout ways to rationalize the Lao government’s engagement inhighly unsustainable logging practices, such as granting unlim-ited rights to log valuable native forests to the Chinese and Viet-namese militaries in return for past military support (TropicalRainforest Programme ; Walker ). The Bank has alsoignored the government’s ethnocidal “Laoization policy” of de-ploying the military to forcibly resettle , people, mostlynon-Lao speaking minorities (of the nation’s total populationof . million), down from the forested mountains into theplains. Although countless studies have been contracted to an-alyze the “irrational” behavior of the “backward” peasant, noofficial ones have been conducted on the environmental andsocial impact of these massive national projects. Because theclient state prefers no public scrutiny, the World Bank system-atically sidesteps it, shifting its scientific gaze and logic of in-quiry onto more acceptable practices of development.

Of course, corruption in the world’s logging industryand bloody nationalist projects are nothing new, and this is

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not the first time the Bank has colluded with its borrowers. Thelarger point is that there are institutional effects of this highlypoliticized knowledge-production process: loans and grantsare earmarked for a borrowing country’s development prob-lems, as defined by the scientific work conducted to justify theinvestments. When the World Bank and its partners generatedata for particular countries, yet systematically leave out themost socially transforming and ecologically destructive na-tionalist projects, they are creating a powerful scientific proto-col that underwrites a particular ideology of development.

From the money of bilateral and multilateral agencies, anaccepted and widely utilized scientific protocol, or concretizedset of practices, is emerging in Laos. The hiring practices, termsof reference, complexity of projects, institutional imperativesof the Bank and its partners and the particular agenda of thestate have all contributed to shaping this protocol. The rapidrural appraisal method of research, with its tremendous time-space constraints, plus the mechanisms that suppress, omit,and outright dismiss what are considered illegitimate or irra-tional forms of knowledge, represent the essence of this proto-col. But the generative side is as impressive: tomes of reportsand new categories, data sets, new actors, responsibilities, andforms of acceptable conduct.

What percolates up from these practices on the ground?What counts as nature, society, and green scientific knowledgewithin these institutional constraints? How is this knowledgereflected in new institutions and new subjects in the new Laos?

Subjectivities of Green Neoliberalism

In order to spread their particular approach to green science andenvironmentally sustainable development, Northern aid agen-cies and banks have invested in “capacity building” in borrow-

The Birth of a Discipline

ing countries. These funders have given birth to or helped sup-port research institutes, training centers, and national scienceand policy agendas. In this way green development knowledgehas become entwined with processes of professionalization,authoritative forms of power, and disciplinary mechanisms.Enormous flows of money (relative to GDP) stream into bor-rowing countries to restructure and “modernize” state agen-cies and institutions. Consequently, the contentious, uncer-tain, and tentative process of knowledge production describedabove has become certain: institutionalized, normalized, andmultiplied in local sites through which new forms of knowl-edge and power (or knowledge/power) now circulate.

In Laos, fifty foreign bilateral aid agencies, multilateralbanks, and donors contribute money annually to the state.28 Ata donor meeting (the Roundtable Meeting for the Lao PDR)held not in Vientiane but in Geneva, $. billion was pledgeddirectly to the Lao government for – (Government ofLao PDR ; UNDP ). In , fully half of Laos’s do-mestic revenue came from foreign grants, and a remarkablyhigh percent of the state’s public investment program camefrom foreign aid (Government of Lao PDR ; UNDP ).That is, almost every public works project and every stateagency related to these large capital investments is financed byforeign money.29 Much of the funding actually goes to foreignconsultants and firms hired to reform state institutions and totrain a Lao professional class. Although the net capital outflowfrom borrowing countries is often greater than the capital in-flows from multilateral banks and bilateral aid agencies (WorldBank , World Bank ), artifacts do remain within thecountry; these include highways, transmission lines, a culti-vated professional class, and discourses and forms of power/knowledge. These artifacts help localize transnational socialnetworks, transnationalize the more effective practices emerg-

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ing from the Lao experience, and accommodate potential for-eign investors.

In the case of Laos, multilateral development banks andNorthern agencies have tried to restructure the moribund andhighly indebted socialist state into one that can better accom-modate the needs of foreign agencies, banks, regulatory regimes,and corporations. In the past few years, many of Laos’s prop-erty and natural resource use laws have been overhauled to re-flect the prevailing ideology of its multilateral creditors—greenneoliberalism. Many laws were written by Northern consult-ants hired by the Bank, bilateral agencies, and even NGOs. Forexample, Laos’s new environmental protection law was writtenby consultants for UNDP; a U.S. lawyer for IUCN wrote keyforestry legislation; and Northern lawyers wrote the rules andregulations that will establish twenty National Biodiversityand Conservation Areas. Although these acts have been medi-ated and delayed by Lao state officials unhappy with such for-eign interventions into the internal workings of the state, thesenew regimes of rule clearly reflect the new truth regimes on Laonature and society generated by Northern experts.

The Forestry Department alone contains more than fiftyseparate foreign-funded projects that promote sustainable log-ging, tree plantations, forest conservation, and more. The Min-istry of Forestry and Agriculture, the Hydropower Office, andmost state agencies overseeing natural resources in Laos are al-most wholly financed, and their staff trained, by Northernagencies and their consultants. The National University, theForest Training School and Training Centre, and the state’scentral environmental agency are all financed by foreign aid.

In the creation of these new resource use laws, new eco-zones, and new rules and regulations for forest access, a wholenew lexicon has been introduced to Laos. Conservation, bio-

The Birth of a Discipline

diversity, sustainable logging, environmentally sustainable de-velopment, and environmental economics are imbued withmeanings derived from negotiations among these transna-tional agencies and experts. What counts as biodiversity inLaos is defined by actors other than the people who live there;the very idea of “biodiversity” is believed to be, according toNorthern experts, a completely exogenous concept. In the mid-s, when the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) andIUCN described the state of the environment in Laos, they un-ambiguously stated that no conservation practices existed. In-deed, one report (IUCN ) stated that the word did notexist in the Lao language.30 Subsequently, Northern agenciesfunded the training of Lao professionals—often in coursesoverseas—so that they could properly identify Mekong species.These retrained experts return home to manage multiprongedconservation projects within state and nonstate agencies thatare dependent on financing from large capital-intensive devel-opment projects. Ironically, it was the untrained forest dwellerswho first guided Northern wildlife experts from IUCN, WCS,WWF, the World Bank, and GEF through the Lao forests to re-veal to them the world of exquisite “globally threatened species”:the rare tigers, elephants, muntjacs, barking deer, gibbons, lan-gurs, and warty pigs. They guided these curious experts downthe inaccessible rivers so they could see the distinctive otters,white-winged ducks, and hundreds of diverse fish species, in-cluding the Asian cyprinid, known to locals for its remarkableability to pluck monkeys off the river banks.

When human populations are scientifically isolated fromtheir environments and categorized as slash-and-burn culti-vators, poachers, illegal loggers, and failed rice farmers, andwhen new rules and regulations prohibit hunting, fishing, semi-nomadism, swidden cultivation, and forest use in large swathes

The Birth of a Discipline

of inhabited forest, these changes affect not only epistemicpolitics but also ontological and material realities. The new au-thoritative logic of eco-zone management that is carving upthe Mekong region is designed to ensure that there will beample high-value hardwood supplies for export, depopulatedwatersheds for hydroelectric dams, and biodiversity preserva-tion for pharmaceutical firms and eco-tourists.

In this way, the old nationalist Lao project to “Laoize” theethnic minority forest populations (i.e., forcibly resettle themin the plains) has been transformed by the new transnationalproject of environmental sustainability, but it has been done in ways that further compel these minorities to get out of theforests and become positive actors in their society’s develop-ment. For the more than sixty different ethnic minority com-munities incorporated into green-development processes, theeffects promise to be enormous and possibly devastating. Notonly do these practices lead to the new subjectivity of the trans-national eco-expert within the Lao professional class, they alsoreshape the subjectivity of the subaltern forest dweller. By thetime this green project is completed, most forest dwellers mayexperience “sustainable development” in the form of ethnicity-based oppression and expulsion from the forest.

Certainly, debates are taking place within the Lao rulingparty on precisely how much power it should cede to foreignagencies, as government officials are taken aback by the on-slaught of project demands, as well as by the imperial nature ofNorthern actors. In one case, a state planning office wrote acritical conceptual paper on the origins of “the idea of poverty”in Laos (Government of Lao PDR ) because Northern ex-perts were asking the government to start using the concept inits policy work. The World Bank liaison officer in Vientiane ex-plained to me that nothing changes in Laos unless a top offi-

The Birth of a Discipline

cial publicly says it is okay.31 She said it was not until the recentSixth Congress that a Lao official had ever used the term“poverty” or, for that matter, “the environment” or even “re-gional integration”—all critical concepts for Bank-style ruleof law. “It was only after that meeting that we could officiallyproceed on these issues,” she noted. As an afterthought, sheadded, “They actually took the phrasing, word for word, fromone of our reports.”

Conclusion

The world of development and its proliferating knowledge-production practices are strategic sites of power in highly em-battled North-South relations and in global capitalism. Withinthese entangled worlds sits the World Bank, an institution cur-rently under intense scrutiny due to the successes of growinganti-Bank and alternative-development social movements. Inthis chapter I have sought to explain the World Bank’s latestinnovation in knowledge production and how it becomes au-thoritative, locally and transnationally. Such practices are bestunderstood within the milieu in which they are being con-structed, reproduced, and circulated.

In an attempt to overcome the charges of its critics andto regain (and sustain) the confidence of its investors, theWorld Bank at the turn of the millennium has pushed itself tobecome the world’s “knowledge bank” (World Bank ). Inpart, this is a valid claim: the Bank is unique in its ability to ac-cess the world’s most remote regions and most secretive gov-ernments and to emerge with a surfeit of apparently reliableinformation. There are no other equivalent institutions. Knowl-edge is now its greatest asset, and it is generated and used inhighly strategic ways in borrowing as well as lending countries.

The Birth of a Discipline

As we have seen in Laos, transnational actors (who now in-clude the small professional class in Laos) gather the data, de-cide their utility, and design the institutions to help indigenize(and hence globalize) particular norms. Moreover, the datacollection process reflects the needs and limits of the large-scale capital investments and investors that motivate them inthe first place. However contentious and uncertain the local-ized process of knowledge production may be, the stamp ofthe World Bank gives it—and the data it yields—tremendousglobal stability, legitimacy, and circulation (Jasanoff ).Professional economists, corporate leaders, policymakers, re-porters, and professors in universities in the South and Northare among the many who consider the Bank’s data and reportsauthoritative and use them as the basis for action.

Besides being the world’s main producer of concepts,data, analytic frameworks, and policies on the environment,the World Bank has also become the world’s most powerful en-vironmentalist, teaming up with prominent NGOs, scientificinstitutions, borrowing states, and Northern aid agencies. Thisnew role of the Bank has led to a cascade of institutional effects.This is particularly ironic because the Bank was pushed into itsgreening phase by a transnational social movement that de-manded that it “reform or die.” Up against a wall, the WorldBank responded with fervor, ingenuity, and capital. Conse-quently, the Bank’s form of environmental knowledge produc-tion has rapidly become hegemonic, disarming and absorbingmany of its critics, expanding its terrain of influence, and effec-tively enlarging the scope and power of its neoliberal agenda.

The Birth of a Discipline

VEco-Governmentality and the Making of an Environmental State

Mountainous and isolated, Laos has decided to try and realize

its last hopes for development by building dams to supply its

neighbors, especially Thailand, reports Libération (France).

—“Dams for Development in Laos,” Libération

hand-drawn map of Lao People’s Democratic Republicprepared for the World Bank by a prominent envi-

ronmental organization does not demarcate the na-tion’s capital, its towns, or villages. The only carto-

graphic markings are round, oblong, and kidney-shaped, eachlabeled with initials, such as WB, SIDA, WCS, and IUCN. That

these splotches reflect the rezoning of nearly one-fifth of theterritory of Laos for conservation, and that these symbols areabbreviations for the World Bank, Swedish International De-velopment Agency, Wildlife Conservation Society, and IUCN-World Conservation Union, tell an important political storyabout new efforts to classify, colonize, and transnationalize ter-ritory in the name of environmentally sustainable development.

In response to the success of its social-movement critics,the World Bank has been forced to enlist scores of social actorsand institutions to help generate its green neoliberal regime. Inits latest development programs, the Bank has started to includeministries of the environment, natural resources, and finance,as well as some of the world’s largest environmental organiza-tions. While activists and academics build their case against aWorld Bank that they see as ecologically and socially destruc-tive, the Bank plugs away at greening its works, engaging moreecosystems and populations in its loan portfolio, and involv-ing ever more partners from the private and public sectors.

To explicate this phenomenon, in this chapter I will focusmore closely on the Bank’s work in the Mekong region. Overthe next two decades, the multilateral banks and the Lao gov-ernment plan to build dozens of hydroelectric dams on theMekong River, converting Laos into the Tennessee Valley Au-thority of Southeast Asia.1 But unlike such projects fifty yearsago, the plans for the system of dams on the Mekong are in-corporating new ideas and tools of conservation, preservation,and sustainability. In the name of this project, a whole range ofactors, from World Bank lawyers to international conservationscientists, have been commissioned to rewrite national prop-erty rights laws, redesign state agencies, and redefine localizedproduction practices based on new global norms, and in doingso they have transformed conventional forms of state power,

The Making of an Environmental State

agency, and sovereignty. By generating new state authoritieswithin national boundaries and in the world system, these prac-tices are giving rise to environmental states in the global South,but not in the way that ecological modernization theorists sug-gest, that is, that states are motivated by the inevitable Westernrationality of environmental sustainability (Frank ; Moland Sonnenfeld ; Schofer et al. ; Spaargaren and Mol). Such theories ignore the particular characteristics of theforces pushing for sweeping reforms and the differentiated out-comes. The environmental states emerging around the worldtoday are marked by the specific needs of transnational capi-tal, which are shaping the form of legality and eco-rationalitythat have prevailed in Southern countries. Green-neoliberalpressures have fragmented, stratified, and unevenly transna-tionalized Southern states, state actors, and state power in waysthat defy simple definitions of modernization.

These changes of power affect what Michel Foucault calledthe “art of government” (Dean ; Foucault ), a concepthe deployed to question the traditional notion of the state asthe main site of modern societal power. He preferred to em-phasize the multiplicity and widely dispersed “forms of gov-ernment and their immanence to the state” (Foucault ,p. ), recognizing that many technologies of power do notoriginate with or exist only within the state. Our emphasis hereis on the porous nature of states and state power and, at itsmost concrete, state actors, finances, and policies. Part of thecurrent neoliberal agenda is to compel us to reconsider the wayswe govern each other, govern ourselves, and have our govern-ments govern us. The point of this political obsession is not toimprove the art of government for the sake of making stateslarge and nurturing, but to take on the responsibility of gov-ernment ourselves and to do so in order to privilege above all

The Making of an Environmental State

the needs of the economy. It is through the nourishment ofmarkets and the economy that we will find sustenance, devel-opment, human rights and justice, and environmental sustain-ability. I call this political rationality of compelling states andcitizens to improve their care of nature and their care of eachother for the greater good of the economy eco-governmentality.

My emphasis, however, differs from the recent literatureon governmentality in that here the contested terrain is thearena that Foucault and his interlocutors have overlooked andrendered undifferentiated: nature, qualities of territory, andthe political-epistemic rationalities that give meaning, order,and value to them (cf. Braun ; Kuehls ; Moore ;Sivaramakrishnan ).2 It is through the Bank’s green neo-liberal project—in which neocolonial conservationist ideas ofenclosure and preservation and neoliberal notions of marketvalue and optimal resource allocation find common cause—that this institution has made particular natures and naturalresource-dependent communities legible, accountable, andavailable to foreign investors (Scott ). Confronted withwhat Foucault called the “problem of government,” unevenlytransnationalized state and nonstate actors have sought to“improve” conditions of nature and populations for interna-tional markets by introducing new cultural and scientific log-ics for interpreting qualities of the state’s territory. In doing so,a hegemonic discourse of ecological difference rooted in neo-liberal market ideology emerges, defining some “qualities ofterritory” as degraded and others as appropriate for commodi-fication, and hence for improvement. In this way, new domainsof political-economic calculation are forged that facilitate thedisciplinary (i.e., normalizing) practices and legitimating de-vices for transnationalizing access and rights to the Mekong.

The Making of an Environmental State

T H E N A K A I P L A T E A U , L A O P D R

Riding along the mountainous road between Vientiane andthe Nakai Plateau, in the central part of the country, one can-not help but feel the presence of colonial and imperial forces.The legacies of the French, Chinese,Vietnamese, and the Amer-icans are clearly visible: their currencies, traders, militaries,banks, political-economic pressures, and ways of seeing clutterthe spaces of Lao society. These imperial forces are active in thepresent as well as in the past. Only from a distance is it possi-ble to maintain the fiction that World Bank-style developmentis simply a technocratic intervention generated outside of thepolitics, culture, and history of imperial social relations. Thevariegated landscape and people tell a much different story.High in the mountains thirty years after the U.S. militaryended its secret and illegal bombing of Laos, Lao fishers traveldown the quiet Theun River on long metal fishing boats madefrom the shells dropped on the nearby Ho Chi Minh Trail byB- bombers. These bomb-shell boats stir the waters whereinternational capital, multilateral banks, and conservationgroups are busy making maps and plans and deciding whomto zone in and whom to zone out of the ecologically diverseNakai Plateau and the larger Mekong River system. But thesegroups no longer work in the name of strengthening the glori-ous empire, civilizing the savage, or stopping the tide of com-munism, but in the name of environmentally sustainable de-velopment.

As a Lao acquaintance and I drive toward the site for thenext major new dam, Nam Theun , we pass cavernous bombcraters, scorched-earth patches, and small spiky metal ballstucked into crevices of exposed tree roots. These are small

The Making of an Environmental State

“unexploded ordinance” or “bomblets” made to explode whenprodded by something as light as a child’s stick or a farmer’shoe. (Thirty years later, these unexploded ordinance blow upa Lao villager, on average, every day of the year.) Most scrapsof metal we see along the road or in the villages—in the formof farming tools, housing materials, road signs, and fencing—come from U.S. military equipment that was left behind orshot down. From first blush, it is clear this is not a landscapeshaped purely by local inhabitants and their idiosyncratic habitsof land use or culture, as many development officials wouldhave it. This is not a landscape or a people isolated from mo-dernity and buried in tradition. They have been in the centerof one of the last century’s most violent and world-alteringmodern events.

The Making of an Environmental State

Traversing the Mekong by boats made from B- bombshellsdropped during the massive bombing of Laos in the s.

Courtesy International Rivers Network.

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

On the road to the Nam Theun construction site, wedrive past the recently completed Theun Hinboun Dam. At theentrance, workers are laying down rolls of grass turf, whichshine an unnaturally bright golf-course green, in preparationfor an upcoming dignitaries’ celebration. Here, high in themountains in the forested Nakai Plateau, Souly,3 who is fromone of the few Lao NGOs in Vientiane, reminisces about thelast time he visited this area. In the early s, Souly had beena juggler for the ruling Pathet Lao’s traveling circus. He and theother members of the circus spent months at a time walkingthrough this difficult jungle terrain, trekking to villages settingup tents, and settling in for a few days of circus entertainmentas well as information exchange.“We were the only connectionbetween the people in these mountains and the state. In fact,for the villages here, we were the state,” he tells me. He laughsbecause he was a very young man then, and he and his acro-batic friends, carrying their homes on their backs, could hardlybe mistaken for “a state.” Ten years ago, there was no road here;in fact, there was no state infrastructure, revenue collection,courts, or schoolhouses. There were no police or tax collectorsor health clinics. Instead, the Lao state was in the capital city ofVientiane and in a few other Lao towns that were many harddays’ journeys down into the valley.

As we traveled, Souly explained how the circus troupewould hike into the jungle, meet the villagers, talk to them, andtell them about what the party was doing for them and what itcould do for them. Mainly, though, they gained the attentionand the endearment of the villagers through juggling and acro-batics. The day I visited, the well-paved road was traversed bylogging trucks (many from Vietnam across the eastern moun-tain passes) brimming with logs from the biodiverse plateau,

The Making of an Environmental State

which the Nam Theun Dam reservoir was slated to flood.When the World Bank signed a letter of intent with the Laogovernment to consider a proposal for a dam here, the Laostate began to balloon in size, thanks in large part to the inter-national development agencies that arrived in the country andlent and spent via the state, fighting over who would build thehighway, who would fund the forestry projects, and whowould conduct the environmental assessments for this ex-panding hydroelectricity project.

How can we understand these rapid changes? James Fer-guson, in his study of development in the southern African na-tion of Lesotho, noted that large-scale development projectsoften fail to accomplish their most basic objectives. Yet thesefailures still have transformative institutional effects on theground. In Lesotho, a large World Bank-financed agricultureand livestock project fortified the Lesotho state with bureau-cratic power as well as an ideological apparatus that depoliticizedpoverty, the state, and development (Ferguson , p. ). AsFerguson shows, the state gained a foothold in yet another dis-trict, which further enlarged its power even though the WorldBank project that brought it there failed to achieve its statedobjective, that is, to raise agricultural output and small-scaleproducer incomes.

Today, almost twenty years after Ferguson’s insightfulstudy, the Bank’s interventions are not only expanding the roleof the state, but are helping to produce a different type of statealtogether. In the Lao People’s Democratic Republic and manyother places around the world, the Bank has instigated the cre-ation of environmental states, which consist of much morethan just additional administrative units and state agencies.Rather, some arenas of the state are empowered as they be-come capitalized and transnationalized in an effort to support

The Making of an Environmental State

large capital projects; other arenas, by stark contrast, are com-pletely neglected. In a country deemed by the international development community as having only two commodifiableresources worthy of any foreign support—hydropower andtimber—the state is under tremendous pressure to recast itselfas a globally competitive player in these two industries. All sailsare raised for these Northern winds; it no longer seems to mat-ter whether the political authorities are socialist, communist,vicious militarist (e.g., Myanmar), or liberal-democrat. To ac-cess capital, borrowing countries must play by the rules ofthese higher authorities.

In the making of these new environmental states, keyagencies are being restructured. This process is supported byprofessionals from the United States, Japan, and Britain andfinanced by multilateral development banks and European aidorganizations. The offices that flourish are those most directlylinked to large-scale development loans (such as those thatfund the dams being built on the Mekong) and those that workto get countries up to speed on international codes, rules, clas-sificatory systems, and new ways of handling the populationswho live where the large-scale projects will go.

The World Bank’s success in becoming the world’s lead-ing expert in environmental state building is reflected in thework occurring in borrowing state agencies whose budgets goprimarily to manage and disburse development loans. The val-ues state functionaries and consultants assign to fisheries,forests, farm land, water supplies, and rural producers mattergreatly to multilateral financial institutions, state coffers, for-eign investors, and the local communities whose future accessdepends on such decisions. In prodding state agencies to be-come more environmental and neoliberal, the World Bankprompts them to make a country’s natural assets accountable

The Making of an Environmental State

in two senses: first, in being counted and thereby made visiblelocally and transnationally, and second, in reference to newenvironmental, economic, and cultural norms and responsi-bilities, with new institutional policing and extractive capaci-ties. Simply put, for the state to gain power in Laos, it is dambuilding or nothing, which is not such a terrible propositionfor state elites as well as many others who stand to prosperfrom their involvement in these projects. These dam interven-tions, however, have unleashed a larger set of power dynamicswith potentially long-term and devastating consequences.

Greening Laos

Transnational development boosters trumpet Laos as the fu-ture crown jewel of Southeast Asia, able to offer abundant en-ergy resources and services to the economic fireballs, such asBangkok, in the more industrialized areas of the Mekong (Trai-sawasdichai ; Usher a; Usher b). The Lao state, theWorld Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and private consor-tia of foreign investors have been keen on building hydroelectricdams in the Annamite Mountains and on the major tributar-ies of the Mekong River. In the s and s, a succession ofU.S. presidents pushed dam building as a way to usurp com-munist power in the region, promising lucrative constructioncontracts and capitalist development. Some transnational insti-tutions like the Mekong River Commission were set up in theera of the cold war, and scores of engineering blueprints de-scribing technocratic solutions to the region’s problems wereproduced, though none of these plans attracted an audience.

Now, however, the blueprints have been dusted off. In thenext two decades the World Bank and others hope to stimulateinvestment in the newly ascribed “Greater Mekong Subregion”

The Making of an Environmental State

The Making of an Environmental State

Planned and existing dams in the Mekong River Basin. Map byCartography Lab, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, .

Myanmar

by relocating millions of mountain inhabitants in Laos, Cam-bodia, Vietnam, Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), Thai-land, and China in order to construct dozens of hydroelectricdams (Asian Development Bank ; International RiversNetwork ).4 If these plans are carried out, hill dwellers inthese six neighboring countries will become the agro-industrialworkforce in the newly irrigated and electrified plains and anew population of eco-rational natural resource managers.According to an ADB director, Noritada Morita:“We may needto reduce the population of people in mountainous areas and

The Making of an Environmental State

Planned and existing dams on the Mekong River artery, the NamTheun, in central Lao PDR. Map by Cartography Lab,

University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, .

bring them to normal life. They will have to settle in oneplace . . . but don’t call it resettlement. It is just migration”(“Relocation in Sight for Hill People” ). Morita estimatedthat million people live in the hill areas of these countriesand noted that the ADB has targeted them because “thesepeople are not a part of their national economies.” The ADBclassifies this project as environmental because its goal is to stopforest destruction through developing the hill tribes, whom thedevelopment establishment blames for engaging in slash-and-burn cultivation, encroachment, and illegal logging, and too-rapid reproduction. The plan calls for scientists, governments,and NGOs to join the ADB and the World Bank in this $-bil-lion engineering project (“Relocation in Sight for Hill People”), which would be just the beginning of a trillion-dollarinvestment scheme for electricity generation and regional in-dustrialization.5

Somewhere in the middle of this desire spectrum is NamTheun , the dam, hydroelectric power, and forestry projectthat is considered to be the test case for these larger transna-tional plans. Nam Theun is currently the biggest investmentproject in Laos, with an estimated cost of $. billion, slightlysmaller than the country’s GDP and almost four times the na-tional budget (GOL ; World Bank , a, a). Thefinancial consortium of French, Thai, and U.S. investors (NamTheun Power Company or NTPC) that will own and operatethe project claims that the annual revenues from electricitysales to Thailand will generate up to $ million annually forthe Lao government, equivalent to percent of the country’scurrent income from exports (World Bank b).

Studies in support of the dam claim that given the coun-try’s current economic situation (Laos has been designated a“highly indebted poor country,” or HIPC, by the World Bank),

The Making of an Environmental State

these precious ecosystems would be better protected withlarge-scale capital projects because the revenues generated forthe state could be spent on much needed conservation, preser-vation, and sustainable development (International AdvisoryGroup ; Scudder ; World Bank ). Without imme-diate action, this global environmental hot spot will deterio-rate under the destructive weight of overpopulation, hunting,slash-and-burn cultivating, fishing, poaching, and tree-felling.As consultants hired to help develop Laos have explained tome, for the future of Laos, there is no alternative.6

T H E R O L E O F N G O s

The site of the Nam Theun Dam, watershed, and reservoirhouses one of the most biologically diverse forests in the world,which includes an amazing array of rare animal and plant spe-cies. Some scientists working for international environmentalgroups argue that local fauna and fish populations will be se-riously threatened (to the point of extinction) if the ecologicaland social landscape is transformed through the dammingand rerouting of the Theun River and the inflow of infrastruc-ture-maintenance activities. Anthropologists working on con-tract for NGOs have raised similar concerns about the humanpopulations, whose communities and cultures could be de-stroyed by resettlement and the influx of other populations attracted by the opportunities associated with the project(Chamberlain ; Chamberlain ).

In all facets of the debate on the potential impact of de-velopment projects, international NGOs have played an in-creasingly crucial role. Indeed, I would argue that they havepropelled the process along, in ways that private capital and themultilateral banks could not have done on their own. More-

The Making of an Environmental State

over, their increased participation has had a powerful impacton the state and the art of government. The NGOs have helpedreconfigure the road map for future Bank lending and policy-making, in which NGOs will now play central roles alongsidestate actors and private firms. In this section I will highlight afew of the key events that led NGOs to shift their stance ondams, describing how that enabled them to become essentialcharacters in environmental state building in Laos and in theBank’s development regime.

One of the key events that defined this development pro-cess was the designation of the Nakai Plateau and Nam Theunwatershed as a global ecological hot spot for protection andpreservation. International conservation groups and the WorldBank’s Global Environmental Facility (GEF) worked hard tolist the area as a global site for protection, a categorization thatnormally triggers global institutional support at the same timeit constrains governments and the private sector from exploit-ing a fragile environment. But in the early s, when a Bankloan manager expressed an interest in the idea of the NamTheun Dam, GEF officials were forced to recant their classifi-

cation so that the loan manager could proceed with her plans.7

For a few months, one World Bank loan manager held theworld’s conservation community hostage. The internationalNGO community in Laos debated the issue with great fervorand anxiety. After a few months, the Lao government steppedin and forbade a Vientiane-based international NGO forumfrom holding debates about the dam and threatened to expelthe more vociferous NGO staff from the country and to harassthe Lao participants. Realizing that their non-dam-relatedconservation projects in the region would be in jeopardy, thedirectors of the large environmental NGOs decided, after con-ferring with their field scientists, that it was better to stay in the

The Making of an Environmental State

country and work with the key actors for conservation, in what-ever form that might take.

Many of the development NGOs, such as CARE, Save theChildren, Oxfam, and World Education, also decided to stayin the country, continue their development work, and remainsilent on the controversy, even though that was interpreted assupport for dam building. Consequently, as development inthe Mekong region became increasingly defined by dam build-ing, the work of most international NGOs there began to beshaped by dam-related interventions.

Their rationale for withdrawing from the controversy wasquite pragmatic: the powerful forces of development insistedthat there would be no alternative to dams, and the NGOs felt itwas better to be part of the dominant development stream thanto be on its banks. Each NGO believed it had a particular com-parative advantage (e.g., sustainable forestry, megafauna preser-vation, village-level support for resettlement and training) thatcould be used to mitigate a subset of the dam’s worst effects.These development NGOs have always worked in conditions notof their own choosing, during civil wars, destructive U.S. foreignpolicies, and authoritarian regimes. For them, this was just an-other hostile situation. Their abilities to adapt and compromiseare precisely what have enabled them to survive for so manyyears alongside military regimes and international financial in-stitutions. Moreover, many had become closer to the Bank, assubcontractors for Bank projects, and had decided it is better totry to improve the Bank’s work than to stand on the sidelinesand criticize. In fact, it is to the credit of NGOs, such as IUCN,Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), World Conservation So-ciety (WCS), CARE, and Oxfam, that conservation, biodiver-sity, farmer training, and carefully mediated resettlement arecentral components to the project and to the Lao state’s agenda.

The Making of an Environmental State

When senior officials of major environmental groupsfound themselves in the uncomfortable position of decidingwhether or not to throw their organizational weight behinddam building and disavow the global hot-spot designation,they expressed their decision in a publicly circulated letter ex-change.8 In a letter to Patrick McCully, campaigns director ofInternational Rivers Network, David McDowell, director gen-eral of IUCN, explained his position:

I have been very aware of the Bank’s sorry pastrecord, its failures, its deceits and its manipulationof people and procedures. I gave a pretty direct anti-dam speech two years ago at the annual Bank jam-boree in Washington. I had also had reservationsabout getting involved at all in the NT exercise. Buthaving made a commitment of time to looking atthe Laos proposals I was rather struck by the dis-tance the Bank has moved in the past year or eigh-teen months. . . .

Having seen the POE report [the Panel of Ex-perts’ report, cowritten, coincidentally, by a formersenior IUCN official], you will not be surprised tohear that on the environmental side the Groups’view was that the globally important biodiversityhot spot which is the Nam Theun watershed will bemore surely protected if the dam is built in associ-ation with the Bank than by unregulated, unmoni-tored private sector consortium. . . . I do concur inthe major conclusions. It seems to me that on thisoccasion the Bank may be getting it more right thanwrong, though history will tell. So may I gently sug-gest that you have another look at Nam Theun and

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see if you agree, notably in the light of the limitedalternative course of action open to the interna-tional community. (August , )

In a more convoluted presentation of the position ofWildlife Conservation Society-NY, Dr. John Robinson, vicepresident and director of international conservation, wrotethis letter to IRN:

WCS is neither a proponent nor an opponent of theNam Theun 2 Dam. WCS is not an advocacy con-servation organization. We are a conservation re-search organization, and we do not comment on is-sues unless we have considerable relevant technicalexpertise. . . . WCS is in the position to commenton the impact of projects on biodiversity conserva-tion, and we have very carefully restricted ourselvesto this role. As is clear from the context of his //

letter to you, Alan Rabinowitz [WCS’s conservationscientist in the Mekong] supports the NT Projectas it applies to biodiversity conservation. He is notsupporting the dam construction per se. The sup-port of the NT project is contingent on continuedenvironmental protection and mitigation. Be veryclear however in distinguishing that support fromthe advocacy position that International RiversNetwork has taken. We are not a proponent of thedam because of its consequences on biodiversityconservation. We only comment that as the entireproject is designed at this moment in time, the im-pact on biodiversity is most likely to be positive.(April , )

The Making of an Environmental State

At the time, the World Bank insisted that the Lao stateand private investors would build the dam; the only questionremaining was whether or not the so-called international de-velopment community would be willing to come aboard andinfluence the process. Proponents of “immediate action” be-lieved that a massive intervention was needed to stem the eco-logical destruction and human poverty in Laos, and that alarge-scale project was the best, and perhaps the only, vehiclefor changing the way the environment—as well as poverty anddevelopment—was managed. These senior environmental offi-

cials came to believe that building the dam was inevitable. Be-cause the Lao state was too poor and disinterested in protect-ing its hot spots, revenue from the dam would be the onlysource of capital to finance the “saving of the environment,”and their NGOs were the best candidates to influence the proj-ect as well as the borrowing state. As negotiations began amongthese different actors, the idea of greening the Nam Theun Dam expanded to the idea of greening the state, state-societyrelations, and transboundary relations with its adjacent neigh-bors. With dozens of dams being planned, NGOs felt that themoment was ripe for a major transformation in the wholeMekong region.

Once the intense dam debates died down, megafauna andbiodiversity conservationists such as the IUCN, WWF, andWCS teamed up with the Lao state, the World Bank, and cor-porate investors to help create and implement the Nam Theun

project.9 Although this unified coalition included individualdissenters, the net effect was to move ahead with the WorldBank’s green neoliberal agenda.

Even as it sought to appease those concerned with im-proving the conditions of populations and ecosystems, theWorld Bank was more concerned about its ability to interest

The Making of an Environmental State

private capital in its new ventures. Large fixed-capital invest-ments are not like speculative capital; they require secure andunambiguous property rights and minimal political risks overa substantial period of time to ensure sustained profit rates. Yetto achieve this required a number of fundamental changes inLaos and other borrowing countries, starting with the stateand its regulatory, legal, and political institutions. Bringing theNGO community around was only one task of many for theBank. As important, before the World Bank could persuadeNorthern investors to invest in “hardware,” it had to persuadethe borrowing country to invest in the “software” of state re-structuring.

The effect of this effort to become more environmentallyand socially proactive has been that the World Bank’s inter-ventions have become much more inclusive, authoritative, anddisciplinary. In general, the World Bank has successfully en-gaged the nascent professional class in the neoliberal discourseof entrepreneurial, individual responsibility. It has also begunthe process of converting the previously inconsequential for-est, hill, and river communities into visible, communicative,and accountable populations. In short, the Bank has instigateda proliferating domain of human activity—the activity of gov-ernment and subject creation—that works to make sites andpopulations more compatible with these large-scale capital in-vestments, even as these investments change to include newways to “improve” biodiversity, mountain populations, andthe professional class.

New Laws, Agencies, and Projects

Under the rubric of state restructuring, there are three types ofinterventions in which the World Bank is engaging: rewritinglaws (particularly related to the regulation of natural resources,

The Making of an Environmental State

the environment, and property rights); restructuring state agen-cies that regulate environments (broadly defined to includemany state ministries); and funding large-scale “green” infra-structural projects. All three interventions are inextricablylinked. The development of fixed capital infrastructure (in thiscase, a joint-ventured hydroelectric facility) requires laws thatestablish certain property rights, which can occur only throughthe restructuring of state institutions. The environmental proj-ects are the legitimizing vehicle for the dam: without a strongpublic commitment to environmentally sustainable develop-ment, the World Bank and its counterparts would encounterrobust resistance from highly effective campaigns to stop“business-as-usual,” Bank-style development. In effect, theBank’s proactive response to transnational environmental or-ganizations, networks, and movements are new strategies ofglobal environmentalism that have become institutionalized(with greater and lesser effectiveness) throughout the world.

Before , the French created the Lao legal, juridical,and administrative systems to maximize social control, re-source taxation, and forced labor for the French empire. Upontaking power, the socialist Pathet Lao abolished the Frenchsystem and replaced it with a general declaration that all landand resources would belong to the people and be held in apublic trust (Evans ). By the late s, as foreign aid fromthe USSR dried up and its foreign debt ballooned, the PathetLao introduced a market-oriented set of economic reformsthat were in part a response to pressure from its main credi-tors, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, as wellas to dramatic shifts already occurring in Vietnam and China.Foreign fiscal advisors, natural resource planners, and lawyerssoon moved to Vientiane to facilitate these changes in policyand economic orientation. Subsequently, the prime minister’soffice passed a number of important decrees relating to prop-

The Making of an Environmental State

erty rights and natural resource use, especially forests, water,and land. Each was motivated and largely written by foreignconsultants to international finance institutions (IFIs), donortrust funds, or international NGOs. Each was followed up withNorthern loans, aid, and direct foreign investments, leading tolarger and more permanent offices and staff in Vientiane forNorthern aid and development agencies. With each legal changecame institutional restructuring in Laos.

In , the country’s first national forestry conferenceproduced the Tropical Forest Action Plan (TFAP), which wasdrafted and funded by UN agencies. It was a boilerplate planand was criticized by the international environmental groupsthat were leading successful campaigns against TFAPs in otherborrowing countries as being too sympathetic toward timberindustry interests (Hirsch and Warren ; Lohmann ;Parnwell and Bryant ). Undeterred, the Lao governmentand the World Bank pushed ahead with an extensive campaignto document the social and ecological processes occurring inthe populated forests of Laos. The prime minister ordered aformal ban on all logging operations until a national auditcould be properly conducted with international support (De-cree No. ). The government acknowledged that it lackedsufficient or reliable data to fulfill the demands of both theinternational development institutions and their detractors tomonitor forest clearing. In fact, it lacked the capacity to en-force the ban: Because Lao generals finance their military unitsthrough logging, logging of the Nakai Plateau has expanded(Southavilay ; Tropical Rainforest Programme ;Walker ; Watershed ). Meanwhile, the World Bankcommissioned studies documenting ecological resource sup-plies, ecosystem dynamics, and utilization patterns of forestusers. Since the early s, the government’s growing profes-

The Making of an Environmental State

sional staff and transnational consultants have been busy in-venting and implementing techniques and tools for rapid ap-praisals and diagnostics of the Mekong.10

As these scientific studies were being completed, the gov-ernment passed more decrees that incorporated the findings,imposing classificatory systems from the development banks’environmental consultants. The prime minister’s Decree No., established in , created a classification system for thenation’s forests: protection forests for watershed catchmentareas as well as for the supply of timber and nonwood prod-ucts; conservation forests for biological diversity and the pro-motion of scientific and cultural values; village forests for sub-sistence production only; and degraded forests for sedentaryagriculture. Three years later, the National Assembly approvedthis decree as forestry law, thereby legalizing state control overforests, a law that nullifies hundreds of local customary-usepractices. Decree No. , passed in the same year, further clas-sified nearly three million hectares (or one-seventh of Laos’stotal land mass and one-fourth of Laos’s forested land) as con-servation and protection forests. This decree also establishedeighteen (now expanded to twenty) National Biodiversity Con-servation Areas (NBCAs), a concept promoted by the WorldBank’s Global Environmental Facility and the largest inter-national conservation NGOs. Emerging from these Northern-financed initiatives is a new classificatory system and knowl-edge regime for land relations: socially diverse, semi-nomadic,shifting, kinship-based, interdependent relations of produc-tion are “out” in the new framework, while biodiversity con-servation, sustainable timber production, and watershed man-agement are “in.”11

These forestry decrees and laws systematically reconsti-tute administrative and cultural boundaries into rationalized

The Making of an Environmental State

eco-zones delineated by new attributions of the value of the for-est and of different groups of forestry users. Every user group—from the timber industry to semi-nomadic forest users, pas-toralists, nature preservers, pharmaceutical producers, theglobal energy and eco-tourism industries—receives rightsover a part of the nation’s forests. These plans seek to clarifyproperty rights and resource use rules through the transna-tional environmental science of tropical forestry management,matching newly collected data on ecological resources and ca-pacities (i.e., degradation and recovery rates) with the de-mands of diverse new markets for these natural goods and ser-vices, from hardwoods to biodiversity aesthetics to electricity.

New forestry laws have also authorized the shift of thefiscal and taxation dimensions of forestry from the provincialgovernment to the central government and centralized allthese new undertakings under the Ministry of Agriculture andForestry. The ministry is growing rapidly as a result of the in-flux of millions of dollars and is creating additional branchesand divisions every year, most of which are skeletal units inwhich transnationally funded projects and programs are housed.Even UN and bilateral agencies spearheading forestry projectsto decentralize authority over local resources and land are con-tributing to the strengthening of the central authority of thestate through the rents that the central bureaucracy demandsfrom the dollar-based aid money that flows into the provincialand district government agencies and into the villages. Themoney to support the neoliberal agenda of decentralizationalso serves to fortify central state power, as well as institution-alize aid-based corruption and rent-seeking.

The Land Decree and Land Law have had thejoint effect of establishing a land market and new standards forland use. New land titling projects in pilot villages are taking

The Making of an Environmental State

cadastres and drawing up state-sanctioned land titles to re-place a decentralized system of customary property rights.These new titles guarantee rights of usufruct, transfer, and in-heritance to their owners and allow for land to be bought andsold. According to the new laws, any land left fallow for morethan three years can be claimed by the state, and any land canbe expropriated for development projects as long as the usersreceive compensation. The law, when enforced, is devas-tating to upland cultivators who rotate cultivation in eight- totwenty-year cycles to maintain the land’s long-term fertility.Land use that results in “degradation” or “neglect” based onnew criteria and priorities (e.g., land left fallow for threeyears), can be confiscated—even if such lands will regeneratefruitfully in these long fallow cycles.

A unique characteristic of these new green laws is the roleof a new World Bank-facilitated network of transnational ac-tors in their creation. Evidence of the World Bank’s authorityand influence is apparent in its confidential Staff Appraisal Re-port for the Forest Management and Conservation Project(FOMACOP), which actually named a deadline by which theLao National Assembly was required to pass into law certainpolicy changes as a precondition for the project (World Bank; World Bank ).12 Regulatory reforms and state re-structuring have always been preconditions for Bank loansand private investments (George and Sabelli ; Kapur et al.), but these green preconditions are unique for being soencompassing, disciplinary, and neoliberal.

The threat of being denied a large loan makes it difficultfor states to say “no.” Such financial withdrawals would be dev-astating to a state’s ability to function. Like other highly in-debted countries, the Lao state depends on external develop-ment grants, loans, and resources for its operating budget.

The Making of an Environmental State

Indeed, by –, fully half of Laos’s domestic revenue camefrom foreign grants, percent of the state’s public investmentprogram came from foreign aid (Government of Lao PDR[GOL] ; UNDP ), and its per capita debt load out-stripped its per capita GDP by $ per person ($ vs. $).These are typical features of many states in the South.

By , the National Assembly had passed more lawsthat effectively created new state authorities and regulatorymechanisms over natural resources. One of the most signifi-

cant is the environmental protection law. The United NationsDevelopment Program (UNDP) helped write and push thislaw through the assembly and, along with the Swedish aidagency SIDA, is providing substantial support for the fledglingenvironmental ministry it helped create, called STEA. North-ern aid and finance institutions have helped establish the gov-ernment agency that oversees all protected areas and wildlifeactivities (CPAWM) and strengthened the Ministry of Agri-culture and Forestry, which receives most of its budget asgrants and loans from these aid agencies. The budget of theHydropower Division of the Ministry of Industry has grownexponentially due to foreign contributions directly related tobig dam investments.

The amount and breadth of environmental program-ming within the state is impressive. The Forestry Departmentalone is buckling under the ballast of more than fifty separateprojects, named with such English acronyms as FOMACOPand NAWACOP and official titles that reveal their origins andnationality. In , the Lao Department of Forestry found itself responsible for the Lao Swedish Forestry Programme,the Lao ADB Commercial Tree Plantation Project, the Lao-WB-Finnida [Finnish] Forest and Management and Conser-vation project, the UN-FAO Benzoin Improvement Project,

The Making of an Environmental State

and the Lower Nam Ngum Catchment JICA-FORCAP [Japan-ese] Project. Some of the larger projects, such as the WorldBank’s FOMACOP, or Forestry Management and ConservationProgramme, represent a major wing of the organizational struc-ture of the Forestry Department. Together, foreign donors andcreditors finance almost all of the department’s annual budget,which goes to implementing these transnational projects (andpaying the high cost of their foreign staff), managing the forestsin a huge expanse of Lao territory, supporting the Forest Train-ing School and Training Centre, collecting and analyzing thedata required by these new projects, and implementing the lawsand decrees described above (Department of Forestry ).

As such agencies as the Ministry of Agriculture and For-estry and the Ministry of Industry and Handicrafts becomemore involved in the receipt and management of foreign capi-tal inflows, their staffs have the opportunity to integrate them-selves into the transnational professional class, which increasestheir relative power and influence at the domestic level. At thesame time, this flow of foreign money reshapes these agencies’domestic priorities to focus on the large-scale investment proj-ects they are now financed to implement and regulate. As theLao government readily admits, because of the region’s cur-rency crash in the late s and the fiscal austerity programsdemanded of it by the World Bank, there is a growing disparitybetween public expenditures on health, education, and publicservices and expenditures on the increasingly transnational en-ergy, forestry, construction (to house these new developmentactors), and transport sectors (Government of Lao PDR ).Indeed, percent of total state investment was in the lattergroup of sectors (UNDP ; World Bank ). In short, thenew Lao state, like so many other states today, must starve thesocial sectors to nourish the newly capitalized ones.

The Making of an Environmental State

Generating Hybrid State Actors

In these upgraded state agencies, the traditional work of stateactors is now being dispersed across a new array of hybridizedstate actors. The most common is the Lao civil servant—theprivileged of whom have been retrained in new skills andnorms and, if lucky, sent abroad for special training pro-grams. The second type is epitomized by the Northern (semi-nomadic) transplant who works inside the Lao state as a con-sultant and invariably wields enormous power relative to hisor her Lao counterpart. The third is the Northern expert whosets up or staffs a shadow organization that conducts the workof an existing state agency, but without the obvious represen-tational or bureaucratic constraints. Both the work and theactor of the old regime are paradoxically underfunded and yetjudged ill equipped for the highly valued and transnationalstate work of the new regime.

A striking feature of government offices in Vientiane isthe sharp degree of contrast among them. Some are dusty, hot,and slow paced, whereas others are air-conditioned, comput-erized, and run on international clocks—typically European.At one forestry department office, for example, Finnish con-sultants work with Lao assistants in the redesigned top floor ofa dilapidated government building behind sliding glass doorsin air-conditioned offices; they are busy reorganizing the “sub-sistence” forestry sector.13 The Lao counterparts to the Finnswork on the ground floor in pre–gold rush style and calm.

In an effort to provide them with highly specialized tech-nical training, the World Bank and Lao government send civilservants to workshops and conferences abroad, and to shortcourses in environmental assessment and management de-signed by the World Bank Institute. These international excur-

The Making of an Environmental State

sions are quite a departure for a country that is still unable toafford the membership costs of joining, and the travel costs ofsending, high-level delegates to international meetings of theUnited Nations, ASEAN, and other groups to which the coun-try is regularly invited. Indeed, this process of building up Laohuman capital takes more than just time; many civil servantsare paid a tiny fraction of what their Northern counterpartsearn ($ per month salary versus $,–$, per month).Scientists with the country’s lead environmental agency,STEA, have told me that they are often treated as second-classcitizens by foreign consultants and staff, regarded more astranslators than scientists, assisting consultants as they quicklytraverse the countryside and computer data bases gatheringevidence, yet left with little but the authoritative, English-written report.

Officials from STEA explained that although their budgethas grown substantially, almost all of the funds coming fromNorthern agencies funnel directly to Northern scientists, con-sultants, and employees from engineering firms shuttling backand forth between Laos and their home countries. As one sen-ior official described the situation: “The problem is that ourwhole agenda and budget is project driven. We can grow anddo the job of an environmental agency only if Nam Theun gets funded. Meanwhile the donors demand so much from us.Even though a lot of foreign money flows through our agency,most of it goes to pay for foreign consultants.”14

Besides writing the new environmental laws and regula-tions, these traveling hybrid actors are critical conduits for thetransnationalization of ideas (i.e., green neoliberal programs).They are also the ones who are paid to construct environmen-tal data, without which STEA (and the World Bank’s loan andguarantees packages) cannot move forward. In short, these

The Making of an Environmental State

foreign “state” actors are designing and carrying out the man-dates of Laos’s new laws and regulations.

With World Bank funding and initiative, and an eye to-ward readying Laos for large-scale capital investments, Fin-nish, Swedish, and German government aid agencies have defacto taken over major wings of, for example, the Forestry De-partment and thoroughly restructured them. The budget ofeach Northern agency includes a portion for training Lao civilservants in environmental technocracy and management, aswell as in English. The fact that most of Laos’s public invest-ment funds are voted on and allocated at a meeting in Geneva,Switzerland, suggests the power of these transnational actors(Government of Lao PDR ; UNDP ). That the skills,worldviews, and conduct of the Northerners in Laos are beingindigenized by savvy Lao staff is progressively more apparent.

Listening to some Northern consultants portray the Laopeople and their “lacks,” it is clear that within the discourses ofdevelopment, progress, and sustainability lie some very neo-colonial attitudes and practices on the part of those “doing thedevelopment” toward those “being developed.” For example,most Northern conservationists work under the premise thatthe Lao people know nothing about conservation. Their fund-ing proposals and projects reflect the view that it is best to startfrom scratch with Lao nationals: first teach these protoprofes-sionals English; then send them abroad to learn how to iden-tify endogenous flora, fauna, and fish species; and then returnthem to Laos to staff the newly designed wetlands, watershed,and conservation agencies (Chape ; IUCN ; IUCN; McNeely ). Yet such a perspective ignores, amongother things, the fact that the actors being produced are theones who made it possible to generate this knowledge in thefirst place. As one Thai forestry specialist suggested,“It’s not as

The Making of an Environmental State

if only people with [the Northern experts’] kind of knowledgeare equipped to conserve forests . . . if it were not for those vil-lagers with their knowledge of the terrain and animals, North-ern wildlife scientists . . . would not be able to make thoseamazing ‘discoveries’ of rare or newly found animal species”(Watershed , p. ). Some Lao government scientists ex-pressed frustration: they had already undergone scientific andlinguistic training abroad during the s, under differentworld-systems imperatives, in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Czecho-slovakia. Why retrain again?

Reflecting this powerful neocolonial attitude, the Aus-tralian public relations specialist with the Nam Theun PowerCompany (NTPC, formerly NTEC), on being asked about thepossible negative effects of the dam, listed the issues raised bythe antidam critics, and then remarked, “Remember, thesepeople on the Plateau are primitive and anything is better thanwhat they have.” This representation does not seem to be loston the people who are “being professionalized” through thedevelopment process. For example, a Lao environmental spe-cialist explained the asymmetric nature of his relationshipwith Northern scientists hired to conduct work for STEA: “Wewant to learn the consultants’ trade, but we are pretty muchleft carrying their bags.”15 While the “modernization” processassociated with the Bank’s investments is supposed to reduceuncertainty and risk, the nascent class of Lao state actors hasexpressed a sense of increased uncertainty and risk in engagingin a process over which it has little control. These Lao actorsdescribe the time-space compression of having to get on or off

this fast-moving vehicle called environmentally sustainabledevelopment.

The discursive field in which these development actorswork is so powerful that it is hardly possible to speak with ex-

The Making of an Environmental State

pertise of Laos today except by using these eco-rationalities.Indeed, the proliferating body of scientific research on the Me-kong is produced either as a condition of multilateral bankloans and development interventions, or as a reaction to them.Fish biologists, cultural anthropologists, environmental econ-omists, development professionals, and Lao citizens participat-ing in World Bank public consultations speak mostly withinthis discursive field. As a consequence, international conserva-tion groups have framed their megafauna discoveries and theirmechanisms to protect biodiversity exclusively in terms of acommensurable trade-off between dams and conservation.“The old,” as David Scott argues of colonial governmentality,“[is now] imaginable along paths that belong to new, alwaysalready transformed sets of coordinates, concepts, and assump-tions” (Scott ). In this way, localized forms of scientificproduction proceed along highly prefigured political fields ofdevelopment.

Uneven Development

Laos’s new green neoliberal forestry laws rezone the country’sforests into distinct administrative categories. Protected forestsare so designated because they protect ecological services, suchas watersheds and soil, from erosion and ensure national secu-rity, which is threatened by porous international borders. Con-servation forests protect high-value biological diversity whilepermitting limited competing uses, such as nontimber forestproduction, tourism, and hydroelectric dams (Department ofForestry ). These new environmental zoning classifica-tions carve up territory and sovereignty through scientific dis-tinctions of forest use (e.g., sustainable timber production,transboundary protection parks, subsistence production). They

The Making of an Environmental State

have also served as a catalyst for resettlement plans, requiringnumerous public consultations and scientific studies that seekto demonstrate the rationality of transplanting people who donot fit the required social characteristics for eco-zone habitation(Franklin ; Government of Lao PDR ; Sparkes ).

In addition to this forest classification system, Lao’s newpolicies identify corridor zones, controlled-use zones, total pro-tection zones, and National Biodiversity and ConservationAreas. There are clear regulations as to what people are and arenot allowed to do within these various eco-zones. In NBCAs,for example, no firearms are allowed, entry by motor vehicle islimited, and commercial logging is banned. In total protectedzones, no hunting, fishing, or collection of nontimber forestproducts is allowed, nor entry without permission, agricul-ture, or overnight stays. In controlled-use zones, there is no in-migration and only limited village rights to grazing, fishing,and fire wood collection. The only requests allowed “by specialpermission” relate to eco-tourism and hydro-dam reservoirs(Department of Forestry ). In other words, dams and tour-ism receive greater weight than the forest dwellers’ right tohunt, gather, and sleep in their forests. Indeed, the implemen-tation of these newly ascribed eco-zones is shifting the rightsand access to the forests’ vast natural resources from forest-dwelling communities to the energy, conservation, and tour-ism industries. The NBCAs, which comprise an estimated percent of national territory, will be managed by a transna-tional board of directors and financed by a percentage of therevenues generated by the dam’s sale of electricity. The moneywill bypass the national government and go directly into anoff-shore fund to ensure that the Lao government “takes con-servation seriously” and that conservation in Laos unfolds asthis transnational board of directors sees fit. On the ground,

The Making of an Environmental State

dam revenues will support “responsibilized” natives trained asguides, rangers, and park police (i.e., productive citizens). Withthis shifting of rights and access comes the ontological trans-formation of the forest dwellers, hunters, gatherers, fishers,and swidden cultivators of the Vietic, Brou, Tai, and Hmongethnic groups, among many others. And in the process, Laoofficials become beholden to foreign conservationists withtheir own sense of rights and truths about Laos.

In Vientiane, real estate prices have skyrocketed and urbanresources have become expensive and relatively scarce.16 Theeco-development business boom has had the immediate andinadvertent consequence of depriving some locals of basic re-sources while increasing the city’s consumption of goods likepetrol, water, and public funds, needed to service the trans-national class in their new settlement enclaves. In this chapter,however, I have emphasized some of the less obvious politicaleffects of this highly uneven process—for example, the focusingof the investigative lens on rural peoples and environmentswhere development elites inevitably find degradation, misman-agement, poverty, and backwardness. Ironically, these humanpopulations are being thrust onto center stage as their conductbecomes the scrutinized subject of the new global technologiesof government, which has become routinely known as envi-ronmentally sustainable development.

The new legal, institutional, and investment modalities areall buttressed by corresponding forms of knowledge, such thatstate-building is not just about gaining new forms of controlover territorial space, but also about control of epistemologicalspace. Moreover, the newly emerging art of government is beingframed by a global environmental scientific discourse that in-cludes a politics of ethics that requires accountability to theglobal community (Goldman ; Rose ). Percolating up

The Making of an Environmental State

from the investigative modalities in Laos is a classification sys-tem and a new set of disciplinary technologies. EIAs and SIAs,NBCAs and the “best practices” of Nam Theun , FOMACOP,and STEA, are all critical effects of power circulating throughLaos, constituting the double movements of state-building andglobal institution-building, on the one hand, and the scienceand art of government, on the other.

In addition to constructing an environmental state, theWorld Bank is instigating the rise of an inclusive global envi-ronmentalism that is based not on mere rhetoric but on power-ful regimes of science, regulation, and capital investment. It isno coincidence that these power/knowledge interventionscome at a time when the World Bank has had to wrestle with ademand crisis for its services, largely due to a combination oftrenchant social activism and increased access to private sourcesof capital with fewer disciplinary strings attached on the partof prosperous borrowers. The Bank’s response has been to cre-ate new demands for its services and to broaden the scope ofthe services. In the process, it has gained access to new popu-lations and environments to the benefit of its main clients, theNorthern-based capital goods and financial sectors.

Conclusion

As an employee of a Lao NGO, Souly, the ex-juggler, is regu-larly invited to participate in various projects connected to en-vironmentally sustainable development. All sorts of organiza-tions would like to employ him. Lao government agencieswould like him to help resettle people and train them to live intheir new environment. The World Bank would like to hirehim to design development projects that will integrate ecolog-ical territories and natural-resource-dependent communities

The Making of an Environmental State

into Bank projects. International conservation groups—amongthe Bank’s subcontractors for the multimillion-dollar conser-vation and resettlement projects related to the hydroelectricdam—want him to conduct conservation-training sessions inthe villages. Activist groups based in Thailand, Cambodia, andthe United States would like to hire him to organize alternativedevelopment campaigns in the region. All seek out Souly andhis colleagues to join the new development campaign to en-liven the space of civil society.

In deciding which job to take, or whether to take any atall, this social worker must navigate through a sea of activityshaped by the environmental and structural adjustment poli-cies that are preconditions for the Nam Theun Dam project.In all his forays into the realms of governance reform, biodi-versity conservation, or civil-society participation—that is,the new activities of development—he must engage with theprevailing political rationality of supporting large capital in-vestments for dams and for biodiversity-conservation proj-ects, even if the rationality evolves as new actors come onboard. Under such conditions, people’s actions are highly cir-cumscribed by the practices of green neoliberal development.Souly’s dilemma—in what form should he participate inBank-style development—illustrates one of this book’s mainconceptual themes: the commingled roles of civil society, thestate, international capital, and transnational policy networksof development. In sum, everyday cultural practices of employ-ment and civil-society engagement are shaped in Laos todayby the overwhelming force of green neoliberal development.

Souly must work in an environment where the role andcharacter of the state is changing fast. As the example of Laosdemonstrates, even with the expansionary powers of financialand speculative capital, multilateral development banks, and

The Making of an Environmental State

transnational regulatory regimes, state power is not vanishing.Instead, states are rapidly changing. Some state functions arebeing created or strengthened whereas others are being de-funded and devalued. States are being reconfigured with newregulatory regimes and hybridized transnational state actors.The World Bank has been in the vanguard of state restructur-ing, helping states to better respond to the forces of capitalistdevelopment.

Souly must also grapple with a highly volatile NGO en-vironment. Many of the smaller local NGOs have become dependent on larger organizations, and the largest ones arechanging fast. In the mid-s, the largest environmental or-ganizations were on the fence about whether or not they couldwork with the development community to build dams. Just afew years later, a sea change occurred. In June , the World-wide Fund for Nature founded the Center for Conservation Fi-nance (CCF) in a bold move to marry the world of conserva-tion with the world of international finance. The center’smandate is to cultivate “the next generation of conservation-finance models—models that can be replicated in every cornerof the world” (WWF ). The WWF hired financial consult-ants from Wall Street firms to develop financial instruments to “generate conservation capital” on their own, as well as to“leverage money for the environment” through environmen-tal taxes, conservation easements, trading systems, environ-mental investment funds, and more. Its work is presented inthe form of “business plans” and through the discourse offinancial investments, with biodiversity mapped as investmentportfolios and ecosystems measured, evaluated, and valorizedfor their natural capital and ecological services. Also in , atransnational partnership was created by IUCN, ConservationInternational, the Nature Conservancy, WCS, and the World

The Making of an Environmental State

Bank, called the Conservation Finance Alliance (CFA) (Alli-ance ). The CFA’s mandate is “to catalyze increased andsustainable public and private financing for biodiversity con-servation” as well as to develop a “communication strategy”that explains to key audiences the significance of “sustainableconservation financing.”

Ten years ago, one could argue that these environmentalorganizations had their backs to the wall and were forced to ei-ther work with the World Bank or get out of the business of de-velopment. Today, however, it is clear that they have developedtheir own business plans to raise conservation capital, whichreflects a synchronicity that is proving beneficial to them, tothe multilateral banks, and to their overlapping corporatesponsors.

In this chapter, I have sought to demonstrate not onlyhow the world of sustainable development is constituted insitu in a borrowing country of the World Bank, but also theregimes of power, truths, and rights on which these new insti-tutional practices are based. These knowledge/power relationsrun through the scientific and legal practices of the WorldBank’s new work and become concretized through loan con-ditionalities, classification systems, new laws and regulations,and large-scale foreign capital investments. Newly transna-tionalized state agencies, staffed with hybrid actors, emergewith the strengthened mandate to oversee the reterritorializa-tion (Brenner ) and re-evaluation of borrowing countrylandscapes, resulting in a radical alteration in the ways peopleinteract with each other and with nonhuman nature. In ana-lyzing this process, we find the making of hegemonic forms of rationality that translate into effects of government: con-structing the environmental science and art of targeting pop-ulations, production practices, and behaviors vis-à-vis nature

The Making of an Environmental State

that are judged as guilty or innocent of ecological degradation.In this way, the modern eco-rational subject and the environ-mental state are mutually constituted.

Interestingly, this strategy was not anticipated by theleading actors. The fiercely nationalistic Lao state and rigidlyeconomistic World Bank did not originally intend to hingenew capital investments on transnationalized eco-zones of bio-diversity and conservation. At the start, international conser-vation NGOs did not want to sign on to large-scale projectsthat dam rivers, submerge forests, and threaten the health ofnatural species and even human populations. These conserva-tion NGOs were part of the larger NGO community question-ing the motives and impacts of the World Bank. Yet within adecade, in the process of establishing the epistemic and ethicaldifferences of territory and nature (e.g., the ways in whichsome species have become more important than others, someknowledge privileged over others), the cognitive mappings ofthis strange collection of bedfellows have, remarkably, con-verged. These epistemic and legal interventions have triggerednew cultural and political rationalities in this transnationalscramble for the Mekong.

New environmental regimes do not roll quietly into townon the train of progress but rather storm in on the wild bull ofuneven development. Any resources that might be harnessedfor environmental protection and maintenance are concen-trated on the natures (social and ecological) that will supportlarge capital investments. Other natures are differentially de-fined based on the needs of development-related rationalities.Some are valorized for rice cultivation through privatization,others are judged to be best for export logging.

Although Laos may seem like an extreme case, one findssimilar trends in larger borrowing countries, even those with

The Making of an Environmental State

more robust state institutions and more active and autono-mous civil societies. From Mexico to Nigeria, the World Bank’sgreen neoliberal framework finds resonance in diverse ways in different institutional settings. Laos is an example of howtransnational efforts are transforming one country in the nameof green neoliberalism, but the Bank also influences policies,politics, and cultures across national boundaries and in therealm of so-called global civil society where some of today’smost volatile development policies are being forged.

The Making of an Environmental State

VIPrivatizing Water,

Neoliberalizing Civil Society:The Power of Transnational

Policy Networks

Public-sector reform and privatization constitute a large part

of the World Bank’s lending and technical assistance programs.

Such reforms go to the core of the social norms around which

society is organized. Such reforms affect the relationship

between institutions and citizens, requiring of all parties a

radical change in beliefs and perceptions about the nature

of public goods and the balance between government

responsibility and private-sector opportunity. They require

a shift in the rights and responsibilities of all players

and call for a national mobilization of civil servants, ministries,

businesses, academics, media, managers, unions, consumers,

associations, nongovernmental organizations and the

public-at-large to pull together to move reform forward.

—World Bank , p.

Civil society is made up of international organizations . . .

[for which] citizenship is therefore not a necessary qualification.

—Guyer , pp. –

frica—do you want to make a difference?” reads theheadline of an advertisement in the Economist in the

January , , issue. Under this heading, OxfamUK is looking for a governance and civil society

adviser, and on the next page the African Development Bank issearching for a Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduc-tion unit head. Historically, most professionals in the field ofdevelopment were trained in agricultural or development eco-nomics, with experience in irrigation, forestry, or the like. Today,however, the market is demanding professionals equipped withexpertise in neoliberal forms of public-sector privatization,good governance, and civil-society advocacy. Where does onelearn such new trades? A primary source for training in thesenew fields is the World Bank itself, at its headquarters, where ittrains thousands of professionals each year, or at one of its

Privatizing Water

“

thirty-seven Distance Learning Centers or four hundred part-ner institutions around the world. For Oxfam, the Asian De-velopment Bank, or the Ugandan government to be players atthe table, they need to work within the changing parameters ofthe latest development regime. Interestingly, the ad’s headlinecan be read two ways: it is as much an alert to developmentprofessionals around the world as it is to “Africa” about whatthe new development trends are. These shifts in the profes-sional development worlds are not simply rhetorical; they are real and substantial and worth many millions of dollars.How are these power/knowledge regimes established and sup-ported, how do they become common sense, and to what ex-tent do they bring about change?

In this chapter I will explore these questions by lookingat one of the fastest-growing areas for the World Bank and the development industry at large—capacity building, civil-society promotion, and transnational policy networking. Grad-uates from the global training and hiring programs of theWorld Bank play an important role in translating and indige-nizing the Bank’s neoliberal lending and policy interventions,and with their help, the Bank has been able to spawn newtransnational policy networks (TPNs). According to the WorldBank, it is through this dynamic that active civil societies areconstituted as a viable mediating force between ineffectual andoften corrupt states, on the one hand, and emerging (albeitdistorted) free markets, on the other. In this way, developmentand state bureaucratic professionals have become the hand-maidens to a globalizing neoliberal politics.

To illustrate the powerful synergies among the Bank’sglobal training and outreach program, these new transnationalpolicy networks, and the Bank’s latest interventions, in the sec-

Privatizing Water

ond part of this chapter I will look at the global policy of waterprivatization, a potentially lucrative initiative for internationalfirms bidding on third world public-sector goods. Since themid-s, a new transnational policy network has arisen withthe ambition of generating a global policy agenda on water. Itsarguments are constructed in situ, in the process of buildingalliances, writing policy statements, negotiating plans, and so-liciting expert advice and opinions. It has grown as it movesfrom one venue to another; each year, new ideas, initiatives,coalitions, and networks are born—while others disappear—in the process of constituting a green-neoliberal water-policyaction plan. These transnational sites overflow with policy-making activities directed at trying to “find the right price” forwater and overcome barriers to supplying clean water to thepoor. It is a discourse that has developed an enormous reach,ranging from the Financial Times of London to the WorldWater Forums in The Hague and Kyoto, from local NGOs inGhana (Berry ) to city mayors in Bolivia (Laurie and Mar-vin ). During the ten years between the Earth Sum-mit in Rio and the World Summit on Sustainable Devel-opment in Johannesburg, global water privatization policy hasgone from a nonstarter to the main event. How the policy rosefrom obscurity is the topic of this chapter. The World Banksuccessfully transformed a “potentially explosive political ques-tion about rights, entitlements, how one should live, and whoshould decide into technical questions of efficiency and sus-tainability” (Li , p. , my emphasis). Critical to the politicsof this policy shift is the fact that it has thus far been an ex-tremely fragile accomplishment and one that has begun toarouse the political ire, and transnational activist networking,of tens of millions of angry people.

Privatizing Water

The Rise of Transnational Policy Networks

Transnational policy networks have always played an impor-tant role for the World Bank; indeed, the Bank has been one ofthe great motors behind these networks and has benefitedenormously from them over the past sixty years. During RobertMcNamara’s tenure the idea of cultivating networks of expertsbecame a well-funded priority for the Bank. For most of itshistory, these networks were peopled by a narrow, elite strandof professionals, mostly high-level state and United Nationsofficials, Northern economists, and a smattering of agricul-tural scientists. The recent crop of Bank-inspired TPNs, how-ever, are distinctive for their growing ubiquity, authority, andcentrality to transnational issue formation; the greater diversityof their participants and geographical loci; and the shortenedtime frame from when policy is debated to its global disper-sion. They are also marked for their close tie-ins to importantinternational meetings and conferences and their access togenerous funding, which enables them to dominate multilevelpolicy debates as well as to convert talk into action. The effi-

cacy of TPNs derives from the fact that they are able to includewithin them a wide range of actors and institutions, givingthem broad credibility and influence as well as a self-acclaimedcomparative advantage in the field of transnational policy ex-pertise with apparently few viable competitors. Such networkstypically include officials and/or representatives from large cor-porations, state ministries, NGOs, engineering firms, mediaconglomerates, UN and World Bank agencies, national and in-ternational scientific councils, and even eminent personalities,such as former IMF director Michel Camdessus and billionaireGeorge Soros.1

Privatizing Water

A critical element of TPN building is the World Bank’sambitious worldwide training program that generates manyqualified actors (including heads of state) as well as the ma-terial, epistemic, and cultural basis for developing effectiveknowledge networks. Starting in the McNamara era, the Bankbegan training its own staff, members of borrowing state agen-cies, staff of NGOs, academics, and employees of engineeringfirms that the Bank would later hire for its projects. By the lates, the Bank’s training center was preparing more than, professionals annually in the field of economic develop-ment alone (Kapur et al. ). In those days, the center wascalled the Economic Development Institute because develop-ment economics was its core curriculum and the primaryknowledge good the Bank marketed. By the late s, andwith a change in name to the World Bank Institute (WBI),those numbers dramatically increased, as did the sites and topics for trainings.2 In alone, the Bank delivered

“learning activities” to “more than , participants in

countries through collaboration with more than partnerinstitutions.” According to this same report, it broadened “itsreach to include parliamentarians, policymakers, technical spe-cialists, journalists, teachers, students, and civil society leaders,as well as World Bank staff” (World Bank Institute ).3

Under a broad rubric of technical titles, these training pro-grams teach the types of expertise required to generate, tailor,and manage the lending efforts of the Bank and to contributeto the production of green neoliberalism around the world.

For example, in China, which is the Bank’s largest bor-rower, the WBI has run environmental management coursesfor the directors of China’s State Environmental ProtectionAdministration, trained senior and deputy officials from dis-trict and central governments in sustainable urban develop-

Privatizing Water

ment and management, and plans to offer these courses tomore than mayors through the Chinese National School ofAdministration (WB Institute ). The WBI ran a decen-tralization program in Pakistan after that country was sub-jected to a Bank-enforced reform aimed at devolving its cen-tral fiscal and regulatory powers to local governments.4

Pakistan now has , new local “self-governments,” and theWBI plans to train the newly empowered local governmentofficials in governance, regulation, and management to inte-grate Pakistan into the global economy (WB Institute ).

The WBI recently shifted its curriculum from a focus on development economics to a much broader set of courseson the environment, public-sector reform, and public-privatepartnerships and now utilizes tools of cost-benefit analysis andthe mandate of “full cost recovery” to help trainees assess theefficiency of their public sectors (e.g., health, education, wel-fare) and define ecosystems (e.g., river basins, forested watersheds) as arenas that require economic valuation and rational-ization. Senior government technocrats are encouraged to eval-uate diverse state-managed realms ranging from rural primaryschool systems to public aquifers for their cost recovery ability.The idea of contracting out public goods and service provisionto the private sector, and in particular, to globally competitivebidders, becomes more than an ideological fantasy but a “bestpractices” case that gets explored in the classroom, with ex-perts flown in to demonstrate its utility and viability, and thengets realized in the field through development projects.

The World Bank trains state and nonstate professionalsin such topics as “educational reform,”“community empower-ment and social inclusion,” “social risk management,” and“poverty reduction and economic management” specifically tohelp it and its client countries overcome the twin obstacles to

Privatizing Water

implementing its desired policy shifts: the lack of local cham-pions capable of turning neoliberal ideas into practice, and thedifficulty for state actors to counter the challenges offered byanimated and wide-ranging campaigns against neoliberalism,privatization, and structural adjustment (World Bank Insti-tute ).

Courses, such as “Improving Trade Competitiveness,”“Making the WTO Work in Developing Countries,” “ConflictResolution for Natural Resource Management,” “CorporateGovernance and Social Responsibility,” “Macroeconomic Pol-icy,”“Banking and Finance,” and “Infrastructure Finance Train-ing and Financial Sector Learning” help inform professionalsin the art of macro-policy management—an expertise that isnow a prerequisite of the development industry. These train-ing programs help the Bank implement its latest round of struc-tural adjustment programs and are offered wherever povertyreduction support credits (PRSCs) are being implemented.For example, the Bank sponsored the Dakar Poverty Forum in, which brought in more than participants from Af-rican countries to promote continent-wide harmonization ofthe Bank’s neoliberal policies in Africa (World Bank Institute). For most of Africa, PRSCs have become not only themain source of capital from the World Bank, but also the pri-mary topic in the Bank’s professional training programs, rein-forcing the Bank’s political significance as well as its economicrole as a source of employment for those within the marginal-ized African professional class willing to embrace its policies.

The WBI offers certain courses to state administrators,others to private investors, a third set to journalists, and stillothers to staffs of NGOs. Such courses feed people directly intoconsultancy positions with the World Bank; steer them intofledgling regional professional networks, such as the Environ-

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mental Economics Network for Eastern and Southern Africa,the International Network for Environmental Compliance andEnforcement, or the China Health Economic Network; andprovide them with opportunities at major global policy con-ferences, such as the World Summit on Sustainable Develop-ment and the World Water Forum. In a context where manypeople live with drastically reduced salaries and/or the quotid-ian threat of losing their jobs because of World Bank/IMF im-posed cuts in the public sector, there is no shortage of peoplewho are willing (indeed, anxious) to become part of the Bank’sever-expanding network.

One set of courses specifically caters to borrowing-coun-try journalists as a way to encourage the major presses, tele-vision, radio, and wire services of the South to run stories onthe issues the Bank promotes. The World Bank Institute runscourses called “Journalistic Reporting on Water and HealthReform,” “Investigative Journalism in Africa,” and “HumanRights and Economic Development” to help educate journal-ists about these potentially explosive political issues. Thesecourses come with a major career opportunity for Southernjournalists: a free trip to cover a major world conference. Withsuch training, they are presumably better equipped to inter-pret the claims made at these global forums by the Bank’s vo-ciferous critics, who often steal the limelight and embarrassthe Bank in the media.

Just as the World Bank helps teach journalists about howto cover its global conferences, it also hires some of its owntrainees to help with its media and public relations campaigns.The Bank now trains staff and consultants in public commu-nications to better argue its case for public-sector reform, pri-vatization, and other desired policy shifts before skeptical pub-lic audiences.5 Improving its public image has become such a

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priority that the World Bank’s public relations expenditureshave surpassed its research budget in recent years (Kapur ;Standing ).

More than simply offering courses on an as-needed sched-ule, the Bank is institutionalizing its training process in bor-rowing countries, legitimizing one path, while marginalizingothers, to professionalization.6 The WBI has opened up thirty-seven distance learning centers on six continents for its GlobalDevelopment Learning Network, with the short-term goal ofhaving one hundred centers worldwide, including thirteen inChina alone. Five years after launching the Fiscal Decentral-ization Initiative for Central and Eastern Europe (FDI) to traintrainers and offer research grants on decentralization and pri-vatization (a funding arena worth hundreds of millions of dol-lars to the region over the last few years), the FDI has becomea financially stable Budapest-based NGO, which now deliversthe WBI’s fiscal decentralization core courses and manages anine-language Web site.7 In Brazil, the Ministry of Finance tookover a WBI training program and offers courses with WBItraining materials on a regular basis.

In the early s, the World Bank, along with UNDPand the African Development Bank, set up the African Capac-ity Building Foundation (ACBF) to help build up local institu-tions able to run programs and implement policies originatingin the international finance and development institutions. Inless than a decade, the ACBF has created fifty policy centersand training institutes throughout Africa, from which hasemerged the African Policy Institutes Forum, whose agendamirrors the World Bank’s newest agenda for Africa.8 Many ofthese African policy centers serve as national secretariats forBank-sponsored professional skills training programs. Theyalso serve as the site for the preparation of Bank-required

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Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), poverty reductionaction plans, economic reform programs with the IMF, devel-opment projects funded by international aid agencies, andtrainings for participation in upcoming WTO conferences.Closely reflecting the Bank’s ideological bent, the African Ca-pacity Building Foundation recently expressed its unambigu-ous support for the highly controversial New Partnership forAfrica’s Development (Nepad), which critics have described asa World Bank blueprint for fast-tracking economic neoliberal-ism across the continent (Bond )—derisively referring toNepad as “knee-pad.”According to its own promotional mate-rials, ACBF is committed to realizing and mainstreaming Ne-pad’s objectives through its institutional networking and train-ing capabilities.9

In sum, within a decade, the World Bank’s training pro-grams have found new homes outside of Washington, D.C.,and inside borrowing-country state ministries, private univer-sities and privatized wings of public universities, internationalinstitutes, and the Bank’s own growing network of globallearning centers. This knowledge circulation process becomescemented once its World Bank label is replaced with an in-digenous one and when the knowledge-production processgets “scaled up” across the African continent, for example, withtrainers and policy advocates being Africans and working onsuch Africanist agendas as neoliberal trade, environment, andgrowth policies.10 Media professionals, government officials,and professionals at large become cultivated through these ac-tivities; they are also giving back much in the process—ideasand their professional time that circulate back through thenetworks to Washington, where their contribution can be-come quite pivotal to the Bank’s ability to effect change. Butlocal trainers still adopt Bank training materials, and the pro-

Privatizing Water

fessional networks in which trainers and trainees actively par-ticipate are still Bank sponsored. So well instituted have thesepractices become that the training materials I received as aparticipant observer in a two-week World Bank seminarfor African economists are now available through trainingprograms run by an all-African network of economists, whichthe Bank helped start. Whereas in the trainers were Wash-ington-based Bank officials and consultants, today the trainersare mostly African graduates of Bank-related training pro-grams. This is but one example of the networks that becomegenerated over time and through which World Bank exercisesits power.

Networking For a New Global Agenda on Water

As recently as , fewer than million people received theirwater from private water companies, and most water custom-ers were in Europe and the United States. Just ten years later,more than million people were dependent on global waterfirms for their water supplies, and the high growth areas wereAfrica, Asia, and Latin America. Industry analysts predict thatby , . billion people will be buying their water fromEuropean-based water firms (Shrybman ).11 These days,an indebted country cannot borrow capital from the WorldBank or IMF without a domestic water privatization policy asa precondition. The world’s largest firms, French-based Suezand Vivendi (now Veolia Water), control about percent ofprivate water markets, and in the mid- economic down-turn, competitors were bought out and the market becameeven more concentrated. Industry analysts predict that pri-vate water will soon be a capitalized market as precious, and aswar-provoking, as oil (Barlow and Clarke ; Global Water

Privatizing Water

Report ; Grusky ; International Consortium of In-vestigative Journalists ; Shrybman ). Dealing in waterhas become one of the most lucrative markets for transna-tional capital investors. According to one water analyst, “theglobal market for municipal and industrial water and seweragegoods and services is currently estimated to be in the region ofUS$bn–$bn per annum” (Owen ).

Perhaps as no surprise to many of us who study theworld of development, these industry trends mirror largertendencies in the global development industry. From the sthrough the s, in response to colonial expropriation, na-tional leaders emphasized repatriation and nationalization ofextractive and industrial sectors. But since the debt crisis andthe precipitous rise of structural adjustment impositions world-wide, states have been forced to sell off their public enterpriseseven if these had successfully produced national wealth, wide-spread employment, accessible public goods, and social stabil-ity. By the late s, under the neoliberal logic of privatiza-tion, even the most essential public-sector services, such aseducation, public health facilities, water and sanitation, werebeing put on the auction block. The issue of public-sector pri-vatization rose to the top of the agenda of governments, NGOsand aid organizations, business forums, UN agencies, andmajor global conferences. In , for instance, at the world’smost attended international conference in history—the WorldSummit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg—the question of water privatization dominated official and un-official agendas.

The way this agenda became dominant in such a shorttime illustrates the escalating power of transnational policynetworks and their institution effects. It shows how the WorldBank has been able to mobilize champions and generate social

Privatizing Water

networks capable of innovating on and implementing WorldBank-supported policies through their own diverse contribu-tions, and to accomplish it far from Washington, D.C., andwithout the Bank’s sole authorship. These activities have gener-ated the space of what development advocates call “global civilsociety,” a realm in which transnational professional class activ-ities—training programs, networking conferences, and profes-sional labor markets for policymakers and implementers—powerfully converge. The case of global water policy reformdemonstrates another way the World Bank has managed toproliferate and exercise its power.

Spaces and Flows of the Water Privatization Discourse

An article on a report on water scarcity, released at a majorglobal water conference by an eminent panel of experts,12 car-ried the headline: “Poor countries ‘must raise water prices’:World Commission Warning on Shortages of Vital Resources.”The journalist reports:

Prices paid by water consumers in developing coun-tries must rise substantially to avoid life threateningshortages and environmental damage, according toan international report published yesterday.

The report by the World Commission on Water,supported by the World Bank and the United Na-tions, calls for radical changes in the way in whichwater services are subsidized in some of the world’spoorest and most disadvantaged regions.

It says annual investment in water facilities needto more than double from $bn-$bn to $bn

Privatizing Water

to meet rising demand and reduce the numberswithout clean water—bn—and without sanita-tion—bn—to just m by .

Governments unable to finance this huge invest-ment must encourage the private sector—whichprovides less than per cent of urban water to con-sumers in developing countries—to fill the gap.The single most effective stimulus for private-sectorinvestment would be to adopt “full cost pricing ofwater use and services” says the commission. . . .Without full cost pricing the present vicious cycleof waste, inefficiency and lack of service for thepoor will continue. Private parties also “will not invest unless they can be assured of a reasonable return on their investments.” (Financial TimesMarch , )

The authors of the much-cited report referred to in thisarticle, “A Water Secure World: Vision for Water, Life and theEnvironment,”13 are among the world’s policy elites, collectedtogether as an eminent panel of experts called the World Com-mission on Water for the st Century. Their message and re-lational biographies reveal an important story about the loftygoals of finding global solutions to a global water crisis.14

Formed in , the World Commission on Water for thest Century includes former heads of state, such as MikhailGorbachev of the USSR, Fidel Ramos of the Philippines, Ketu-mile Masire of Botswana, and Ingvar Carlsson of Sweden. Italso includes former and current senior World Bank officials,such as Robert McNamara (also cochair of the Global Coali-tion for Africa); Mohamed El-Ashry, who is the CEO of theBank’s Global Environmental Facility; Enrique Iglesias, presi-

Privatizing Water

dent of the Inter-American Development Bank; former WorldBank vice president Wilfried Thalwitz; and Ismail Serageldin,who is both a senior World Bank environmental official andthe commission’s chair. Corporate leaders play an equallyprominent role: included on the panel are Jerome Monod,chairman of the board of Suez, and Maurice Strong, formerCEO of Petro-Canada, Ontario Hydro, chair of the Earth Coun-cil, and a frequent commissioner and special envoy for theUnited Nations. From the foundation, NGO, and state sectorscome such dignitaries as the president of IUCN, Yolanda Ka-kabadse; president of the Rockefeller Foundation, GordonConway; chair of the World Commission on Dams and formerSouth African minister of water affairs, Kader Asmal; and theformer president of Canada’s foreign aid agency (CIDA) andcurrent member of the Population Council, Margaret Catley-Carlson. Well-connected heads of major transnational researchand policy institutes, most of which receive funding from theWorld Bank and the bilateral aid agencies of the North, fill outthe ranks.15

These people, well recognized in both the business anddevelopment worlds, have come together to form a trans-national policy network on water. This particular commissionwas started and is funded by another important actor in thenetwork, namely, the World Water Council.16 The World WaterCouncil, established in , is a self-described internationalwater policy think tank which aims to provide policymakerswith up-to-date research and advice on global water issues. Itis sponsored by UN and World Bank agencies and is governedby board members hailing from the World Bank, CIDA, theUnited Nations Development Program, IUCN, Suez and otherEuropean water firms, and water-related professional associa-tions. A -member group, the World Water Council played

Privatizing Water

a pivotal role in organizing the Second World Water Forum in The Hague and the Third World Water Forum in Kyoto. Italso produced the well-circulated “World Water Vision” re-port quoted above with its unambiguous water privatizationagenda for the future—one that mimics as well as extends theWorld Bank’s policy position and economic analysis on waterreform.17

Another important player in the transnational policynetwork on water is the World Business Council for Sustain-able Development, or WBCSD.18 Representing a coalition of transnational corporations, the WBCSD is made up ofsome of the world’s largest corporations involved in the busi-ness of water, energy, and waste management.19 In August ,the WBCSD released an influential report entitled, “Water forthe Poor,” with a battle cry of “No Water, No Sustainable De-velopment!” The report strongly endorses (as well as puts itsown spin on) the Bonn Action Plan, a plan developed duringthe multistakeholder International Conference on Freshwaterheld in Bonn, Germany, in December . In its “Water for thePoor” report, the World Business Council’s main policy pre-scriptions reflect a political rationality that weaves together theneeds of corporations and public institutions with those of thepoor. From its perspective: “Providing water services to thepoor presents a business opportunity. New pipes, pumps, mea-surement and monitoring devices, and billing and recordkeeping systems will be required to modernize and expandwater infrastructure. Industry not directly related to the provi-sion of water services will be able to enter new markets becausewater for production, and to sustain a productive workforce,will be available. Thus this program has the possibility of creat-ing huge employment and sales opportunities for large andsmall businesses alike” (World Business Council for Sustain-

Privatizing Water

able Development , p. ). In short, everyone wins—thefirms that form partnerships with the global developmentcommunity and governments to bring water to the poor, andthose who are at the receiving end of the water pipeline. Thisis the same perspective the World Bank promotes in its profes-sional training seminars and its policy work.

Another key actor, the Global Water Partnership (GWP),also established in , supports countries in the “sustainablemanagement of their water resources.” This support is chan-neled through the ideological lens of interpreting water strictlyas an economic good, and its main programs seek to reformpublic water utilities around the world. The chair of its steer-ing committee is, again, Ismail Serageldin, longtime WorldBank senior official, and its funding comes from bilateral aidagencies of the North (especially those with large water corpo-rations), the World Bank, UNDP, and Ford Foundation. As ofJanuary , GWP’s executive secretary is Emilio Gabbrielli,who is also the managing director of Thames Water Do Brazil,a subsidiary of the German conglomerate RWE-Thames. Thechair of GWP’s Panel on Financing Water Infrastructure isMichel Camdessus, former IMF executive director, structuraladjustment guru, and member of corporate boards of directors.

Representatives of states, international financial institu-tions, development agencies, think tanks, and firms are not theonly actors in the new and expanding transnational water pol-icy network. The oldest and most prominent water NGO to getinvolved is WaterAid of Great Britain. WaterAid joined theWorld Bank and UN agencies in calling for “new millenniumdevelopment goals” of halving the proportion of people with-out access to water and sanitation in the world by ,20 andin the process, connecting , people to a safe watersource, providing , people access to adequate sanitation

Privatizing Water

each day for the next thirteen years, and raising and disbursing$ billion each year to provide for these connections.21 Water-Aid also endorses the increased participation of NGOs, civil-society groups, and transnational water companies in waterreform: “One solution to this crisis is to call in the private sec-tor. The idea is that more actors (not just governments) wouldenter the sector and deliver the services. In an environment ofrelatively free markets, the private sector can deliver not onlyinvestments, but also the reforms and efficiencies that are ur-gently needed in water and sanitation service delivery.”22

In other words, the world’s most influential water NGOhas embraced the World Bank’s and IMF’s clarion call for waterprivatization as the most sensible way to avoid catastrophe.23

Moreover, WaterAid also endorses the Bank’s and IMF’s con-troversial policy of making water privatization a preconditionfor access to desperately needed capital and debt relief. That is,Poverty Reduction Support Credits (PRSC, with PRSP as onecomponent), the latest structural adjustment policy for highlyindebted countries, has water privatization commitments asone prevalent feature of their conditionalities for access toloans for poverty reduction and debt relief, and WaterAid sup-ports this approach: “WaterAid has joined with other civil so-ciety groups in engaging with the PRSP program in some ofthe countries we work in to ensure that access to water andsanitation remains a priority in the PRSP. . . . The PRSPs pres-ent the clearest and most important opportunity for translat-ing these policies into plans that will be prioritised, resourced,implemented and monitored.”24

The British public has an intimate connection withWaterAid in the form of monthly pleas for charitable contri-butions for “pro-poor” water projects in the South that comewith the monthly water bill. WaterAid also has high-profile

Privatizing Water

promotional fundraisers that are written up in major Britishnewspapers. Formed in , it is one of the earliest and largestadvocates for “water for all.” WaterAid raises money from cor-porate and individual donations and works in fifteen coun-tries in Africa and Asia delivering water to the poor; in –, it had an income of million British pounds. In contrast tomany other high-profile development NGOs, WaterAid wasstarted by large water corporations and still receives supportfrom them, along with individual donations and governmentcontributions (from the UK and the European Union).25 Al-most every one of its trustees works or has worked for a majorwater firm: Vic Cocker retired as CEO of Severn Trent, HughSpeed is the vice president of Suez, David Luffrum and JohnSexton have been directors at Thames Water, Stuart Derwent isfrom Southern Water, and Colin Skellet is the chair of WessexWater. WaterAid, among the best networked of the water-related NGOs, ran a number of panels at the Kyoto WaterForum, including one that tellingly asked “How will the poorbecome customers?” which is precisely the question the WorldBank and the largest water firms have been pushing the pastfew years—with its embedded answer, that is, turn the poorinto good customers. WaterAid responds with its own “suc-cessful” case studies on private-sector participation and “therole of civil society in promoting a pro-poor agenda.”26

Tracing the discursive genealogies and relational biogra-phies of dominant global policy forums on water reveals theenormous role the World Bank has played in constituting andsupporting these networks and their agendas.27 Three of thehighest profile transnational water policy network actors cameinto being with World Bank support: the Global Water Part-nership, the World Water Council, and the World Commissionon Water for the st Century. All are key production nodes for

Privatizing Water

transnational water conferences, training seminars, and policypapers and are ultimately a highly mobile set of global expertson water that comprise the leadership and establish the guid-ing principles of the new water reform movement. The Bankhas also helped start and sustain the triennial World Water Fo-rums28 and funded the International Symposium on Water,29

the Global Panel on Financing Water Infrastructure,30 the WaterMedia Network,31 Water Utility Partnership–Africa,32 and avariety of other high-level networks that bring together state,private sector, NGO, and corporate officials by region, theme,and agenda.

The World Bank and these key nodes in the global waterpolicy network are educating journalists, development con-sultants, state officials, and the world at large on the necessityfor water policy reform. In –, WaterAid, Vivendi, theWorld Bank, and the International Chamber of Commerce’sBusiness Partners for Development organized a series of influ-ential meetings on water and sanitation where they invokedthe reports and arguments produced by these networks tomake the case that these TPNs reflect widespread agreementon how to solve the crisis of water scarcity.33 At high-level meet-ings, forums, and policy-generating conferences throughoutEurope, Asia, Latin America, and Africa, the topic of water re-form moves forward, creating the appearance of worldwideconsensus. Consequently, these uniquely situated and well-funded transnational water policy networks have effectivelyfilled the spaces and saturated the marketplace of ideas onwater policy in global civil society. Who can afford to attendglobal forums, speak up with reliable global data, and sit atthese roundtables on water but their own members? Indeed,a well-known insider, the journalist John Roberts of one of thetop industry newsletters, Platts Global Water Report, publicly

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scolded these network actors for considering themselves asleaders of a “global water community” (Roberts ). At theFourth International Symposium on Water, Roberts criticizedsymposium attendees for being too narrowly doctrinaire andfor acting as ideological advocates of water privatization, ratherthan as neutral sponsors of open dialogues on global water pol-icy reform. Even to an insider, the self-referential work seemeda bit too gratuitous.

Creating a Global Consensus on Water Reform

Although seemingly diverse interests are represented in thisdebate, the positions of these organizations, the strength oftheir voice, and their roles in transnational policy networkshave converged to create what they describe as a “global con-sensus” on water. The TPN argument begins with the com-pelling “facts” that the global water commons is being threat-ened and the world’s poor are suffering the most both becauseof their lack of access to water and their inability to becomeproductive contributors to society (Goldman ). The sec-ond step has been to construct a narrow historical time frameand simple political landscape that governments inhabit. Ac-cording to the TPN analysis, the main actors causing the deg-radation of water service systems and depletion of the globalwater commons are inefficient and politicized (i.e., monopo-listic and corrupt) governments that treat water as if it were afree natural resource. Governments’ failure to price water in away that reflects its true cost has inculcated a culture of waste-fulness among the world’s populations, and as a result, water hasbecome scarce. (As Peter Spillet, senior executive for ThamesWater recently put it, without a hint of irony,“clearly people donot understand the value of water and they expect it to fall

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from the sky and not cost anything” [Carty ].) Yet becauseit is scarce, it has now become an arena that has begun to inter-est “value-seeking” corporations. According to Spillet,“There isa huge growth potential. . . . We think there will be wars foughtover water in the future. It is a limited precious resource. . . . Soit’s a very viable place to put your money” (Carty ).

In sum, the majority of the world’s water consumers lackaccess because of a history of government indifference and afailure to charge people adequately for its use.34 Indeed, thepoor are in part impoverished because of this irresponsiblegovernment behavior. According to the political rationality ofthe transnational water policy network, this causal argumentis applicable throughout the ailing South.

To solve these problems, governments need to adopt in-ternational accounting methods for water services, submit tograding by international credit agencies, and, most important,put a market price on water. These standards should steer gov-ernments to invite the help of experienced Northern privatewater companies, since the private sector is assumed to bemore efficient, more capable of increasing water supplies, andmore likely to improve conservation. This argument is onethat has evolved since and has been contrived through thehard work of the vast transnational policy network of actorsthat present themselves, in this self-referential and intertextualnarrative, as neutral global-problem solvers trying to reversewater scarcity trends.

Perhaps what is most striking about the many differenttransnational policy actors I have described in this chapter isthat they invoke the same origins story, declarations, and prin-ciples—all coming from the Rio Summit and DublinConference. They all refer to a meeting in Marrakech as a de-fining moment when a diverse community came together to

Privatizing Water

devise a global plan of action. This is true even though thoseoriginal participants were from a small circle of World Bankand UN institutions, major transnational corporations, devel-opment and bilateral aid agencies, and a few state agencies withlarge stakes in water projects.35 By the Second World WaterForum, held in in The Hague, a handful of NGOs wereinvited to participate. In the third forum, held in Kyoto inmid-March , organizers promised that the meetings wouldbe more diverse and participatory, even hosting an open In-ternet discussion. (Tellingly, the Kyoto World Water ForumWeb site was available in only three languages: English, French,and Spanish.) Yet for all the innovative ways that these globalwater forums try to incorporate different people and world-views—with the list growing to include concerns related togender, disability, indigenous peoples, orphans of HIV/AIDSvictims, and noneconomic uses of water—the fundamental“Dublin principle” on economic valuation remains a pillar oftruth around which all competing ideas revolve. That is, waterhas an economic value and, in the name of sustainable de-velopment, must be considered as an economic good in all ofits uses.

The major global water policy event of , the WorldSummit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannes-burg, reflected the realization of this global consensus, theproduct of six years of transnational networking. Although anumber of sustainable development issues were on the agendaat the WSSD, including the famine in southern Africa, theHIV/AIDS crisis, and sustainable forestry and mining issues,the main theme was water privatization. Indeed, the summit’smain media event was the christening of the glamorous cor-porate—and UN-sponsored—WaterDome. This gala spec-tacle was hosted by Nelson Mandela and the prince of Orange

Privatizing Water

surrounded by the paparazzi and the global “water lords” andcelebrated in ostentatious splendor the public-private part-nership (PPP) agenda of the water lobby.36 The water agendaaired at the WaterDome and the WSSD was identical to theone developed by the transnational water policy network, fromthe global diagnosis of a “world water crisis for the poor” tothe solutions offered of greater efficiency in water service pro-vision, better cost recovery, and a shift from public-sector toprivate-sector providers through partnerships. The strength ofthis consensus can also be seen in the seemingly unrelatedlaunching of the African Union as well as its bold report on theNew Economic Program for African Development (Nepad),both of which embrace and echo the TPNs’ analysis and planof action. This new global policy consensus reflects the collec-tive policy mandates of the World Bank, IMF, and World TradeOrganization, which are now being instituted by governmentsthroughout Africa, such that Africans are feeling the repercus-sions of these global mandates, even as they debate, indigenize,and resist them.

In the mountains of policy papers, technical agendas, in-vestment portfolios, and legislation on water and sanitationreform that have been produced since the mid-s, one dis-covers a remarkable global consensus on the options availableto countries that have large populations living without cleanwater or decent sanitation. In less than a decade, there has beenan unequivocal and narrowing set of the terms of reference, ofeconomic models, of ethical concerns, and of the roles of ac-tors offered as a synthetic global regime of truth, rule, andright. This phenomenon is not unlike the many other discur-sive strategies and artifacts that comprise the age of green neo-liberalism. Paralleling these other discursive offenses, debateson the global water crisis have been driven by the immediacy

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that surrounds any self-stated crisis: we have no time to bickeror defer, because there must be “water for all, quickly!” (Mes-trallet ). The argument becomes that much more persua-sive and effective when backed by the full force and authorityof the international institutions of finance, trade, and devel-opment. Consequently, in a world where state leaders and vul-nerable professional classes from the South seem to have fewalternatives, the global water policy boosters offer the bestchoice in the classic Friedmanesque “freedom to choose” par-adox in which choice is in fact quite limited and overdeter-mined (Rayack ). That paradox becomes clearer when welook at the latest round of conditions placed on heavily in-debted borrowers by the Bank and the IMF and the way thatwater privatization has come into Africa roaring like a lion,even as elements of it just as quickly limp out like a lamb.

Imposing Water Privatization

The most direct way the network’s idioms, technologies, andwater action plans get translated into action is, of course,through the imposition of conditionalities on World Bank andIMF loans. In fact, almost all recent public utility privatizationdeals (outside Western Europe and the United States) have oc-curred through active Bank/IMF participation.37 That partici-pation comes in the form of a threat, since every governmentofficial knows that the Bank/IMF capital spigots can be shutoff if governments refuse to conform to their loan condi-tions.38 As overwhelming debt burdens have put tremendouspressure on borrowing-country governments and created diresocial conditions (most recently reflected in the – fa-mine in southern Africa), and as populist movements have de-

Privatizing Water

manded that governments stop servicing these odious and un-just debts, the Bank and IMF are using the carrot of debt reliefto foist water policy reform on borrowing-country govern-ments.39 In , for example, all eleven of the World Bank’swater and sanitation loans carried conditionalities that re-quired borrowing governments to either privatize these ser-vices or dramatically increase cost recovery from them (seetable .). Because the Bank and IMF often give indebted coun-tries a very short time to construct a “viable” water action plan,the transnational water policy network’s expertise and actionplans are likely to be invoked to satisfy the Bank and IMF’swater reform demands.

In addition to targeting water and sanitation services, theBank also imposes stringent conditions on its large structuraladjustment loans, the Poverty Reduction Support Credits(PRSCs) referred to earlier. The selling-off of state owned en-terprises, utilities, and public services has become a prerequisitefor continued access to Bank and IMF loans (Grusky ).40

In alone, Benin, Honduras, Nicaragua, Niger, Panama,Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Tanzania, and Yemenagreed to conditions placed on IMF Poverty Reduction andGrowth Facility loans before receiving much-needed capitaland/or debt reorganization. These loans and debt renegotia-tions had water privatization and cost recovery as key con-ditions. The IMF’s Emergency Post-Conflict Policy loan toGuinea-Bissau and Tanzania’s acceptance of its Poverty Re-duction loan were predicated on privatization of public waterservices. Indeed, in order for most “highly indebted poorcountries” (or HIPCs) to receive debt relief, it has been neces-sary to lease their water services to private—and invariablyNorthern—firms.41

Privatizing Water

Tab

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At the end of , the Bank had outstanding loan com-mitments in water-related sectors of nearly $ billion (WorldBank ). Most of the Bank’s water service loans have startedout with cost-recovery mandates, only to be ratcheted up topartial or full privatization when governments prove them-selves unable to comply with the Bank’s requirements for costrecovery, and when few communities are willing or able toafford the associated price increases (Grusky ; World Bank). Without compliance, the public-sector choice is judgedas inadequate, and private alternatives are introduced. By, most of the Bank’s cost-recovery agreements led to someform of privatization and were presented as a bail out of sortsby foreign firms “willing to help” indebted and flounderingpublic agencies meet World Bank and IMF targets. In effect,corporations are placed in the role of charitable trusts, offer-ing a helping hand, technology transfer, and expertise where itis needed the most. Under this political rationality, it is not In-ternational Chamber of Commerce members who are beingattracted to a new business opportunity, but rather private-sector development actors who are on an ethical mission ofpoverty alleviation, ecological sustainability, and social justice.

One finds this worldview expressed by Gérard Mestral-let, CEO of Suez, in the French newspaper Le Monde:

Two years ago, I set up a committee of twenty inde-pendent world-class experts from different coun-tries, all of them internationally recognised special-ists in water and sustainable development. For aprivate group it was a new initiative, but one thatwas needed. Someone had to think to the future,to rethink policies for sustainable management ofwater resources and services in megacities around

Privatizing Water

the world. . . . For the past ten years, interna-tional institutions and the World Bank in particu-lar have extolled public-private partnerships as afocus for renewing water policies, to lever newsources of finance and apply more efficient man-agement methods.

For a Group such as ours, possessing more thana century of experience in managing water servicesfor local authorities, we have seen extraordinarychange. The numbers of our customers have multi-plied by five, such that our subsidiary Ondeo todayserves million people around the world, fromBuenos Aires, to Santiago in Chile, La Paz, Casa-blanca, Atlanta, Budapest, Mexico City, Djakarta,Manila, Amman, Barcelona, Indianapolis, NewDelhi, Gaza. . . . The partnership model has pro-duced tangible results. Many governments are un-dertaking reforms to promote it and are collaborat-ing closely with local authorities and internationalinstitutions.

The universal right of access to water must berecognised. Our work consists in turning that rightinto a reality every day. Nine million of our cus-tomers in the world live under the poverty line.Serving those people is one of the main objectivesto which we are committed by contract. . . .

We involve local communities in decision-mak-ing and sometimes even in carrying out the con-struction work, backed by efficient, local NGOs.Where these solutions have been adopted, the priceof water has been divided by ten in comparisonwith that of water dealers, and its quality is incom-

Privatizing Water

parable. Elsewhere, the poorer you are, the higherthe cost of water, and the lower its quality. Con-necting underprivileged districts to the public watersystem is a basic tenet of social justice. For us, it isnot a question of corporate philanthropy: we aremerely doing our job, and our duty, and we areproud of it. . . .

These people expect solutions now. The worldneeds the efforts of each and everyone. Opposingpolitical and economic standpoints where water is concerned is detrimental to the interests of theunderprivileged everywhere around the world. Thewar for water needs all our resources.

If nothing is done, however, by the year ,four billion men and women will not have satisfac-tory access to drinking water. That is the reality be-hind the commitment expressed in our appeal for“water for all, quickly.” It will only be attainable ifthe political authorities in every country take im-mediate action to lay the groundwork for a moreambitious, efficient water agenda. (Mestrallet )

If, however, we shift the analytical frame and see theproblem in terms of the two-decade-long process of structuraladjustment in which World Bank clients have been exportingmore capital in interest repayments than they have beenspending for public health, education, and welfare at home,then the way we judge the cause of ineffectual public servicesectors changes. If the global community of actors articulatingthe rationality of privatization comprises the same actors whopressured states to dramatically reduce spending on public in-frastructure and services, including in the water sector, then

Privatizing Water

the network’s “at-a-distance” objective standpoint becomessubject to question.

Indeed, there is good reason to critically question the“global water scarcity” and the “crisis” discourses of the trans-national water policy network and to examine the very real po-litical-economic interests that lie behind it. First, as notedabove, these practices are a product of a particular agenda ofthe international finance institutions and the global water in-dustry and have not arisen because of demands made bywater-deprived poor communities. This is not to say, of course,that urban squatters and slum dwellers, the rural poor andsubsistence producers do not lack access to clean water andsanitation. But this particular policy initiative has come fromabove and is part of the neoliberal capitalist transformationbeing promulgated by the IFIs and their development part-ners. Since , the World Bank has not only helped financethe birth of these transnational policy networks but it has alsounderwritten the widespread privatization of public utilities,industries, and goods. In the realm of water alone, the WorldBank awarded water supply loans between and No-vember , one-third of which require the borrowing coun-try to privatize some aspect of its water operations as a condi-tion of receiving funds.42 Indeed, the number of loansrequiring privatization as a precondition has tripled since

(International Consortium of Investigative Journalists ,p. ). Of the structural adjustment loans approved be-tween and , , or percent, required privatizationas a condition (see table .).

In Africa, there has been a particularly marked trend to-ward privatization. Until , privatization of water serviceshad occurred only in a few West African countries, but in ,the number of contracts rose sharply. As of May , more

Privatizing Water

Tab

le 6

.2C

oun

trie

s w

ith

IM

F W

ater

Pri

vati

zati

on a

nd

Cos

t-R

ecov

ery

Con

dit

ion

s,20

00

Cou

ntr

yIM

F P

rogr

amL

oan

Con

dit

ion

An

gola

staff

-mon

itor

ed p

rogr

am–a

dju

st e

lect

rici

ty a

nd

wat

er s

ervi

ces

tari

ffs

Ben

inPo

vert

y R

edu

ctio

n a

nd

–rev

ise

regu

lato

ry fr

amew

ork

Gro

wth

Fac

ility

–pri

vati

ze b

efor

e th

e en

d of

the

thir

d qu

arte

r of

Gu

inea

-Bis

sau

emer

gen

cy p

ost-

con

flic

t–p

riva

tize

man

agem

ent

ofel

ectr

icit

y an

d w

ater

po

licy

man

agem

ent

serv

ices

Hon

dura

sPo

vert

y R

edu

ctio

n a

nd

–app

rove

fram

ewor

k la

w fo

r th

e w

ater

an

d se

wag

eG

row

th F

acili

tyse

ctor

by

Dec

embe

r

Nic

arag

ua

Pove

rty

Red

uct

ion

an

d –c

onti

nu

e ad

just

ing

wat

er a

nd

sew

age

tari

ffs

by.

%

Gro

wth

Fac

ility

a m

onth

–off

er c

once

ssio

n fo

r pr

ivat

e m

anag

emen

t of

regi

onal

wat

er a

nd

sew

age

subs

yste

ms

in k

ey r

egio

ns

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erPo

vert

y R

edu

ctio

n a

nd

–div

est

from

key

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blic

en

terp

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din

g th

e

Gro

wth

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NE

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ama

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d-by

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ange

men

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man

agem

ent

ofpu

blic

wat

er c

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ny s

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ce–a

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trac

t w

ith

pri

vate

-sec

tor

oper

ator

s–a

dju

st t

ariff

s

(con

tinu

ed)

Tab

le 6

.2(C

onti

nu

ed)

Cou

ntr

yIM

F P

rogr

amL

oan

Con

dit

ion

Rw

anda

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rty

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uct

ion

an

d –p

riva

tize

man

agem

ent

ofth

e w

ater

an

d el

ectr

icit

y G

row

th F

acili

tyco

mp

any

(Ele

ctro

gaz)

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Tom

e an

d P

rin

cipe

Pove

rty

Red

uct

ion

an

d –a

dju

st w

ater

an

d el

ectr

icit

y se

rvic

es t

ariff

s to

G

row

th F

acili

typr

ovid

e fo

r fu

ll co

st r

ecov

ery

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egal

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rty

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uct

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an

d –r

efor

m r

egu

lati

on t

hro

ugh

cre

atin

g re

gula

tory

age

ncy

Gro

wth

Fac

ility

for

the

urb

an w

ater

sec

tor

–adj

ust

tar

iffs

thro

ugh

tra

nsf

erri

ng

the

recu

rren

t co

sts

ofw

ater

pu

mpi

ng

and

dist

ribu

tion

equ

ipm

ent

toth

e co

mm

un

itie

s–i

ncr

ease

th

e in

volv

emen

t of

priv

ate-

sect

or o

pera

tors

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zan

iaPo

vert

y R

edu

ctio

n a

nd

–ass

ign

th

e as

sest

s of

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es

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am W

ater

an

d Se

wag

eG

row

th F

acili

tyA

uth

orit

y to

pri

vate

man

agem

ent

com

pan

ies

Yem

enPo

vert

y R

edu

ctio

n a

nd

–adj

ust

tar

iffs

in w

ater

,was

tew

ater

,an

d el

ectr

icit

yG

row

th F

acili

tyse

rvic

es t

o pr

ovid

e fo

r fu

ll co

st r

ecov

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ce:L

ette

rs o

fin

ten

t an

d m

emor

anda

of

econ

omic

an

d fi

nan

cial

pol

icie

s pr

epar

ed b

y go

vern

men

t au

thor

itie

s w

ith

th

e st

affs

ofth

e In

tern

atio

nal

Mon

etar

y Fu

nd

and

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ld B

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e do

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ava

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th

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f.or

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than eighteen water privatization contracts had been signedbetween European firms and African governments, five inSouth Africa alone, with eight more countries in the process ofnegotiation. Vivendi (now Veolia Water), Saur (France), Bi-water (England), Aguas de Portugal, and Northumbrian Water(England) are the most frequent lead companies; the con-tracts, with durations ranging from five to fifty years, some-times combine control over both electricity and water (seetable .). By , more than million people worldwidewere purchasing their drinking water from European-basedcompanies. The six largest companies work in more than fifty-six countries, and their revenues have grown dramatically overthe past six years (Barlow and Clarke ; Global Water Re-port ; Grusky ; International Consortium of Inves-tigative Journalists ; Shrybman ). In sum, this re-markable shift from public to private serves a particular set ofeconomic interests, with the world’s largest firms and dis-persed comprador classes eager to be part of this new wave ofthird world investment.

Cracks in the Pipe

One measure of how these privatization efforts have fared isthe durability of the contractual agreement. For this measure,the process has not been smooth. Many of the new contractswith transnational corporations have been, and are being,widely contested. Many communities threatened with rate in-creases have begun to network within and across national bor-ders, sharing information and organizing strategies in theircampaigns against water privatization. In Cochabamba, Bo-livia, where a mass uprising closed down the city for weeks andforced the government to nullify its water contract with Bech-

Privatizing Water

Tab

le 6

.3W

ater

Pri

vati

zati

on in

su

b-S

ahar

an A

fric

a,N

ovem

ber

200

2

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pan

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rati

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nd

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ubl

ic o

fC

ongo

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ater

Biw

ater

(C

ongo

)co

ntr

act

awar

ded

but

deta

ils n

ot k

now

n

(Bra

zzav

ille)

Uga

nda

Suez

-On

deo

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deo

(Uga

nda

)-

year

man

agem

ent

con

trac

t

Bu

rkin

a Fa

soV

iven

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di (

Bu

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so)

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anag

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t co

ntr

act

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diV

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di W

ater

(N

iger

)

-yea

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new

able

con

trac

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lySo

uth

Afr

ica

Suez

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deo

Joh

ann

esbu

rg W

ater

-ye

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anag

emen

t co

ntr

act

Ch

adV

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diST

EE

-y

ear

con

cess

ion

(m

anag

emen

t

con

trac

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itia

lly)

Mal

iSa

ur

ED

M

-yea

r le

ase

Cap

e V

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as d

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ci

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th A

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ech

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-yea

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(Dol

phin

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(Gab

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tel, a citywide protest united for the first time disparate groupsfrom urban and rural areas, women’s groups, professionals,trade unionists, irrigators, and the poor (Finnegan ; Lau-rie and Marvin ).43 A number of attempts at privatizingmunicipal water services have been prevented (e.g., in Poland,Honduras, Hungary, Sweden), some contracts have been ter-minated and reversed (e.g., in Argentina, Trinidad, Bolivia,and the United States), and other antiprivatization campaignsare building (e.g., in Brazil, Ghana, Indonesia, and SouthAfrica) (see table .).

Amidst the recent wave of privatization, two main actorsare balking: firms and consumers. In February , John Tal-bot, the chief executive of Saur International, the world’sfourth largest water company, spoke before a World Bank au-dience, arguing that the needs of the Bank’s clients were sogreat that although extending water to all made good sense interms of sustainable development, he had to ask whether this“is [a] good and attractive business.”44 Cost recovery from thepoor is not feasible, Talbot suggested, and the private sectormay not be the place to tap for investments in these sectors. Inhis words, it was “simply unrealistic” to believe “that any busi-ness must be good business and that the private sector has un-limited funds. . . . The scale of the need far out-reaches thefinancial and risk taking capacities of the private sector.” As aresult, subsidies and soft loans would be necessary to make theendeavor worthwhile. “Even Europe and U.S. subsidize ser-vices,” Talbot coyly noted.“If [subsidization] does not happen,the international water companies will end up being forced tostay at home.”45 Talbot’s proposed solution is particularlyironic because it turns existing logic on its head; rather thanprovide subsidies to consumers (which many actors in thenetwork believe is wastefully wrong), the World Bank and

Privatizing Water

Table 6.4 Campaigns against Water Privatization

Country City Year Type

Poland Lodz privatization preventedHonduras Honduras privatization preventedHungary Debrecen privatization preventedSweden Malmo privatization preventedArgentina Tucuman termination and reversion

to publicGermany Munich privatization preventedBrazil Rio privatization preventedCanada Montreal privatization preventedPanama privatization preventedTrinidad termination and reversion

to publicBolivia Cochabamba termination and reversion

to publicBrazil Limeira incomplete terminationGermany Potsdam termination and reversion

to publicHungary Szeged incomplete terminationMauritius privatization preventedThailand termination and reversion

to publicUnited States Birmingham termination and reversion

to publicArgentina BA Province termination and reversion

to publicFrance Grenoble termination and reversion

to publicBrazil current continuing campaignGhana current continuing campaignIndonesia Jakarta current continuing campaignSouth Africa current continuing campaignUruguay current continuing campaign

Source: Gathered from http://www.psiru.org/reports/--W-Africa.doc.

other development funders should provide government subsi-dies, soft loans, and guarantees directly to private firms thatknow how to use them best.

To wriggle out of their existing contractual (and ethical)commitments to provide water for all, water service compa-nies are redefining the language of their legal contracts. For instance, in its contract with the city of La Paz, Bolivia, to con-nect the shantytown of El Alto to the water system, Suez re-cently argued that “connection”would no longer mean a “pipedconnection” but “access to a standpipe or tanker”—preciselythe condition that CEOs and elite transnational policy net-works once called deplorable under public regimes.46 Watercompanies are also demanding that poor communities do-nate labor to help build the supply system. In essence, thesefirms are creating a nonmonetary barter system (which restson self-exploitation by the poor, who have few options) sothey can live up to their agreements and shore up their profitrates. Is this déjà vu globalization of the old imperial order?Or is it the next frontier of uneven and combined capitalistdevelopment where twenty-first-century technologies (suchas prepaid water meters) will become available only if com-bined with indentured labor conditions reminiscent of thenineteenth century?

In Ghana, privatization ended abruptly when the WorldBank withdrew funding because of public outcries about cor-ruption on the part of the parent company, Enron. In Gambia,Guinea, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa (Fort Beaufort),and Zimbabwe, either the government or the water companypulled out amidst controversies raised by angry communities.In some places, firms have withdrawn because they were un-able to make their expected profits without substantially chang-ing the rules or interpretation of the contract. The response by

Privatizing Water

poor “customers” has been a vociferous refusal to accept dra-matic increases in price and no improvement in service, press-ing elected officials to demand equitable service and lowerprices from foreign firms. One-third of the contracts in Africahave been nullified because of mass-based political actions,and this is also happening throughout Latin America, EasternEurope, and Asia. Tellingly, in Grenoble, France, home of Suez,the firm that promises to bring Africa its “European services,”Lyonnaise des Eaux, a Suez subsidiary, was expelled for grossviolations of overcharging, theft, and corruption in its waterand sewage services (Barlow and Clarke ; Lobina ).The irony of this event, of course, is not lost on either Frenchor Ghanaian water consumers. It is the flip side to the neo-colonial discourse that deems corruption, theft, and collusionas attributes of third world public sectors and not of France orFrench firms. It flies in the face of the old European tune ofgood Western conduct that the World Bank and its trans-national policy networks sing to non-Western borrowers.

In , a controversial suit was filed with the WorldBank-run International Centre for Settlement of InvestmentDisputes (ICSID) by the California-based Bechtel Corpora-tion. Throughout April , tens of thousands of Boliviansgathered in the streets of Cochabamba to reject the water pri-vatization policy of the government negotiated by the Bankand its sell-out to Bechtel. After eight days of continuous pro-test, the local government relented, repealed the contract, andexpelled the Dutch subsidiary of Bechtel. In February ,Bechtel filed a $-million lawsuit with ICSID against Boliviafor the loss of future profits. “We could use that money,” re-ported a Bolivian community leader Oscar Olivera speaking inJohannesburg at an alternative World Summit forum, “to pay, teachers or to build , water-gathering structures

Privatizing Water

in Cochabamba. Instead, we must hire lawyers and fight acompany whose annual revenues are $ billion, or double Bo-livia’s gross national product.” Olivera continued: “The prob-lem is that the World Bank, who supported the privatizationdeal in Bolivia, is now also the judge of this case. And to whomis the Bank accountable?”47 Although the World Bank is notliterally the official judge in the case, the ICSID is under theauspices of the World Bank and is the legal arbiter of disputesfor the Bank’s aid and loan agreements. It has also become thepreferred site for arbitration by large multinational firms filingsuits against Bank borrowers who want to avoid governmentcourts and their public juries.48

The motive for these protests and contract nullificationsis the steep rise in water prices for the poor. For poor house-holds, water fees now consume a substantial percentage ofhousehold income, sometimes as much as one-third. In Co-chabamba, the cost of water equaled one-fourth of a typicalfamily’s income after the Bechtel subsidiary increased its pricesto reflect water’s “true cost.”49 For some social groups, the priceof water spiked more than percent (Laurie et al. ).Bechtel also insisted on charging communities for water gath-ered from handmade rain-catchment systems, the water con-servation technology that predates unreliable government taps.This action best exemplified the attack on enduring local eco-logical practices and fundamental community rights and pro-duced the rally cry that Bechtel was charging for the use of therain (Finnegan ).

In the black townships of Johannesburg, South Africa,where most water consumers are underemployed or unem-ployed, the price of water rose more than percent after thepublic water system was privatized. Moreover, these townshipcommunities have experienced a proportionally greater price

Privatizing Water

hike than that experienced by middle-class consumers inneighboring white suburbs and by large industrial and miningfirms (Bond ). Critics have called this the neoliberaliza-tion of apartheid. In Guinea, water prices rose more than five-fold after privatization, resulting in a steep drop in bill collec-tions and a steep rise in inactive connections (Grusky ).Given these realities, it is hard for anyone to argue that the shiftfrom public to private providers has increased water access forthe poor.

Awash in Contradictions: The Rise of Decidedly“Uncivil Society”?

On the drive from the Johannesburg airport to the wealthywhite suburb of Sandton—host to the World Summit onSustainable Development—colorful billboards cajoled summitdelegates to taste and enjoy the city’s tap water, boasting that itwas as pure and clean as bottled water. Billboards suspendedabove the airport freeway display pictures of black townshipboys splashing joyfully in an endless bath of fresh blue tapwater. The messages imply that, unlike bottled water, Johan-nesburg’s water is free, clean, and for all to enjoy. But after twoweeks at the summit, it became crystal clear that these ads werenot selling the idea of safe potable water to European delegatesanxious about drinking the water in the third world; on thecontrary, they were selling South Africa’s water systems to in-terested European bidders in town for the World Summit.

In painfully stark contrast, ten kilometers down the road,the rigidly segregated and decrepit black township of Alexan-dra (“Alex”) houses Sandton’s underpaid labor force. Withoutgood public transportation, health clinics, schools, or basicpublic services, Alex stands as a grim reminder of all that has

Privatizing Water

not changed since the end of apartheid. Three hundred thou-sand people in Alex are jammed into just over two squaremiles of land without access to affordable clean water, electric-ity, safe housing, or basic sanitation services. The key word is“affordable,” as many of these services have been provided buthave now been shut off because people cannot afford to pay forthem. In a dramatic political U-turn, the new politics of thepostliberation African National Congress (ANC) conforms tothe view of the Washington Consensus of the market as “will-ing buyer, willing seller,” which has been imposed on poorblack South Africans in the most draconian fashion.

At the time of the summit, South Africa was stillreeling from a deadly cholera outbreak that erupted after gov-ernment-enforced water and electricity cutoffs. At the outsetof the epidemic, which ultimately infected more than ,

people, the government cut off the (previously free) water sup-ply to one thousand people in rural KwaZulu-Natal for lack ofa $ household reconnection fee. South Africa has an ongoingwater supply problem as is evidenced by the , childrenwho die annually from diarrhea, a disease endemic in areaswith limited water and sanitation services. The Wits UniversityMunicipal Services Project50 conducted a national study in that identified more than ten million out of South Africa’sforty-four million residents who had experienced water andelectricity cutoffs (McDonald ). (These figures are dis-puted by South Africa’s Water Ministry.)

In the black township of Orange Farm, just days beforethe start of the World Summit, the French firm Suezrushed to install water meters as a test run for other parts ofthe country.51 The French insist its “pay as you go” systemavoids nonpayment or theft. But in Orange Farm, meters wereinstalled at homes with no income earners. Some of the new

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taps already leaked, and residents, with no way to recover thelost water, feared that their first month’s free water would betheir last.52 As it is, many households can afford only four to fivedays per month of electricity from their recently privatizedelectricity meters. Township homes replete with fancy newFrench meters are otherwise ill equipped: toilets are outhouses,there are few sewage connections, and homes are constructedfrom either thatched materials, concrete slabs, or collectedpieces of scrap metal. Along with the ten million people suffer-ing from water cutoffs, and ten million from electricity cutoffs,two million people have been evicted from their homes andmany more live in substandard conditions. With more than onemillion formal sector jobs lost since , the full-throttle moveby the ANC to privatize the heavily unionized public sector willcause many more jobs to disappear soon. However much theANC wishes it could constitute a willing consumer cultureamenable to foreign investors, the only thing thus far beingconsumed are the township residents themselves. The govern-ment and its police can do only so much to contain this politi-cal pressure cooker.53 The tensions running through Johannes-burg exemplify the troubling reality found around the world asneoliberalizing governments face mounting public protest.54

The changes that have occurred in the townships were inmany ways the mirror image of the World Summit agenda. Asa follow-up to the momentous Rio Earth Summit in , themission of the Johannesburg Summit was to assess the accom-plishments and failures of the past ten years and to agree on aprogram for the future. The agenda emphasized five basic is-sues: water, energy, health, agriculture, and biodiversity. Aftera series of preparatory committee meetings held throughoutthe world, attended by government officials, staff from majorintergovernmental agencies, NGOs, and international environ-

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mental organizations, the final WSSD document nonethelessread like both the latest World Bank policy paper and a wishlist for the world’s largest service sector firms. That such aseemingly diverse set of actors should carve out a documentthat is so familiar, so full of “common sense” to many sectorsand professional classes, including environmentalists and de-velopment activists, should give us pause.

Conclusion

The economic and ethical arguments for Bank-style develop-ment are always changing based on pressures from diverse po-litical forces, ranging from the Bank’s Northern country andcorporate clients to antiprivatization activists cropping upacross the postcolonial map. But whichever way the windblows, there is an ever-widening cadre of professionals readyto learn and a new set of Bank training courses available. Whatis so remarkable is the rapidity with which the Bank’s new po-litical rationalities shift and often contradict one another, yetcirculate and become legitimate. In this chapter, I have soughtto highlight the rise of a particular eco-rational logic that hassprouted up from the activities of Bank-facilitated professionalnetworks. This logic has circulated within training centers,gained authority and voice in high-echelon circles of policy-makers, and has congealed as a policy framework implementedthrough existing political-economic imperatives managed bythe Bank, such as structural and environmental adjustmentregimes. Even though disparate actors represent vastly differ-ent perspectives on the role that private capital should have inthe control of public water supplies and services, in practice aconsensus has temporarily emerged on the way that public

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water should be managed—a fragile consensus orchestratedthrough World Bank technologies of power and knowledge.

In the case of water privatization, the shocking tragedythat much of the world lacks access to affordable and cleanwater is an image that may create new opportunities in devel-opment though it may have little to do with ultimately quench-ing those basic needs (Barlow and Clarke ; Bayliss andHall ; Grusky ; Hall ; Hall et al. ). The “prob-lem” of water scarcity for the world’s poor has been analyzedby the World Bank as one in which the public sector has failedto deliver and has therefore prevented development from “tak-ing off” and the economy from modernizing. If the state can-not deliver something as basic as water and sanitation, the ar-gument goes, it is a strong indication of a general failure ofpublic-sector capacity. Water scarcity becomes simultaneouslyindicative of a problem of poverty, of modernization, and ofgovernance. The third world state is typically portrayed by theBank and its partners as stuck in “arrested development,” oftendepicted as corrupt, inept, and politicized. In this colonialframing, the state is the main hindrance to a country’s suc-cessful integration into the global economy and hence to theeconomic fruits that such integration supposedly bears.

Within the interpretative framework of “pro-poor” de-velopment, the best decision the Bank can make is to insist thatas a precondition of future access to capital, the state mustclean house and package degraded public assets for sale on theinternational market. Such services and goods as housing,water, electricity, and sanitation can no longer be left to decay,for their inefficiency affects not only the health of the poormajority, but the whole country’s ability to participate in theglobal economy. For many reasons, not least a neoliberal ethics

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of poverty reduction and ecological sustainability, this newpolitical rationality of development views public-sector indus-tries, utilities, and goods as best serving the public only afterthey are partially or fully privatized. In this scenario, the stateshould regulate but not run the public service.

Yet with the sale or lease of a public good comes morethan simply a privatized service; alongside it comes a whole setof postcolonial institutional forces that intervenes in state-citizen relations and North-South dynamics. The World Bank’spolicy campaign for water privatization has been much morethan a leasing program for dilapidated public plumbing andsewer infrastructure. Rather, it has marked the entrance of newtransnational codes of conduct and procedures of arbitration,accounting, banking, and billing; a new ethics of compensa-tion; new expectations of the role of the public sphere; and thenormalization of transnational corporations as the local pro-vider of public services and goods. It also marks the apoc-ryphal last stake into the heart of nationalist revolutionarypolitics in the ex-colonies.

Within the world of development, a consensus hasemerged claiming that private firms can do no worse than theinept state, and will more likely do much better. Those whoconstitute the world’s transnational water policy networks be-lieve that the poor are already paying above-market rates forwater from private water tankers and taps when public systemsare inadequate. To European-based water firms and WorldBank economists, this evidence indicates that the poor (as wellas the middle classes) represent a large population of “willingcustomers” eager to be provided with an efficient and reliableservice, something the private tankers and public taps appar-ently cannot offer, especially on the scale required.

Privatizing Water

In today’s dominant discourse, the distinction betweenpublic and private is assumed to be sharp and clear, such thatone can make the sweeping generalization that the world’s pastand present water problems are due to the public sector.Yet eventhe most conventional historical readings of the world’s largestwater projects—e.g., the Hoover Dam, Suez Canal, Indus Riverwaters projects—reveal that this distinction is a specious oneand that, in fact, the public-private distinction has always beenblurred. The world’s largest water projects have been jointpublic-private ventures with states typically the lead investorsand with private firms doing the infrastructural and contractwork and receiving most of the benefits they provide. Whetherthey are feeding industrial farming, mining, or energy produc-tion, most grand water schemes have had highly subsidized statesupport in order that a minority elite could profit (Cronon ;McCully ; Scott ; Worster ). Indeed, often it is thevery same actors who are generating and awarding the contracts(in their roles as state officials) as receiving them (in their rolesas goods and services providers, investors, or landowners).

Many of the world’s largest water projects have also beeninextricably tied to state-building and imperial military proj-ects, a two-for-one territorial and capital accumulation pro-cess, such as the Indus Water Treaty of and the subse-quent Indira Gandhi Canal that created a massive irrigationmoat in an otherwise porous desert border between Pakistanand India, or the damming of the Colorado River to ensurethat Mexico would not get any water overflow from U.S. rivers(Goldman ; McCully ; Worster ). In these cases,public utilities have been set up as quasi-public ventures, withprivate firms managing or leasing them, often with guaranteedprofit rates that are voted on by “public” oversight boards.

Privatizing Water

Finally, it is important to note that in the colonies vastamounts of valuable “public” natural resources (includingwater, watersheds, and river systems) were controlled by “pri-vate” trading companies awarded contracts by “public” Euro-pean royalty and imperial states. Zambia, for example, was colonized by the British South Africa Company, a privatemultinational corporation led by Cecil Rhodes (Ferguson andGupta , p. ). Today, Zambia along with many other Af-rican nations are ruled “in significant part, by transnationalorganizations that are not in themselves governments, butwork together with powerful First World states within a globalsystem of nation-states that Frederick Cooper has character-ized as ‘internationalized imperialism’” (Ferguson and Gupta). So, how can we say without batting an eye that the pub-lic has failed such that, now, it is time for the private sector totake over the experiment? It requires the violence of abstrac-tion and the denial of colonial-imperial history to derive sucha simplified narrative (Scott ).

In sum, the relation and identities of development NGOs,state professionals, firms and business councils, and interna-tional aid agencies should not be taken for granted, as their ge-nealogies and biographies do matter. Who is billed as local andwho is transnational, public or private, charitable or profit-able, above, below, or in the civil middle? The categories arehighly problematic and politically strategic. Not only is therealm of newly emerging civil society romanticized as the spaceof progress and ingenuity, but the process of constituting civilsociety—or transnational networking—is a “globalization proj-ect” that has received tremendous philanthropic support fromelite sectors within the North and become uncritically assumedas the inevitable social process of agile and flexible globaliza-tion (Florini ). Important questions to pursue are: why

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has the process of networking become the privileged site oftransnational social relations for political civil-society actors(Riles ), and what other types of political processes areerased, undermined, and subordinated by this privileging? Net-workers, it seems, are best able to generate and work in spacesof just-in-time, flexible, deterritorialized, and depoliticizedexpert realms. The instant expertise certification one earns asa member of the jet-setting transnational class of networkerssuggests we need to give greater attention to this power/knowledge nexus. The largest international conference ever,the World Summit, reflected the ultimate accomplishmentof World Bank-financed transnational policy networking.Making this claim is, however, not to suggest that its outcomeis singular or overdetermined. By focusing on the remarkablerise and legitimacy of the powerful transnational policy net-work promoting global water reform, I have tried to shed lighton the increasingly significant phenomenon of this type ofelite policy networking and its basis in the Bank’s expandingregime of green neoliberalism. Although Western media re-peatedly question the “representation” and “accountability” ofthe green-haired anarchists who demonstrate outside of majorinternational finance meetings, our attention needs to turn tothe question of who comprises the “official” transnational ex-pert networks, interrogate from where their authority derives,what the institutional effects of their extraordinary rise andinfluence in the global political economy are, and, finally, theprocess by which this enormous global influence of the WorldBank gets (re)produced. The political stakes in such inquirieshave never been higher, and the immanent possibilities neveras grand.

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VIIConclusion:

Can It Be Shut Down?

ew moments in history rival this moment, a timewhen so many diverse people have come together to

challenge the existence of a single institution. Suchworldwide unity is a direct consequence of the Bank’s

enormous reach and highly invasive work practices. This op-positional political momentum could only have been pro-duced within the milieu of the Bank’s latest developmentregime of green neoliberalism—a regime that is embedded inand emboldened by the rapacious accumulation strategies ofglobal capital. Although the Bank’s earlier regime of structuraladjustment and debt management was draconian and poverty-inducing, it was an insufficient “hothouse” for such mass-basedoppositional politics. The World Bank has offered a gift to thepeople of the world that it might wish it had not.

The beauty of the Bank and the IMF’s structural adjust-ment interventions was that they occurred behind closeddoors among a handful of men, restructuring the inner work-

ings of government financial and budgetary structures. Tomost people, structural adjustment was an abstraction and amystery. In spite of widespread food riots and marches by theunemployed in major third world cities throughout the s,the opportunity to build cross-sectional movements was lack-ing largely because it was difficult to understand precisely thesource of these oppressive changes. A huge wave of job losscoupled with the elimination of major social programs oftenlead to the overthrow of one government and its replacementwith another. But the successor inherited the same mess: theburden of generating revenues to repay old debts by firingpublic workers and selling off public-sector enterprises andgoods. In the s, mass-based despair did not translate intomass-based movements working across social groups and na-tional boundaries. It was only when this painful and repressiveregime of “fiscal austerity” was succeeded by a much moregenerative regime that mass mobilizations began to erupt inconcert. Dubbed “a movement of movements,” oppositionalpolitics arose in a highly innovative and unpredictable fashion(Mertes ). Whereas the “battle in Seattle” at the WTOmeetings surprised everyone and gained unparalleled world-wide media coverage, it was only one of a series of protests thatclosed down major cities around the world, with millions ofpeople hunkering down with determination to protest a mul-titude of interrelated neoliberal policies.

In its surveys of borrowing countries—a job typicallyperformed by management firms like Arthur Andersen andPricewaterhouseCoopers—the World Bank found health ser-vices, water aquifers and water services, fisheries, garbage andparking fee collection, cable TV and telephone services, na-tional airports and breweries, and richly diverse forests seri-ously undervalued and potentially attractive to foreign capital

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investors in search of higher profit margins. In effect, theWorld Bank argued that every place has its own special andhidden treasures that are poorly managed by local popula-tions, states, and markets. Together with local professionals,the Bank dressed up these public goods and services for sale oninternational markets. While this strategy became palatable to the professional classes enlisted in this neoliberal project,many other social groups found it to be grand larceny. Whengovernment resources stop flowing to localities, people oftenchallenge the party in power. But when the water gets turnedoff, and the controller of the water tap comes from France orthe United States, people see the translocal nature of both theproblem and the solution. Success stories like the Cocha-bamba “water wars,” pitting the people against the GoliathBechtel, have mobilized similar communities worldwide.

These social movements are anything but ephemeral;their durability parallels the neoliberal structures they oppose.Activists whom I have interviewed describe their personal andorganizational histories as deeply rooted in major politicaltransformations, with their antecedents in the struggles againstapartheid, military authoritarianism, and Western imperial-ism. Experienced activists stumbled upon the World Bank as afocal point for their politics because of the growing role of theBank, and the IMF, in their lives. Some, for instance, followedthe path similar to the Thai environmentalist who started outorganizing his neighbors against a dam being built in his homeprovince then “scaled up” to challenge international financeinstitutions once he traced the relations of power infused inthe provincial dam to the World Bank and the Asian Develop-ment Bank. The husband of a Filipina activist was murderedwhile the couple participated in the anti-Marcos student

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movement. After the Philippines dictator Marcos fell frompower, she turned her attention to the issue of indebtednessthat plagued small farmers and farming communities, a cam-paign that expanded nationally with the spread of the oppres-sive effects of structural adjustment. In the process, she hashelped organize a transnational antidebt campaign that strivesto reform the global financial system. These are not fair-weather protestors on spring break from their real careers.They are not planning to retreat with the introduction of newWorld Bank reforms.

What does this political landscape tell us about the fu-ture trajectory of the Bank and its detractors? Since /, theBank has been compelled to redirect its finances to a handfulof countries supporting the U.S. war. In , the World Bankput together loans for an unprecedented $ million to Pak-istan, $. billion to India, and $. billion to Turkey, much ofwhich appears unconnected to plans the Bank had before Sep-tember . Countries in southern Africa suffering from hor-rible famine received little financial support. In and ,the Bank’s flagship investments have been Afghanistan andIraq. The future of the Bank seems to be in the mopping up ofthe destruction caused by the U.S. military, the rebuilding ofsocieties in the name of antiterrorism, development, and de-mocracy. It is certainly an important historical rupture that for the Bank will require innovation and change, but routedthrough its pre-existing regime of green neoliberalism. Thenew is always produced from the enduring old. Some facets,such as environmental and social assessments, have been jetti-soned in the rush to “rebuild” before people’s movements or-ganize themselves and propose alternative plans for publicgoods, such as oil reserves and river basins. Such an imperial

Conclusion

project led by the World Bank to win the hearts and minds ofthe people of Iraq and Afghanistan—and Iran, Syria, NorthKorea too?—will likely provoke a bloody future.

What about the oppositional forces to the World Bank?As the Bank moves into Iraq, it will be guided by a cadre ofhigh-rolling corporate interests (e.g., Halliburton, Bechtel, theU.S. oil industry) that will reveal more clearly than ever themyths of development and the twentieth century’s “warsagainst poverty.” It can only engender a broader base of oppo-sition to the hypocrisies that built up World Bank power overthe past sixty years. It will embolden and focus activist organi-zations that work on transnational political issues, building onboth the successes of antineoliberal movements as well as theproliferation of antiwar campaigns that mobilized millions ofpeople in and in opposition to U.S. military aggres-sion. But it will also empower people working on issues of localor regional significance, as they make connections between theBank’s work in Iraq and at home. If the next set of priorities forthe Bank is to clean up after the U.S. government, it may markthe death knell of the perception of the World Bank’s project ofdevelopment as humanitarian and apolitical. To survive suchan agenda shift, the Bank will need widespread support from itsemployees, and professional allies in universities, on Wall Streetand from its borrowers. A global “coalition of the willing” forsuch imperialist interventions by the Bank is, in my opinion,highly unlikely. Like the U.S. military, the Bank might have togo it alone. But can it? The Bank stands on the precipice of acrisis of legitimation due to the type of global institutionalstature that it has been working so hard to create, one builtupon allegiances cultivated across sectors, interests, and na-tional borders. Simply put, the Bank’s hegemony as a global in-

Conclusion

stitution is thoroughly dependent on the support of others.But to be the top global institution in a world of U.S. empirerequires that it be, perhaps more than ever before, an intimatecollaborator. Does it have any choice but to work on the behalfof the United States? In expanding its imperial nature, theWorld Bank would be planting the seeds of its own demise.

Irrespective of how the Bank acts in these particular cir-cumstances, the opposition to the World Bank is becoming increasingly robust, geographically dispersed, and durable.Oppositional activists have learned where the Bank’s vulnera-bilities lie. Using tactics from the international antiapartheidmovement, for example, the World Bank Bond Boycott haspersuaded institutional investors to disinvest from Bank bonds.Since its start in April , nearly ninety institutional in-vestors have committed either to disinvest or not further investin Bank bonds. Boycotters include U.S. cities, such as Milwau-kee, San Francisco, Boulder, and Cambridge; investment firms,such as ASN Bank (the Netherlands), Citizen Funds, Calvertgroup, and Parnassus Fund; and church-based and union-based pensions funds, such as the . million member Team-sters and the . million member Service Employees Interna-tional Union.

The Bank is also vulnerable to the default of its largestborrowers. In late , Argentina stopped payments of morethan $ million to the World Bank, leading Moody’s In-vestor Services and others to express grave reservations aboutthe value of Bank bonds. Moody’s and Bear Stearns in LatinAmerica commented in different publications that Brazil waslikely to default, and Russia and Indonesia could also defaulton Bank repayments as well. These four countries owe almost percent of the Bank’s gross outstanding loans. These de-

Conclusion

faults would have powerful ripple effects through both bor-rower and investor communities. Social movements through-out Latin America, Asia, and Africa are pushing their nationalgovernments to refuse payments to the World Bank and IMFand to kick them out of their countries; they see current in-equitable development debt relations as an affront to nationalsovereignty and an obstacle to national development. A fewwell-timed political victories could send tidal waves throughthe international financial system and create many new oppor-tunities for social movements to create alternative structures.

Reflections from Political Activists

The gamut of people challenging the World Bank’s latest re-gime is wide, ranging from some World Bank professional staff

and consultants working on retainer, to critically minded gov-ernment officials, to disenfranchised development subjects.This odd assembly is brought together by a desire to changethe parameters of development. The spectrum of their politi-cal interests is equally broad, ranging from the desire to trans-form the contours of development—that is, to make it moregreen, democratic, just, equitable—to a commitment to dis-pose of development by refusing to allow the dominant insti-tutions and the ruling elite to determine, in Gramsci’s terms,“the questions around which the struggle rages.” As develop-ment is so deeply embedded and articulated within largerstructures of power, the latter goal is no easy task.

In this final section, I offer two short excerpts from a se-ries of interviews with Southern activist leaders who are deeplyengaged in the politics of the World Bank and neoliberalism toillustrate the depth and breadth of anti-Bank activism. Work-

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Conclusion

Young South African protestor at the World Summit on SustainableDevelopment, Johannesburg, . Photo by author.

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

ing together, the transnational networks of activists havehelped empower Southern legislators to pull out of the pivotal Cancún WTO meetings, for instance, and to force a sub-stantial retreat of the World Bank and the water conglomeratesfrom the cities of Manila, Atlanta, Cochabamba, Montreal,Rio, Lodz, Panama City, Grenoble, and possibly also Jakarta,Johannesburg, and Akra. Here, by quoting directly from inter-views I conducted with activists, I will highlight a few themesthat emerged. The first excerpt comes from a Haitian activist,who explains how he and others became focused on the WorldBank and yet how difficult it is to live and organize in crisis-ridden Haiti. I quote him at length not to reveal the tragic consequences of neoliberalism in Haiti or its historical roots,but rather because his particular mode of interpretation andanalysis can help us understand the way activists are carvingout their own “war of position.”“Michel” (a pseudonym, as areall names used in this chapter) is fully aware that the WorldBank does not stand on its own, nor do he and his colleagues.The story line cannot be reduced to the neoliberal World Bank on the one side and socially conscious activists on theother; history does not unfold so simply. Michel situates thepresent struggle within a past of complex forces and events.His narrative makes us aware of the historical conjuncturewhere neoliberalism takes root and how the same institutionsthat imposed or helped to support previous oppressive re-gimes have lined up behind this one—in the case of Haiti,the U.S. military and corporate and political interests from theUnited States and France. The people of Haiti have experiencedworse—slavery, dictatorship, and military invasion. With sup-port from around the world, they have the potential to over-come the worst of the neoliberal forces under which they cur-rently suffer.1

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Michel, an Organizer from the Central Union of Electricity Workers of Haiti

I was raised in a modest home and from early on Isaw a lot of injustice in the most direct way. Manyof us from the South were born under dictatorship,so I’m quite aware of how dictatorships work andwho finances them. I developed a critical conscious-ness at a young age as a result. To understand howa movement against the World Bank emerged inHaiti, it is important to remember that Haiti wasthe first country of blacks to fight for independenceand win; Haiti is a country with a history of mili-tancy. When the United States invaded in , thepeople resisted until , when the United Statespulled out. But Haiti continued to be pillaged bythe Western powers as it supplied most of the world’ssugar, and coffee and cacao as well. One effect ofthis history of enslavement and resistance is thatthe people of Haiti have always been radical. Wehad soldiers fighting in Savannah, Georgia, againstslavery in the United States!

In , our dictator Duvalier died, and his sonBaby Doc took over. The Bank and IMF had thepower to force him to liberalize the economy; by, he backed a neoliberal plan for the economy.As a consequence, U.S. goods flooded our marketsand destroyed our local industries, from pig pro-duction to rice cultivation. The Bank had two ob-jectives: first, to dismantle the agriculture sector,which it did by forcing our government to importcheaper U.S. goods subsidized by the U.S. govern-

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ment. And now, the Bank is privatizing our publicenterprises: power, health, education, and water, allare critical to our survival. My union organizesagainst the World Bank because we are public-sec-tor workers, working for the electricity sector, andour jobs are at greatest risk under this privatizationprogram. So our objective is to inform the publicthat these changes are not coming from the heavensbut from the World Bank and its people. Becauseelectricity is so important to the future of Haiti,we feel we’re in the mouth of the lion with thisstruggle. Right after the coup d’état in , the firstunion attacked by the state was the electricity union.The return of the Aristide government was contin-gent upon conditions agreed upon in Paris. Aris-tide could not come back to power until he agreedto the Paris Plan, and the heart of the plan was pri-vatization, currency devaluation, the elimination oftariffs on imports, and to fire people from the pub-lic sector. The nine most important enterprises inthe country were to be sold. This is all expressedformally in World Bank documents: reduce all so-cial services! The IMF, the World Bank, the minis-ter of finance, the WTO, and U.S. representatives,including some from U.S. firms, were all in Parisand in agreement. After he signed the agreement,Aristide was escorted back into power in Haiti bythousands of U.S. marines. But his power could fitinto a small box; he had no more power; Americansand the World Bank held all the power.

What happened next? Phantom firms were cre-ated with Haitian elites and U.S. corporate money

Conclusion

and Canadian people. The electricity sector wassabotaged as the state stopped funding it so that itcould barely perform. Without electricity, the coun-try was in real crisis. While we have been trying tofight the corruption in the sector and bring in de-cent managers, the World Bank has been trying toconvince the government that because of such badperformance, the sector should be privatized. Since, half the public employees of the nation havebeen laid off.

Besides our unions, we have NGO networks,such as PAPDA [The Haitian Platform of Advocacyfor an Alternative Development], working againstneoliberalism and privatization, and for develop-ment alternatives. But things are so bad in Haitithat the movement itself struggles to survive. Oneof its leaders recently committed suicide. The move-ment is evaporating as the situation for organizershas become grave. The last big activity we had wasa hunger strike at the National Cathedral, whichended when we were all arrested. I would say thereare three main reasons why the movement is fail-ing. First, people have lost trust in everything. Sec-ond, the economic situation is so dismal, so des-perate, that people can no longer work for politicalchange. They put all the energy into just trying tosurvive. They have no jobs, no money, no food.They spend their time just meeting their most basicneeds, like trying to grow vegetable gardens. Third,the military repression is getting worse for protes-tors. I’ve spent a lot of my life in prison; I’ve sufferedfrom torture. Many of my colleagues are very weak,

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despondent, and feel helpless. The country is indeep trouble.

But those of us who have come to Washington forthese protests are getting new energy from otherpeople who also suffer from Bank programs. I havebeen promoting the idea of an international tribunalfor the people who have committed these crimesagainst humanity. Just as we are trying Pinochet, andwould have [tried] Hitler, we should do the same forthe people at the World Bank.

Michel’s perspective is clearly rooted in what HowardZinn calls “people’s history” (Zinn ), which is quite dis-tinct from the history conjured by the World Bank and devel-opment experts, of a country that alone “lacks” the ability todevelop. In Michel’s analysis, the inequities and deprivationsof Haitian life are seen as the result of power struggles, ratherthan through technical questions of economics and markets. Itrecognizes the transnational character of Haiti’s past and pres-ent, rather than deploying the “national model” of inquiry thatis dominant in development. Michel’s explanation of sufferingis not based on Haiti’s “lacks,” deficiencies, mistakes, bad plan-ning, or corruption but on its structural relations with Frenchand American geopolitical interests. Finally, Michel makesconnections between Haiti’s national elites and the promotersof these inequitable divisions—the World Bank and IMF. Herecognizes historical ruptures and continuities, and he under-stands that the recent neoliberal deluge has a particular historywith particular consequences. Hence, he has an acute sense ofwhy he, a public-sector worker and union organizer, is engagedin transnational struggles against the World Bank and its latestdevelopment regime of green neoliberalism.

Conclusion

Haiti’s dismal situation can be generalized only so far;after all, the World Bank is most able to practice strong-armtactics in countries where its actions are matched by U.S.strong-arm tactics. The situation in Zimbabwe, a country onthe verge of complete disorder, with regular street riots andmilitary repression, offers a different picture.

James, an Organizer with the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development

In the s I worked in ecumenical support ser-vices and with the antiapartheid movement. Thechurches were active in the front-line states support-ing liberation movements in Namibia and South Af-rica. After independence, all of a sudden, we foundourselves without work or focus. By , Zim-babwe had a new economic structural adjustmentpolicy. The government went all out to sell the pro-gram to the public, without much local criticism.But since thirty African countries had already ex-perienced it, with disastrous effects, there was a lotwe could learn from others. Economies had suf-fered, currencies were devalued, there was disin-vestment in education and health services, andmany people lost jobs. We found ourselves with anew political agenda.

As we became aware of the situation, we starteda policy analysis training program for midlevelmanagers in the NGO sector, to train ourselves andalso engage decision makers in our government, aswell as people inside the Bank and IMF, and to re-late our experiences and come up with alternatives.

Conclusion

From this, the Debt and Development Coalitionemerged, which is a network of twenty-three or-ganizations associated with the Jubilee cam-paign for debt relief.

In contrast to a growing NGO sector that ques-tioned these new policies, we also had our nationalcollaborators. The World Bank, for instance, didnot go to parliament to talk to [elected officials],but straight to the Finance Ministry, and the tech-nocrats. The Bank and IMF worked to create a tokennation-state here, unable to protect its people. If youlook at who are the top officials in the ministries,they are not homegrown, but brewed in D.C. andparachuted down into Zimbabwe. Low-level civilservants were implementing policies without under-standing them at all. The World Bank works veryaggressively here and engages in very little dialogue.Our NGO network has taken the lead in creatingpublic dialogues on these policies and offering al-ternatives.

Our earliest struggles in Zimbabwe were politi-cal: national independence and apartheid. Now, wesee this struggle as economic. We have been com-partmentalizing our struggles in the past and weshould not. The World Bank says we can have ourcountry and our political power but we can’t haveeconomic power. The values these policies promoteare individualism and competition instead of shar-ing and solidarity. So, in fact, it’s a much broaderstruggle than an economic one.

This struggle today is unique because peoplearound the world are not just offering solidarity, as

Conclusion

in the antiapartheid movement. This struggle is mystruggle and it is your struggle. It is global, and so isthe movement. In Zimbabwe we used to say that weare a depoliticized society. But the World Bank haspoliticized us. People are now taking to the streetsas never before. So thank you World Bank, you havebrought us back to the streets, and I think we arebetter prepared than before. And thanks to theglobal movement, our resolve is growing.

James interprets politics in Zimbabwe in two historicallydistinct periods—the unified struggle against apartheid andfor national independence, and today’s struggle against neo-liberal capitalism. Although people were caught off guard bythe rise of neoliberalism, the leadership in Zimbabwe is nowquite vulnerable to mass rejection and revolt. Finally, Jamesnotes that the struggle cannot be reduced to a single phenom-enon or analytical frame, such as the political or the economic.Society is being transformed in such profound ways—cul-tural, ecological, religious, social—that to reduce it to an eco-nomic question misses out on the multiple and diverse waysthat people experience neoliberal capitalist development.

In neighboring South Africa, an organizer from the So-weto Electricity Crisis Committee reflects upon an importantpoint that resonates with what others have told me: that themovement against green neoliberalism has exploded in sizebecause of the challenge to people’s basic rights to livelihood.

We have had workshops on the World Bank, theIMF, the WTO and we’ve got strong people work-ing on these issues. We’ve set up structures for theCampaign against Neoliberalism in South Africa.

Conclusion

But in the end we had to get down to the most basicquestions: What are the problems facing people onthe ground that unite us most? In Soweto, it’s elec-tricity. In another area, it is water. We’ve learned thatyou have to actually organize—to talk to people,door-to-door; to connect with the masses. But youhave to build with a vision. From Day One we arguedthat electricity cuts are the result of privatization.Privatization is the result of GEAR [national neo-liberal policy]. GEAR reflects the demands of globalcapital, which the ANC is bent on pushing through.We cannot finally win this immediate struggle un-less we win that greater one. (Ngwane )

Examples from Latin America suggest the rise of a newform of national politics. In Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, andMexico, indigenous peoples’ movements have rejected con-ventional notions of national politics, and are rearticulatingthe meaning of nation, borders, and territory. Indigenous Ma-puche activists, for example, are remapping their relations andterritorial rights across the Argentina-Chile border, stirring uppolitics in the Southern Cone. Breaking out into armed insur-rection on the eve of one critical neoliberal turn, the signing ofthe North American Free Trade Agreement, the Zapatistashave forced the Mexican government and people to seriouslyrethink the nation-state and the role of indigenous peoples insociety (Collier and Quaratiello ; Nash ). As a way tocounter this subversive discourse on indigeneity, which eschewsnational borders, neoliberal land policies, and internationalagreements and bodies, the Inter-American Development Bankand World Bank are pumping money into “indigenous educa-tion” institutes and courses that try to take back from social

Conclusion

movements their radical framing of “indigenous” knowledge,history, and politics.2 In other words, as social movements ar-ticulate a new politics in terms of economic and cultural in-justice and alternatives embedded in struggles over meaning,history, culture, nature, territory, spirit, and kinship, the WorldBank has jumped in to offer its own programs on indigenousrights, albeit linked to projects of development capital. In acomplementary fashion, cross-class coalitions are formingaround antineoliberal politics in Argentina, where the middleclass has suffered much under recent neoliberal shifts. In Bo-livia, the “water wars” have succeeded in more than the expul-sion of Bechtel and its control over municipal water supplies;they have spurred new municipal political formations basedon direct democracy and powered by a coalition of urban pro-fessionals and rural irrigators, men and women, trade union-ists and farm laborers, politicians and activists. As one of theorganizers declared in a public speech, “The mayor can nevermake such a backroom deal with a multinational corporationagain!” No decision is now made, he insisted, without the ac-tive participation of La Coordinadora, the antiprivatizationcoalition. In sum, aggressive World Bank policies have trig-gered unanticipated democratizing responses.

And yet, we should not romanticize the battle socialmovement activists face. Murder—indeed massacre—is acommon prospect for people who challenge such power.Moreover, as Michel’s comments show, mobilizing people isdifficult when most of their energy must be used for basic sur-vival. Solidarity across class and national boundaries thereforebecomes essential. But one must not idealize transnationalnetworking either. Well-funded and well-staffed transnationalenvironmental groups, for instance, can be found co-optingand even closing down local environmental groups, convert-

Conclusion

ing them from small populist organizations rooted in radicaland anticapitalist politics into their own large technocraticNGOs. When the discourse of environmentally sustainabledevelopment becomes the rallying cry for NGOs and multi-lateral banks, together promoting a global enclosures move-ment or what geographer David Harvey calls “accumulationby dispossession,” then we know that this green neoliberal turnis generating dangerous consequences (Harvey ).

Have these protests sparked a world-historic shift in op-positional politics? Are they laying the foundation for new po-litical institutions? Do they have the power to shut down theBank? The World Bank is not working merely through decep-tion: the Bank is deeply embedded in multi-tentacled struc-tures of power, culture, and capital. Even if every activist acrossthe globe came to Washington, D.C., to protest, the Bankwould likely remain standing. Yet it is also possible to specu-late that just as the World Bank arose from the ashes of WorldWar II and remained a fairly minor actor until the s, itcould return to those ashes as a result of persistent revolt andcross-class coalitions boycotting and confronting their politi-cal leadership’s agreements with the Bank. Perhaps the Bank’smain source of capital—large institutional investors—wouldprefer to switch to more secure, less volatile investments.Without legitimacy, there would be no capital to lend; withoutcapital to lend, the Bank could conceivably become irrelevant.

The global political economy has changed substantiallysince the s, and the role of Wall Street and Washingtonpower brokers has expanded and intensified immeasurably(Gowan ). Today, the policies the Bank thrusts upon sov-ereign states in the South and in Eastern Europe work in partto sustain this highly inequitable set of power relations. Al-though Northern firms and interests could produce an alter-

Conclusion

native vehicle to do their work, it would require a level of le-gitimation that could not be generated overnight. Indeed, themain argument of this book is that the World Bank has culti-vated institutional and class-based support for its global agendaof development over many years, with hard cultural work andpowerful capital forces and incentives spread across the globe.We know that this type of complex power regime does not reside just within the New York-Washington corridor. None-theless, North-South power dynamics would look profoundlydifferent—indeed, become much more vulnerable—withoutthe World Bank and its development regimes. It would be avery different world.

We need a much deeper understanding of the develop-ment myths we choose to believe and of the ways we partici-pate in and consent to the forces that constitute North-Southpower relations today. Recognizing the roles we play in repro-ducing the structures that are the bedrock of our highly ex-ploitative and commodified world is the first step to a moreemancipatory one; democratizing and socializing these power-ful capitalist structures becomes the obvious second step. An-other world is indeed possible.

Conclusion

Notes

Chapter .Introduction

. As Timothy Mitchell notes of the effects of Bank/IMF policies inEgypt: “It is not uncommon, among the proponents as well as critics of the[IMF/World Bank] reforms, to admit that structural adjustment and theopening of markets may be accompanied by political repression . . . an un-foreseen, unfortunate, intermittent, and probably temporary side effect ofthe shocks that accompany the expansion of the global market” (Mitchell). Mitchell documents the repression, violence, censorship, and humil-iation that are everyday effects resulting from the alchemy of military rule,U.S. foreign policy, and Bank/IMF policies.

. John Williamson, who coined the phrase “Washington Consensus,”notes that the consensus consisted of ten basic axioms that formed “the com-mon core of wisdom embraced by all serious economists” (Pincus and Win-ters ; Williamson ).

. While at the World Bank, Stiglitz () was shocked and dismayedby his peers at the IMF who told him that countries needed to “feel the pain”in order to recover.

. I challenge this interpretation in chapter , with a different readingof Bank and IMF history.

. I focus on postdevelopment scholarship because I share much ofthe same intellectual foundation, with the exceptions highlighted in the nextsection.

. This information is based on an interview with a senior environ-mental officer, World Bank, .

. See the Web sites of Center for Economic Justice (www.economicjustice.net) and World Bank Bond Boycott (www.worldbankboycott.org) forupdates and background on the global campaign to boycott Bank bond in-vestment, with international unions, city and state legislative bodies, invest-ment firms, and umbrella church organizations participating.

Chapter .The Rise of the Bank

. The authority of Treasury, State, and Wall Street concerning thepolicies and the trajectory of the Bank are unmistakenly clear in the collec-tion of oral histories of early senior Bank officials, archived as the WorldBank Oral History Project in the Columbia University library and at theWorld Bank.

. The World Bank Group consists of five associated institutions: theInternational Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), estab-lished , members; the International Finance Corporation (IFC), es-tablished , members; the International Development Association(IDA), established , members; the International Centre for Settle-ment of Investment Disputes (ICSID), established , members; theMultilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), established ,

members. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTABOUTUS/,,contentMDK:~menuPK:~pagePK:~piPK:

~theSitePK:,.html. The World Bank is actually composed of a groupof five agencies. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Develop-ment (IBRD), established in , is the main branch of the Bank, lendingmoney to “creditworthy” borrowing countries carrying lower-than-marketinterest rates. But because Wall Street from the beginning had deemed mostthird world countries as “uncreditworthy,” IBRD lending started off slow.

In , the Bank established the International Development Associ-ation (IDA) for those borrowers that could not qualify for IBRD loans, withthe intention of helping them become creditworthy. Borrowers were offeredno-interest loans with a small (. percent) administrative charge. Somemiddle-income countries have “graduated” out of the IDA and have becomefull-fledged IBRD borrowers; many lower-income countries continue to re-ceive a mix of IBRD and IDA loans. The International Finance Corporation(IFC) was established in as the largest multilateral source of loan andequity financing for private-sector projects; it has blossomed into a majorglobal player only over the past decade, as the world of development shiftedinto this neoliberal privatization phase. The International Centre for Settle-

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ment of Investment Disputes (ICSID) was established in to settle dis-putes outside national court systems. Over the past few years, a steady flowof transnational corporations have been using the ICSID arbitration processto resolve disputes they have with Bank borrowing countries. Finally, theMultilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) came into existence in and has also recently become quite active in providing investment in-surance and political risk guarantees for high-stakes investments in thirdworld countries. For the sake of clarity, I chose to focus on the World Bankas a single entity and specifically emphasize the work of the IBRD, the mainlending and policymaking arm of the World Bank Group.

. World Bank presidents: Eugene Meyer (six months, June toNovember ), John McCloy (two years, March to April ); EugeneBlack (fourteen years, July to ); George Woods (five years, January to March ); Robert McNamara (thirteen years, April to June); A. W. Clausen (five years, July to ); Barber B. Conable (fiveyears, July to August ); Lewis T. Preston (four years, September

to May ); James Wolfensohn (ten years, June to May ) (WorldBank ).

. See, e.g., Keynes’s quotation in this chapter’s opening epigraph.. From the start, questions arose about the Bank’s purpose and in-

tentions, compounded by reasonable concerns about its ability and legiti-macy to lend money for a concept as unstable as “development” in the newlyinvented role of a “world” bank. All of this resulted in heavy constraints in itsgrowth by the founders themselves—the United States and England.

. See also Hurni ; Mason and Asher .. Mason and Asher, in their respected history of the World Bank,

reviewed the first twenty-five years of the Bank in these terms: “[Bank leader-ship] recognized that investments of many kinds were needed for develop-ment but frequently implied that one kind was more essential than anyother. The relative ease with which [the Bank] could finance electric power,transportation, and economic infrastructure projects . . . made it an expo-nent of the thesis that public utility projects, accompanied by financial sta-bility and the encouragement of private investment, could do more than al-most anything to trigger development. . . . At the same time the Bank was ledto eschew certain fields traditionally open to public investment, even in thehighly developed free-enterprise economies: namely, sanitation, education,and health facilities. . . . The contribution of [these] social overhead projectsto increased production, however, is less measurable and direct than that ofpower plants. . . . Financing them, moreover, might open the door to vastlyincreased demands for loans and raise hackles anew in Wall Street about the‘soundness’ of the Bank’s management” (Mason and Asher ).

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. I borrow the phrase “Big Five” from George and Sabelli ().. See interviews with Cavanaugh and others in the Columbia Uni-

versity Oral History Project collection (Cavanaugh ).. See Mitchell () on the genealogy of the idea of economic wor-

thiness.. It is worth noting that most of the first professionals at the Bank

were ex-colonial officers (Mason and Asher ).. McNamara, who graduated from UC–Berkeley and taught at Har-

vard Business School, often used his social networks for promoting the Bank.. The World Bank under Rotberg began a whole new set of currency

and financial transactions that marked the world with “rate setting, ‘tap’ facil-ities, continuously offering securities, synthetic issues based on benchmarks,global bonds, extendables, retractables, warrants, multi-currency optionbonds, and a variety of reset interest rate obligations” (Rotberg , p. ).The new Bank brought to the market about one hundred different issues ayear—one every three or four days somewhere in the world. By the s,the Bank routinely offered $– billion worth of global bond issues at a time.

. Other high-income borrowers included the Bahamas, Finland,Greece, Israel, and Singapore. Middle-income borrowers included Brazil,Chile, Fiji, Morocco, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Low-income borrowers in-clude most of sub-Saharan Africa, India, China, Afghanistan, Laos, Yemen,and Vietnam. These are categories and indicators constructed by the Bank,cited in Kapur, Webb, and Lewis .

. In geopolitical terms, the new strategies follow the shift of the anti-communist crusade from the factory to the field. McNamara’s focus on therural peasantry also reflects U.S. policymakers’ discovery that socialism andcommunism in the third world was not Moscow-directed but rooted in-digenously in struggles over land and resources. This point, and superb ad-vice for this chapter, comes from historian Kate Dunnigan.

. At the same time, McNamara declared to the Bond Club of NewYork (May ) that “the economists at the IBRD have been working onmethods for quantifying the economic returns derived from social invest-ment, such as education. Their conclusions demonstrate that the benefitsvary enormously. A liberal arts college in a private underdeveloped area canbe a dead loss, but a technical high school—in an expanding economy wherethe available capital is not matched by the requisite skilled manpower—canpay huge dividends. One such project in Latin America brought an annualreturn of per cent. It is the IBRD’s task to determine, in a given situation,precisely what sort of education contributes most to solid economic growthand to invest accordingly. We have not financed in the past, and will not

Notes to Pages ‒

finance in the future, any education project that is not directly related to thateconomic growth” (McNamara , pp. –).

. It should not be forgotten that the Pentagon Papers were publishedin (Ellsberg had been a McNamara staffer at the Pentagon) and Halber-stam’s stunning critique of McNamara and his buddies surrounding Ken-nedy and Johnson had come out in . Everywhere he went he was casti-gated for the killing of so many peasants in Indochina. Inside the Bank,apparently no one spoke the word “Vietnam” in front of him even as manysaw McNamara’s hire, and his legacy, as the “ruin of the Bank” (Shapley ).

. As no loan figures were given, this was presumably a technical as-sistance grant tied to a possible future loan.

. In the course of funding its expanded projects, the Bank also in-vested in, and spurred the growth of, such transnational and national agenciesand organizations as the Association of Development Financing Institutionsin Asia and the Pacific (ADFIAP), the Pan-African Institute for Develop-ment, the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT), the South-east Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture,and a myriad of UN agencies. Many of these organizations became depend-ent on the Bank to fund their institutes, seminars, conferences, libraries, re-search, and projects. Whereas before hardly any of these organizationsexisted, by they were well institutionalized, and the Bank was picking upa large percentage of the bill as well as funding the creation of a network inwhich these organizations could work collaboratively with the OECD, FAO,UNESCO, UNIDO, WHO, and the European Development Fund (WorldBank a). Consequently, a wholly new practice of development becamepervasive in multiple arenas—not just in the old Bank style of working onlywith finance ministries or central banks, charities, or self-help developmentNGOs, but also with ministries of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, rural devel-opment, economic planning, with such quasi-state private entities as EGAT,ICRISAT, and with UN agencies, development banks, and agricultural uni-versities.

. As John K. Galbraith argued, because the West would supply onlycapital or technical knowledge to places such as India, where he served asU.S. ambassador under Kennedy, the causes of poverty were then derivedfrom these possibilities. “Poverty,” he wrote, “was seen to be the result of ashortage of capital, an absence of technical skills. The remedy included thediagnosis. Having vaccine we invented small pox” (Galbraith , pp. v–vi).

. Thanks to the Bank’s leadership, the international agricultural re-search institutes greatly expanded their budgets, research agendas, outreach,and successes (Baum ). McNamara first created a central secretariat in-

Notes to Pages ‒

side World Bank headquarters with a technical advisory committee housedin the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which also brought theUnited Nations into the fold. Next, he financed the Los Banos and El Batancenters, along with the two new institutes in Colombia and Nigeria (Baum; Stakman ). Initial pledges from the Bank and other multilaterals,bilaterals, and Northern foundations totaled to more than $ million atfirst, and after a few years grants to the CGIARs reached $ million a year(Baum ; Shapley ). But for the seeds of these institutes to be utilizedin the South required a whole infrastructure of support. Within a decade, theWorld Bank was investing billions in green revolution infrastructure: dams,irrigation systems, power generators, roads, tractors, fertilizer and pesticidefactories (World Bank ; World Bank a).

. Northern firms producing tractors and farm equipment, patentedseeds, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, turbines, and irrigation equipmentbenefited most of all. The World Bank not only fueled the lucrative businessof selling high-yield variety seeds to third world farmers, it also triggered aglobal trend in which more than seed companies would be taken over bya handful of rapidly merging firms, so that by the mid-s, five firmswould control most of the world’s commercial seed production and fivefirms account for almost percent of the world’s grain market (Toussaint). In this way, the Bank’s green revolution spurred a global commoditychain in which third world farmers became consumers of first world agro-industrial inputs.

. According to Belgium’s executive director at the World Bank, theflow back from the World Bank to industrialized countries was one dollar toseven in , that is, for every dollar invested in the World Bank seven dol-lars came back to industrialized country firms. By , the flow back rose to$. for every dollar (Toussaint , p. ).

. The Baker Plan (Seoul ) and Brady Plan (Washington )were crucial levers for transferring enormous power to the World Bank andIMF in exchange for ensuring that Citicorp and other Northern privatebankers would be bailed out. For more on this historic conjuncture, see(Gowan ; Helleiner ; Kapstein ).

. By , half of Thailand’s entire land area had been allotted to pri-vate logging firms and another tenth of the country to export crop produc-tion, largely financed by Bank loans (Rich ). World Bank-sponsoredThai agencies went to great lengths to push a narrow export-oriented agenda.Of a Bank-financed Rubber Replanting Promotion Fund, one Thai farmerexplained that the fund actually “promotes the destruction of all kinds ofplants . . . in , the government regulation actually forbade farmers tohave any species of tree on land not being subsidized by the fund. If they find

Notes to Pages ‒

a mango or jack fruit, they charge people about Baht [ten dollars] pertree” (testimony from the People’s Forum of , quoted in Rich , p. ).

. Between and , the World Bank lent $ million for theIndonesian Transmigration Project. In the name of progress and develop-ment, this rural modernization scheme cleared more than , squarekilometers of forest ( percent of Indonesia’s total forest) and , squarekilometers of wetlands and resettled four million people, most of whomwere ethnic minorities. The resettled population was promised millions ofdollars for agricultural support to produce export crops, such as cacao,coffee, and palm oil, but little of the promised agricultural supports materi-alized, and the newly resettled were left without resource or governmentsupport to eke out a living. The World Bank loans attracted tens of millionsof additional dollars from U.S., German, and Dutch governments, as well as from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), UNDP, and the World FoodProgramme. General Suharto was, strategically, a fierce anticommunist andprime beneficiary of Western aid. (See Caufield ; Pincus ; Rich ).

. See The World Bank and the Environment (World Bank );Making Development Sustainable (World Bank Environment Department); and Mainstreaming the Environment (World Bank Environment De-partment ).

. Until recently, the Bank’s Environment Department Web site hada running count of EPAs around the world fostered by the Bank. The num-ber of environmental agencies started to rise dramatically after the Rio Sum-mit in when the Bank made it a priority agenda item and also an infor-mal condition for World Bank loans. For worldwide statistics on EPAs, seeFrank, Hironaka, and Schofer .

Chapter .Producing Green Science inside Headquarters

. There are two types of data being discussed here: data on popula-tion change, per capita income, etc., which are used widely by academics andother researchers; and “internal” documentation from government budgetoffices, public officials, and government ministries; internal cost-benefitanalyses; and project evaluations, etc.—information that becomes publiconly in its processed, diluted, and often uncited form in Bank publications.Because the second type of information is only alluded to in Bank reports,readers have no way of knowing how it is being used. See Srinivasan et al. for a critique of the Bank’s heralded database and sources published ina special issue of the Journal of Development Economics. They argue that the

Notes to Pages ‒

data on which most development economists depend, and take for granted—e.g., income, population, and growth rate figures—originate in extremelydubious national censuses and surveys. Nonetheless, they become the basisfor many policy-related assumptions and analyses. The models for process-ing these dubious data sets are also being questioned: the computable gen-eral equilibrium (CGE) model, an accomplishment that has placed Bank re-search on the forefront of economic scholarship, is challenged by manyobservers, including Nicholas Stern, the chief economist at the EuropeanBank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) when he wrote his crit-icism, later to be the chief economist at the World Bank (Stern and Ferreira, p. ). Such questions about the scholarship of Bank science, however,do not impede its positive reception by most policy-making institutions.

. Although the budget is the largest among development agenciesand finance institutions, it is smaller than the European Union’s researchbudget. The latter, however, has a much broader mandate, and its scientistsserve the member nations as a pan-European academy of science would. Also,the budget figures for the World Bank fluctuate depending on one’s defini-tion of research. Since I include environmental assessments and various rou-tine forms of data collection and analysis that are part and parcel of the jobof loan managers and environmental technicians—because internal reportsand memoranda are utilized as if they represented scientific research find-ings—I would put the research budget much higher than the official rangeof $– million (Pincus ; Standing ; Stern and Ferreira ).

. Interview, January .. See also Tower and World Bank, “Report on the World Bank

Research Program,” Report no. , December , as cited in Stern andFerreira .

. For a discussion of the important role of the Bank in producing anddisseminating information on China, see Stern and Ferreira . On struc-tural adjustment, the Bank invented it; on debt, media, academic, and policypeople depend on the Bank’s key publication, World Debt Tables, with an an-nual circulation of , copies. World Development Report has a distributionrun of , copies a year, which is all the more remarkable when comparedto a brilliant scholarly treatise, with a lifetime press run of maybe ,, orthe most prominent economics journals, with a few thousand copies.

. It is important to distinguish notoriety and accessibility from qual-ity. According to one former high-level Bank official: “If academic develop-ment economists were asked to list the thirty most important books or ar-ticles on development published in the years since the Bank’s researchdepartment was established—very different from the compilation of a read-

Notes to Pages ‒

ing list for students—we suspect that few would list many articles by Bankresearchers” (Stern and Ferreira ).

. Names of departments and divisions change often, such that evenBank staff have confused the exact names of the units with which they work.Because my research covers the Bank for over more than a decade, duringwhich there was at least one major reorganization (and a few minor ones)with unit name changes, I use the name of the unit in which staff whom I in-terviewed worked at the time of the interview. On a few occasions, I use asimple generic descriptor that identifies the unit’s purpose, such as the Mex-ico Desk or the Policy Research Department.

. Interviews, April and June . On the organizational chart, thePRD sits under the vice president of development economics, the chief econ-omist (a position that has been filled over the past years by Michael Bruno,Joseph Stiglitz, Nicholas Stern, and François Bourguignon), and the directorof development policy, in what is considered “the Center” (rather than “Op-erations”). PRD consists of the following divisions: Environment, Infra-structure, and Agriculture; Finance and Private Sector Development; Macro-economics and Growth; Poverty and Human Resources; Public Economics;and Transition Economics. From the World Bank’s organizational chart onits Web site.

. Since most of the Bank’s lending money sits with Operations staff,research money often comes from loan support funds. Hence, researchers inthe Center depend on bids from Operations staff to support up to half oftheir work time.

. McNamara interview conducted by Nicholas Stern, in Stern andFerreira .

. World Bank staff training seminar and interviews with Environ-mental officials, April .

. Interviews, April .. Operational Directive . paras. and , as cited in World Bank

Environment Department , p. .. When I conducted these interviews in the mid- to late s, staff

were required to follow these operational directives; since then, PresidentWolfensohn has made them voluntary but highly advised, much to the dis-may of the environmental staff. Bank staff is well aware that public scrutinyis heightened around large-scale loan projects, and this becomes a strongmotivating force to conduct comprehensive EAs.

. A Pandora’s box of controversy would burst open if structural ad-justment loans, or SAPs, were to be considered for classification. The criticalscholarship on SAPs argues that of all the Bank’s loans, adjustment loans

Notes to Pages ‒

have the most deleterious impacts on the poor majority and the natural en-vironments on which they depend.

. This change reflects the fact that the Bank is shifting its invest-ments to more capital intensive projects; leading the pack are cofinanced in-vestments in China worth $. billion over FY, , and . Thesefigures represent the estimated project cost, which includes Chinese govern-ment, World Bank, and IDA financing. See World Bank Environment De-partment .

. Throughout the day, the specter of the huge Arun Dam in Nepalwas everywhere; almost every worst case scenario was dramatized by theArun case, i.e., if you do not do a good EA, you may end up at the wood shedalongside the Arun managers. This was at the time when Arun had beencanceled by the Bank’s president in response to the inspection panel’s con-cern about its viability. For a discussion of the controversy, see Fox andBrown ; Wade .

. Our trainer in this seminar observed that: “EAs rarely look into the‘go/no go’ option, whether the project should be canned or completely re-done. Our counterparts [borrowers] have already made up their minds onthe project and don’t want to analyze alternatives. They’d rather discusschanging the dam height, feet instead of feet high, rather than engagein the ‘no dam’ debate. Here is where a ‘sectoral EA’ of the whole power sec-tor makes more sense, where we can ask if there is actual demand for thedam’s power unit, in the first place.”

. Forty percent is a very generous assessment. Most observers con-clude that practically no Bank project is satisfactorily supervised, so thesedesk-top internal reviews are always questionable.

. Interviews, January and April .. A coalition of international organizations lobbied hard to change

one small aspect of this huge project—farmer training and seed distributionby extension agents, not state agents but by a private bidder. They felt that alocal NGO with ties to a petroleum and chemical company would get thecontract for this work and would train farmers in chemical-dependent farm-ing rather than in integrated pest management (IPM). After receiving dailyfaxes in protest and phone calls from top Bank brass, the task manager re-lented and gave the contract to a more IPM-sensitive NGO. “If that’s whatpleases everyone around here, then fine. I’m happy to put ‘environmentallysustainable’ before every noun in this project report. But I still believe thatfarmers themselves choose what’s best for their own land.” The internationalcoalition leader rejoiced at the news, though oddly enough, it was a completemystery to him and the campaign that this flea-sized farmer outreach pro-gram was on the back of a $-million elephant (interview, ).

Notes to Pages ‒

. Interview, April .. One mid-level Bank official had been invited to participate in a

weekend retreat of a highly competitive multinational corporation. He saidit took him two days of sitting in meetings and at meals to figure out whowas whose boss. “Heck, I wasn’t sure who the CEO was until I was intro-duced to him.” By contrast, he said it takes only a few minutes at a Bank staff

meeting to learn the pecking order.. Interviews with Bank economist, Latin American region, January,

April, and June .. For example, Fanelli et al. ; Stern and Ferreira ; David

Woodward as cited in George and Sabelli ; and Taylor .. This remark comes from an interview with the Bank’s evaluation

expert of NEAPs, January .. See World Bank Environment Department .. In some countries, Bank task managers’ insistence that national

officials write their NEAPs themselves has met with strong in-country re-sistance. In other countries, local officials understand these reports for howtask managers treat them, as a “salute to the Bank flag,” as one senior econo-mist in the Africa region described them. As of , IDA countries have tohave a Bank-approved NEAP before receiving loans, so the incentive forboth Bank officials and their clients to patch something together is great.

. From interviews with Bank consultants from different Africancountries, conducted at a two-week training seminar in Washington, D.C.,.

. One hundred and four of the citations in Munasinghe’s andCruz’s influential report, “Economywide Policies and the Environment”(), refer to World Bank documents ( are to affiliated authors); morethan three-quarters of the bibliography to a Bank report on environmentallysustainable development in Africa ( of citations) refers directly to Bankdocuments (see AFTES, Toward Environmentally Sustainable Developmentin Sub-Saharan Africa [World Bank, December draft]); and almost

percent of Frank Convery’s citations in his Bank report, “Applying En-vironmental Economics in Africa,” are to his colleagues’ writings. See Con-very, “Applying Environmental Economics in Africa,” World Bank TechnicalPaper no. , March .

. Robert Wade () and Alice Amsden () also note these in-tellectual kinship networks.

. Interview, April .. Interview with a former Bank official, January .. Several Bank officials I interviewed were current and past YPs, Oc-

tober and December , January and April .

Notes to Pages ‒

. Interview with a former World Bank official who was hired in mid-career.

. For an insightful portrayal of the Bank’s “narcissus,” see Amsden, p. .

. One of the leitmotifs in the Morse Report, the independent reviewof the Bank’s catastrophic Narmada dam project in India, is the recognitionof how definitions and apparatuses of the development world fail to capture,measure, or explain the complexity of life along the Narmada River and inthe Gujarat desert. To discuss the concrete aspects of “resettle and rehabili-tate”—shifting real populations—requires an explanation of their presentand future. The Morse team—approved by Bank president Barber Conable—can be easily considered a conventional assemblage of professionals institu-tionally sympathetic to development ideologies: a retired UN technocratand member of the U.S. Congress, a prominent Canadian supreme courtjudge, a Canadian hydrologist, and a Canadian anthropologist. Yet they wereunanimously appalled at the huge discrepancy between institutionalized as-sumptions and understandings, that is, how unrealistic it is for a Bank or acentralized governmental agency to think it can “know” a huge, diverse ruralpopulation that shows up on the epistemic scanner only because it stands inthe way of a dam. The report is a rare gem that documents, in its own smallway, the crisis of development. See Morse ; also from my interview withthe main author, the Honorable Thomas R. Berger, Vancouver, May .

. In the example described in the preface, one of the world’s largestirrigation projects displaced hundreds of thousands of desert dwellers fromtheir land, yet the Bank’s final reports never listed them as displaced (Gold-man ).

. This is the dilemma that many applied anthropologists face. See,e.g., the Web site of Professor Ted Downing, University of Arizona, and theDevelopment Policy Kiosk Web site, as well as the edited book, Hobart .

. Daly’s books include: Toward a Steady-State Economy (editor, );Economics, Ecology, and Ethics (); For the Common Good (); Valuingthe Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics (); and Beyond Growth: The Econom-ics of Sustainable Development (). Interview conducted in January .

. Interview, January , and subsequent conversations.. Daly explained: “I was invited to Chile by [eminent economist]

Manfred Max-Neff to talk about ecological economics at a conference. Imentioned it to a colleague at the Chile desk, and soon afterwards I wascalled in by one of my superiors and told that since Chile–World Bank rela-tions were quite sensitive at the time, I was not allowed to give a public talkthere. Well, it was near Christmas time and I wasn’t so excited about travel-

Notes to Pages ‒

ing all that way for a talk, but I wasn’t going to lie to Manfred either and saymy grandmother was ill. He was so upset that he sent back a rush letter to theBank’s top brass saying that after having experienced seventeen years of dic-tatorship in Chile he was quite surprised that the Bank, the paragon of dem-ocratic freedom, would censor its own staff, and that he would read this letterand their response aloud to the conference participants. Well, the guys up-stairs immediately called me in and said, ‘No, no, no, you misunderstood, ofcourse you can go.’ The one condition was that someone from the Bank’sChile desk had to accompany me” (interview, January ).

. Interview, January . A senior economist overseeing a numberof African country portfolios explains how there is “absolutely no seriousdiscussion of the environmental impact of privatization of the public sector,which is now the Bank’s main business in Africa. Privatization needs a newregulating framework, yet no one does calculations on its environmental im-pact.” Interview, April .

. Interviews in April , October , and June .. See World Bank’s Web site on South Asia Environment and Social

Development: http://wbln.worldbank.org/sar/sa.nsf/adcaedeefa/aff?OpenDocument#Environment .

. See Bretton Woods Project Web site (www.brettonwoodsproject.org); and also Fine ; Jamison ; Mehta ; Stone .

Chapter .The Birth of a Discipline

. Interview, Vancouver, British Columbia, .. In fact, in anticipation of a negative result, the Indian government

cancelled its agreement with the Bank before the directors’ vote.. Interviews in World Bank headquarters, Washington, D.C., –

, and from a Bank staff training seminar in which I participated.. The principal bilateral donor, the German development bank KfW,

described Arun as the “best-studied development project ever undertakenby the German government.” See Usher .

. From my participation in a Bank staff training seminar on EIAs,April .

. Interviews, –, Washington, D.C., and Vientiane, Laos, .. It is important to note that although officially it may be the gov-

ernment or a private investment firm that is responsible for hiring consult-

Notes to Pages ‒

ants, it is the Bank official in charge who oversees all activities. Although thechief officer in the Lao Hydropower office may sign off on a report or a pay-ment to a consultant, it is not she or he who finds the consultant and sets theterms of reference for the job. In other words, the whole process is governedby the Bank, even if the responsibilities are dispersed among other actors.

. Some of these engineering firms are actually subsidiaries ofbuilders, whereas others have worked alongside them for years.

. The term “feasibility study” generally refers to a group of studiesthat assess the economic and environmental feasibility of a project, its po-tential social and environmental impacts, and how it measures up againstpossible alternatives.

. In early , Transfield sold off its shares of NT to a Chicago-based firm but is still heavily invested in energy production in the Mekong.

. These military helicopters were landing in the same remote denselyforested areas where the United States led its largest bombing campaign ever,along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. These anthropologists were asking for moretime in part to try to overcome the fear and silence that the presence of suchhelicopters might evoke.

. Interviews, Vientiane, January .. Interview, May , with a highly regarded U.S. ichthyologist of

the Mekong.. A few weeks later, the Mekong campaigner for International Rivers

Network (IRN) wrote a pointed letter to the ADB director in charge, de-manding that the report be released and rebutting the bank’s claims that thereport failed to produce any clear recommendations. Indeed, since IRN al-ready had the report, it was easy to challenge the ADB’s interpretation of itscontent. The quotation in the text comes from the ADB’s response to thehired scientist and to IRN. The scientist was told by a Lao official that his re-port was suppressed to keep the information from the “environmental lobby.”

. This observation is based on numerous conversations I have hadwith consultants doing research for the World Bank, as well as public andnews reports.

. The first major study on NT fisheries by Hill and Hill () ar-gued that “the central problem with this evaluation, as well as other studies ofthe Mekong fisheries, is a lack of data and information. Proposed develop-ment projects cannot be safely designed or adequately mitigated without asound and reliable environmental data base.” These authors unambiguouslywarned against acting on any speculation at this point because of the dangersof speculating without data. “There is virtually no body of knowledge uponwhich to rely in making these decisions.” Despite these strong conclusions

Notes to Pages ‒

and the call for multiple-year and multi-sited studies before any developmentdecisions should be made, these words were not heeded (Hill ). More-over, these conclusions and warnings are missing from subsequent referencesto this pivotal study; the World Bank and its partners, in both confidentialand published reports, put a very different spin on these findings.

. Personal correspondence, July . See Roberts .. Independent of the dam EIAs, Roberts and his colleagues have me-

thodically identified new and potentially rare species of fish and other riverfauna. See Roberts and Baird and Roberts .

. Understandably sensitive about his treatment, he described thetask at hand as extremely complex: “It’s not like studying salmon migrationin U.S. rivers, where they make one big migratory push before they die. Inthe tropics, these are feeding migrations, and the fish move when an areadries up. But that includes much more than the big fish—the whole ecosys-tem packs up and moves with them. And there are absolutely no data on howthe whole system holds together”(interview, July ).

. Personal correspondence, July .. Interviews, Vientiane, January .. IUCN has been negotiating with the World Bank on numerous

other high-stakes conservation-development projects elsewhere.. Rare species of ox, deer, pig, and frogs recently discovered by

Northern conservation scientists may be the necessary “facts” that will helpcement the agreement for internationally managed wildlife protection sites,megafauna running corridors, and biodiversity parks in Laos.

. One high-profile scientific censorship controversy involves theBank president’s independent review of the Pangue project in Chile, a reviewthat was instigated by the Pehuenche indigenous people who claimed theBank’s International Finance Corporation was breaking its own policies onhandling of indigenous peoples at development sites. Two separate distin-guished panels were commissioned and their reports were summarily cen-sored. See the Web sites of senior anthropologist Theodore Downing (http://www.ted-downing.com/), International Rivers Network (www.irn.org),and the Bank’s International Finance Corporation (www.ifc.org/pressroom/Archive//HAIR-E.htm). In this chapter, however, I try to make the pointthat these high-profile anomalies are built upon a whole set of scientific pro-tocol for which everyday forms of censorship, suppression, and generationare commonplace.

. Interview, . He is now an official in the Mekong River Com-mission, Phnom Penh, a funder-driven research and policy institute.

. For differing views on this project, including the much-touted

Notes to Pages ‒

participation aspect, see World Commission on Dams (), and Web sitesfor the report (www.damsreport.org), IRN (www.irn.org), and the WorldBank (www.worldbank.org).

. Franklin as well as author’s interviews with people who at-tended the consultations.

. These range from the ADB, to the bilateral aid agencies, such as theSwedish aid agency SIDA, and the NGOs, such as CARE.

. As I note elsewhere, this financial and political pressure encour-ages a stratification process within borrower states, creating a transnationalstate sector (e.g., forestry, mining, natural resources) funded to facilitate for-eign capital investment, and a domestic state sector (e.g., health, education,welfare) that receives little attention, if it is not bled.

. By the early s, large transnational conservation groups shiftedtheir stance on the dam project, agreeing with the World Bank that the onlyway to “save” megafauna or biodiversity was to support the massive damproject and fight to ensure that a portion of the revenues goes for Western-style conservation. In Laos and Cameroon, these conservation groups havenegotiated for a share of the revenues from capital-intensive projects (e.g., amajor oil pipeline through the Cameroon tropical forest), which would goin an off-shore account supervised by objective and impartial transnationalelites, such as their own staff, and be used for conservation efforts.

. Interview, Vientiane, January .

Chapter .Eco-Governmentality and the Making

of an Environmental State

. A map of Laos demarcates about ninety planned dams (seeAMRC Web site, Sydney, Australia), and a British consulting firm mapped outthirty-seven different dams on just two rivers of the Mekong River systemrunning through Laos. See Halcrow and Partners Ltd .

. My emphasis also differs from the perspective of economic geogra-phers who effectively argue that nature is socially produced and under a cap-italist regime, produced specifically for commodification (Harvey ;Smith ). Instead of seeing this process as a fait accomplis, and being hes-itant to gloss over the contested terrain from which such transformationsoccur, I emphasize the heated productive relations out of which new politi-cal, economic, and cultural rationalities are born and become institutional-ized, resisted, and everything in between. That is, I find it useful to interrogatethe process of production from which new hegemonic (and counterhege-

Notes to Pages ‒

monic) forms emerge, to better understand the actual routes from which theadjective “green” and the noun “neoliberalism” may congeal as naturalizedartifact, becoming part of the “there is no alternative” (TINA) state of mindcirculating within professional communities across the globe.

. This name is a pseudonym. This plateau trip took place in January.

. The way in which the region is being renamed by Northern-basedbanks and agencies as “the Greater Mekong Subregion,” and the way inwhich the six countries—including the supposed rogue state run by the vi-olent military regime in Myanmar—are being funded as a transboundaryregion, with major projects, goods, and capital crossing borders as if nationalsovereignty does not count, is a truly remarkable phenomenon. Socialist,communist, or military junta—politics no longer matters to the forces be-hind this transformation.

. See the latest Web sites by the Asian Development Bank, the WorldBank, the Greater Mekong Subregion, the Mekong River Commission, theOxfam Mekong Initiative, the Australian Mekong Region Centre, the Inter-national Rivers Network, IUCN, WWF, and many others, to get a sense of themagnitude of these ambitious plans.

. As one member of the Bank’s Panel of Experts commented in re-sponse to public statements by ichthyologists that at least one fish specieswill not survive the dam’s construction: “Look, it’s between one little fish, onthe one hand, and all the poor [people] in the region who would benefitfrom this project. Which would you choose?” (author interview, Vientiane,January ). Many of the experts whom I interviewed in Vientiane adoptedthis highly reductive TINA perspective.

. These controversies are well documented by the Bank InformationCenter (Washington, D.C.), TERRA (Bangkok), and the International RiversNetwork (Berkeley), with archived copies of letters, reports, meeting min-utes, and emails among the relevant actors.

. The full letter exchange among IUCN, WCS, and IRN in the – period when NGOs were still on the fence in terms of supporting the NamTheun Dam process, is archived on IRN’s Web page (www.irn.org) underNam Theun campaign.

. As noted in chapter , the plans for NT include an ambitious stringof conservation and protected areas, megafauna running corridors, water-shed conservation sites, eco-tourism projects, biodiversity research and de-velopment sites, and indigenous peoples’ extractive reserves. Roads, markets,experimental farms, Lao-language schools, health clinics, and workshops inagronomy, resource management, family hygiene and birth control are alsopart of the project.

Notes to Pages ‒

. The fruits of this labor can be found in two publicly circulated dataatlases: Asian Development Bank’s GMS Atlas of the Environment, , andNordic Institute of Asian Studies and the National Statistical Centre (Vien-tiane), The Atlas of Laos, .

. The distinction between “in” and “out” is obviously based on one’sinterpretative framing. For example, as soon as hired anthropologists real-ized that the Nakai Plateau residents could be moved from their soon-to-besubmerged villages to new plots outside the range of the planned dam reser-voir but still within the people’s “spirit territory,” development expertsjudged this resettlement process as only a minor disruption and easily com-pensated by the development inputs (e.g., Lao-speaking schools, health clin-ics, agricultural inputs) rewarded to the displaced. The World Bank applaudssuch discoveries by its consultants and willingly sets out to preserve a spiritterritory, since its success leads to the implementation of another, such as adam. But this cost-benefit analysis does not take into consideration the effectof a spirit territory once everything the spirit and territory are based on hasbeen radically altered, i.e., forests submerged, rivers dammed, societies puton a development agenda. This exemplifies the ongoing reification process,where pieces of indigenous practices are decontextualized, objectified, andthen judged in purely developmentalist terms of commensurability.

. Although the FOMACOP project is now defunct, the Bank’s au-thority in the domain of “sustainable forestry” remains.

. Old computers, since replaced with newer models, are stacked be-hind office doors and a collection of broken-down Volvo station wagons, su-perseded by newer SUVs, fills a parking lot behind the building. Staff offeredtwo complementary explanations: Vientiane lacked experienced computerand car mechanics, and with each new project comes a new equipment budget.

. Interview, Vientiane, .. Interview, with a STEA staff scientist in Vientiane, .

. Not a month goes by without Laos being described in the interna-tional press as the “little sleepy nation” hidden in the shadows of the rapidgrowth and prosperity of Southeast Asia.

Chapter .Privatizing Water, Neoliberalizing Civil Society

. In this chapter, I focus exclusively on transnational policy networkssupported by the World Bank and not on TPNs unrelated to the Bank. Butbecause the Bank is involved in many global policy issues—from climate

Notes to Pages ‒

change to Law of the Sea, the war on terrorism, and international tradeagreements—the overlap is substantial.

. Since , in response to external criticism that the Bank itself wasneither transparent nor accountable, the WBI decided to establish an exter-nal advisory council, one of the first of the major Bank departments to be re-sponsible in some way to outsiders. The WBI’s advisory council in wascomposed of executives from Sun Micro Systems, the International HeraldTribune, McKinsey and Company, members of the transnational high-endservice sector (i.e., key beneficiaries of Bank adjustment loans), the CEO ofAfrican Virtual University (a new World Bank-sponsored university), a Pe-ruvian specialist in civil society, and executives from exclusive Southern pri-vate universities. In other words, though the WBI is becoming more ac-countable to the outside world, that world is a highly selective, exclusive, andcompatible one, formed largely of the corporate clients that benefit mostfrom Bank loans and activities. See World Bank Institute .

. The WBI’s Water Policy Capacity Building Program alone hastrained more than nine thousand professionals from ninety countries since. Almost half of the participants surveyed said that WBI-sponsored ac-tivities led to reform of water management policy in their countries (Pitman, p. ).

. In , as a result of U.S. pressure on the World Bank to supportits post-/ agenda, Pakistan received an unprecedented $ million foradjustment/privatization projects alone (World Bank , p. ). Theseloans cut across all institutions in Pakistan, from the courts to parliament,from local state offices, to the insurance, banking, and public-service provi-sion sectors.

. See “Public Communication Programs for Privatization Projects”downloadable from http://www.worldbank.org/developmentcommunications/Publications/wb%toolkit%book%...pdf.

. I thank Nina Laurie for helping me clarify this observation.. See www.logincee.org.. See www.acbf-pact.org/forums/APIF.. See “What Can ACBF Offer Nepad?”ACBF Web site, www.acbf-pact

.org/inforResources/briefs/FAQs.pdf.. See Laurie et al. .. See also Global Water Archive at http://www.platts.com/gwr/

.html.. This report was released during the Second World Water Forum at

The Hague.. See http://www.worldwatercouncil.org/forum.html.

Notes to Pages ‒

. On their concept of relational biographies, see Dezalay and Garth.

. See http://www.worldwatercouncil.org/forum.html.. The terminology here may be confusing in that the commissions,

councils, partnerships, and forums discussed are at once networks in and ofthemselves as well as forming part of a larger network in which these smallernetworks interact.

. See www.worldwatercouncil.org/vision.html.. World Bank president Wolfensohn was a founding member of the

WBCSD.. See www.iccwbo.org. These members of the WBCSD are

drawn from more than countries and major industrial sectors. SeeWorld Business Council for Sustainable Development , downloadedfrom http://www.gm-unccd.org/FIELD/Private/WBCSD/Pub.pdf.

. In this context, the “new millenium development goals” refer tothe goals established at the Millennium Session of the UN General Assemblyin for addressing problems of water access. See World Business Coun-cil for Sustainable Development .

. These figures come from WaterAid’s Web site, http://www.wateraid.org/site/in_depth/current_research/.asp, accessed February ,.

. Quoted from WaterAid Web site, “Private Sector Participation”http://www.wateraid.org/site/in_depth/current_research/.asp, accessedFebruary , .

. Like so many organizations described here, WaterAid has circu-lated reports that question the argument that privatization is the only or bestway to help the poor. Indeed, disagreement and dissensus is a critical ele-ment to the making of hegemony. See, e.g., the report “New Rules, NewRoles: Does PSP [Private Sector Participation] Benefit the Poor?” (WaterAidand Tearfund ).

. See http://www.wateraid.org/site/in_depth/current_research/

.asp, accessed February , .. This information is drawn from WaterAid’s Web site, www.

wateraid.org, accessed February , .. From www.wateraid.org, accessed February , .. Other major funders of these transnational policy actor networks

include the bilateral aid agencies of the countries where the world’s largestwater-service firms reside: DFID, the British aid agency; SIDA, the Swedishaid agency; the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the Netherlands Ministryof Foreign Affairs; and U.S. AID. Most of these policy actors have emerged

Notes to Pages ‒

since and their agendas hew closely to the Bank’s water privatizationagenda.

. See www.worldwaterforum.org/eng/wwf.html.. See www.symposium-ho.com/symposium.html.. See www.worldwatercouncil.org/download/FinPan.Washington.pdf.. See www.worldbank.org/wbi/sdwatermedianetwork.. See www.wupafrica.org/what.html.. See www.iccwbo.org.. “The water crisis is a governance crisis, characterized by a failure

to value water properly and by a lack of transparency and accountability inthe management of water,” argues a Global Water Partnership report, for ex-ample. “Reform of the water sector, where water tariffs and prices play es-sential parts, is expected to make stakeholders recognize the true costs ofwater and to act thereafter” (International Consortium of Investigative Jour-nalists , p. ).

. See Web sites, news briefs, and summary reports from all threewater forums, which can be accessed through any of these major players’Web sites, including the World Bank’s.

. At the same time, the global water lords were repeating, in themost Victorian-colonial phrasing, that Africa’s poor were victims of theirown bad habits. Dignitaries exhorted “wash your hands!” as the water cam-paign’s rallying cry during the summit and at the WaterDome.

. The exceptions are in the United States and Western Europe; how-ever, it could be argued that the world’s largest firms can expand into theNorthern markets largely because of the heavy Bank/IMF subsidization ofthe firms’ deals in the South.

. Of course, large borrowers, such as Brazil, Mexico, India, andChina, also have the Bank over a barrel since their withdrawal could havedevastating effects, and Bank staff act, first and foremost, to avoid conflicts.

. Debt relief without conditionalities and debt reparations were themost common political demand from African activists at the “anti-summit”forums in Johannesburg during the World Summit meetings (author’s per-sonal notes).

. The Bank’s Poverty Reduction Support Credits—the new struc-tural adjustment program for its poorest borrowers, include water privatiza-tion as a priority. See World Bank, “Poverty Reduction Support Credits forUganda and Burkina Faso,” at www.worldbank.org.

. Since structural adjustment loan agreements are often outside thepublic domain, the information on other Bank/IMF privatization condi-tionalities in their SAP loans comes through public circulation of so-called

Notes to Pages ‒

confidential papers as well as from discussions that leak within borrowingcountries. See Public Citizen’s report of September (Grusky). Also seethe report “Letters of Intent and Memoranda of Economic and FinancialPolicies” prepared by government authorities with the IMF/WB, available atthe IMF Web site, www.imf.org.

. When these numbers are broken down by year, one finds a con-tinuous increase in privatization as a requirement for access to capital, start-ing at fewer than percent in to more than percent in (Inter-national Consortium of Investigative Journalists , p. ).

. See also Public Citizen at http://www.citizen.org/cmep/.. “Is the Water Business Really a Business?” J. F. Talbot, CEO Saur

International, World Bank Water and Sanitation Lecture Series, February ,, www.worldbank.org/wbi/B-Span/docs/SAURD.pdf.

. This about-face, of course, has important repercussions on WorldBank and IMF lending practices because it becomes more difficult for theseinstitutions to demand privatization if firms are unwilling to provide theservices.

. See also Laurie and Crespo .. Author’s personal notes from Johannesburg, August-September

.. In February , lawyers representing the people of Cochabamba

requested that the ICSID open its doors to the public and the media, but theICSID judges refused. See “Secretive World Bank Tribunal Bans Public andMedia Participation in Bechtel Lawsuit over Access to Water,” Earthjusticepress release, February , .

. “Frontline” PBS Web site, Multinational Monitor interview, Janu-ary , and a presentation by Cochabamba machinist Oscar Olivera, ofthe Coordinadora de Defense de Agua y la Vida (Coalition in Defense ofWater and Life), at the International Forum on Globalization, August ,Johannesburg.

. See http://www.queensu.ca/msp.. When I was visiting the area, a busload of World Summit delegates

from France, invited by Suez executives, pulled into Orange Farm to see ademonstration of the new French water meters.

. Interviews in Orange Farm, August-September .. One of the strongest voices against privatization is the Southern

African Civil Society Water Caucus. Of its members, the South African Mu-nicipal Workers Union campaigned against private-sector and NGO-basedrural water schemes; the National Land Committee and Rural DevelopmentServices network rallied pressure on the government for its failure to providewater to millions of rural South Africans; Earthlife, Environmental Moni-

Notes to Pages ‒

toring Group, and other environmentalists have protested against the fi-

nancing of the expensive and corrupt Lesotho Highlands Water Project’sMohale Dam; and numerous civic groups organized a national network ofantieviction and antiprivatization campaigns to reverse the government’sefforts to strip poor households of their access to water, electricity, and san-itation services (Bond ). By the time of the World Summit, these differ-ent campaigns had coalesced into a nationwide social movement with “an-tiprivatization”as its rallying cry and had brought into the fold activists fromthe rural landless people’s movement, the fisherfolk’s movement, the tradeunions, and AIDS/HIV and human rights campaigns. Finally, these South Af-rican groups joined hands with thousands of activists who had traveled fromneighboring countries, from across the continent, and from Brazil, SouthKorea, India, Thailand, Western Europe, Canada, and Northern California.

. See Bond ; Ngwane .

Chapter .Conclusion

. Special thanks to Beverly Bell of the Center for Economic Justice(Albuquerque, N.M.) for her generous help with this interview.

. Personal communication with the anthropologist Dr. GuillaumeBoccara, Buenos Aires, .

Notes to Pages ‒

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Index

academia: reliance on WB publications, ;vs. World Bank, , ,

activism, th-century, –

activism, th- and st-century. See opposi-tion to water privatization; opposition toWorld Bank

ADB. See Asian Development BankAfghanistan, –, n

Africa: capacity building in, –; debt cri-sis (s), (see also debt of borrowingnations); early WB loans, n; inappli-cability of WB models/assumptions, –;internationalized imperialism, ; NEAPs,–, n; postcolonial development,–; public opposition to WB/IMF, ;structural adjustment’s effects, ; train-ing in neoliberal policies, ; water priva-tization, , , –, –t, –;WB knowledge production in, – ,–; WB publications on, –. Seealso South, global; and specific countries

African Capacity Building Foundation(ACBF), –

African Development Bank, ,

African National Congress (ANC), –,

agriculture: employee exchange program, ;farmer credit, environmental ramifica-tions of, –; green revolution, –, –, –n, n; integrated pestmanagement vs. chemical-dependentfarming, n; in Laos, ; loans,; loans,

Aguas de Portugal (water company), , tAlberts, Bruce,

Alexandra township, Johannesburg, SouthAfrica, –

Amazon, –, –. See also BrazilAmsden, Alice,

ANC (African National Congress), –,

Angola, tanthropologists, –, n; and the

NT dam project, –, , n. Seealso social impact assessments

antiprivatization movement. See oppositionto water privatization; opposition toWorld Bank

Argentina: anti-neoliberal politics, , ; de-fault on WB loans, –; electric powerproject loan (), ; water privatizationopposition/termination, , , t

Aristide, Jean-Bertrand,

Arndt, H. W.,

arrogance of World Bank,

Arun dam project, , n, n

Asher, Robert E., n

Asia: CGIAR wheat varieties, ; public op-position to WB policies, , ; struc-tural adjustment’s effects, . See alsoSouth, global; and specific countries

Asian Development Bank (ADB): Indone-sian Transmigration Project investment,n; and Laos/Mekong region, , ,–, , n

Asmal, Kader,

Australia,

Bangladesh, ,

Bank of America, ,

banking interests. See commercial banks“Battle in Seattle,” ,

Bear Stearns, ,

Bechtel: Cochabamba “water wars,” , ,–, , , n; in Iraq, ; andthe Washington WB meetings,

Benin, , tBerger, Thomas, . See also Morse Com-

mission ReportBhagwati, Jagdish,

“Big Five” countries, , ,

biodiversity, , , –. See also envi-ronmental conservation; environmentaldegradation; National Biodiversity Con-servation Areas

Bird, Kai, –

Biwater (English company), , –tBlack, Eugene, , n

Bolivia: and the Bretton Woods conference,–; indigenous peoples’ movements,–; water privatization opposed, ,, , t, –, ,

bonds, World Bank, , , –, , n;boycott and disinvestment,

Borlaug, Norman,

borrowing nations: defaults possible, –;high- and middle-income borrowers(–), , n; journalist training,; large borrowers’ influence, n;national political interests, –; pres-sure to accept WB priorities/paradigms,– , –, –, –. See alsodebt of borrowing nations; loans, WorldBank; and specific countries

Boutros-Ghali, Boutros,

Brazil: agriculture and rural developmentloans, ; Amazon development projects,–, –; and the Bretton Woodsconference, –; early loans, n;loan default possible, –; nuclearpower loan project, – ; opposition to WB policies/projects, , –, ,t; structural adjustment, ; WB training offered by Finance ministry,

Bretton Woods system/institutions, , ,–, . See also International MonetaryFund; World Bank

British Guiana,

Brown, Lester, ,

Burawoy, Michael,

Burkina Faso, t

Cambodia, fCamdessus, Michel, ,

Cameroon, –, n

capacity building, –; in Laos, –

(see also Laos); water policy, , n (seealso water); WB training programs and,– (see also training by the WorldBank)

Cape Verde, tCARE International, ,

Carlsson, Ingvar,

Catley-Carlson, Margaret,

Cavanaugh, Robert,

CCF (Center for Conservation Finance),

censorship, – , –, , n,n, nn, . See also culture of theWorld Bank; knowledge production bythe World Bank

Center for Conservation Finance (CCF),

Central African Republic, tCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA; U.S.),

Central Union of Electricity Workers ofHaiti, –.

CFA (Conservation Finance Alliance), –

CGIAR. See Consultative Group on Inter-national Agricultural Research

Chad, tChenery, Hollis, –

children, ,

Chile: advisory team posted (), ;early WB loans, n; environmentaleconomics conference, , –n;indigenous peoples’ movement, –;Pangue project, n

China: CGIAR wheat varieties, ; economicpolicies (–), ; Mekong dams,f; population resettlement assessment,–; WB loans, , n, n;WBI training programs, –

cholera,

CIA (Central Intelligence Agency, U.S.),

Citicorp, , , n

Index

civil society: and global water policy reform, (see also water; water privatization);removal of public goods from (see privati-zation); rise of hegemony within, –

(see also hegemony of the World Bank);transnational policy networks and, , (see also transnational policy net-works); WB agenda missed by Wade,

Clausen, A. W., –, n

Cleaver, Kevin M.,

Cochabamba, Bolivia, , , –, ,n

Cocker, Vic,

Colombia, –

colonialism: –, , . See also North-South relations

Colorado River,

commercial banks, – , , , n.See also specific banks

commodities, export, , ,

common sense, –, . See also knowl-edge production by the World Bank

communism, , , , , n

Comoros, tcomputable general equilibrium (CGE)

model, –n

Conable, Barber B., n

Congo, Republic of, tConservation Finance Alliance (CFA), –

Conservation International, –

conservation politics: conservation finance,–; language of conservation, –,; in Laos, –, , –, –,–, , n (see also Laos: envi-ronmental conservation); and neoliberaleconomics, , (see also green neoliber-alism). See also environmental conserva-tion; specific conservation groups

consultants: costs, ; in Laos, –,–, , (see also Laos; NamTheun Dam project); long-term rela-tionships with WB, , n; pressure tosupport WB policies,

Consultative Group on International Agri-cultural Research (CGIAR), –, n

Conway, Gordon,

Cooper, Frederick,

corporations, large/transnational: ICSID arbitration process used, n; relation-ship to WB, – ; and water privatiza-

tion, –, –, , –, n

(see also water privatization). See alsospecific firms

cost recovery, ; as loan condition, –, t, –t; not feasible from poor,

Costa Rica,

cost-benefit analysis: flawed analysis,– ; national benefits vs. local costs,–; training in use,

Côte d’Ivoire, t Council on Foreign Relations,

Cousteau, Jacques-Yves,

CPAWM (Lao agency overseeing protectedareas and wildlife),

Crisis and Opportunity: Environment and Development in Africa (Falloux), –

Cuba, –

culture of the World Bank: anthropologistsand sociologists and, – (see alsoanthropologists); and Bank-style environ-mentalism, –; careers linked to knowl-edge production, , –, –,– ; censorship, – , –,, n, n, n, n; hier-archical nature, , –, –;national interests valued over local inter-ests, –, , ; –early s, ,; project support constraints, –;punitive nature, – ; and scholarship,–. See also organization and struc-ture of the World Bank

currency devaluation, . See also structuraladjustment

Daly, Herman, – , –n, n

dams: Arun dam project (Nepal), ,n, n; environmental effects, ,, –, nn–; Mekong region,–, , , –, f, f, (seealso Laos; Nam Theun Dam project);Mohale Dam (Lesotho), n; NarmadaDam project (India), , –, n,n; public opposition, , –, ,n; viability assessment, , n

data collection, , , , –n. Seealso knowledge production by the WorldBank; research by the World Bank

Debt and Development Coalition (Zim-babwe), –

Index

debt of borrowing nations: antidebt cam-paigns, , –; debt crisis (s), ,, , –, n (see also structuraladjustment); refusal to repay, – ,–. See also specific countries

Defense, U.S. Department of,

deforestation, , –. See also forestryand logging

Derwent, Stuart,

developing countries. See borrowing nations;South, global; and specific countries and regions

development: development economics (seedevelopment economics; neoliberalism);effects of capital-intensive development,–; environmentally sustainable devel-opment (see environmentally sustainabledevelopment; green neoliberalism);McNamara’s influence on developmentthinking, –, –, – (see alsoMcNamara, Robert); modernizationmodel, –, ; “social objectives” eradefined, –; two dimensions of, –.See also development projects; develop-ment scholarship

development economics: Clausen’s reorgani-zation and, –; invention of, –;McNamara and, –, – (see alsoMcNamara, Robert); training, ,

(see also training by the World Bank)development projects: alternatives rarely

considered, ; categorization, ,–n; EAs (see environmental assess-ments); environmental monitoring,–; lack of supervision, , –,n; project cycle, –; projectturnover, , –; water projects (seedams; water; water privatization). See alsoloans, World Bank; and specific countriesand types of projects

development scholarship, –; “develop-ment gone astray” argument, –; mod-ernization model, –, ; postdevelop-ment scholarship, –; reinterpretingWB’s role, –; rereading developmenthistory, –; “terrain of the conjunc-tural,” –. See also history of the WorldBank

Dezalay, Yves,

Diouf, Mamadou,

displacement and dispossession, –, .See also resettlement of populations

domestic production, structural adjust-ment’s effect on, , –. See also com-modities, export

Dublin Conference,

Dulles, John Foster,

Duvalier, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”), –

East India Company, –

eco-governmentality, –. See also greenneoliberalism

ecology. See conservation politics; and head-ings beginning with environment

Economic Development Institute (EDI), ,, . See also training by the WorldBank; World Bank Institute (its successor)

economic research, –

economic restructuring. See structural ad-justment

economy, world, , –. See also debt ofborrowing nations

Ecuador, , t, –

EDI. See Economic Development Instituteeducation: McNamara’s emphasis on, , ,

–n; structural adjustment’s effecton public spending, , ; WB staff, .See also training by the World Bank

Egypt,

El-Ashry, Mohamed,

electrical power: development projects, ,– (see also dams; Nam Theun Damproject); privatization, prices, and cutoffs, –, –, . See also energy

endangered species,

energy, –. See also dams; electricalpower; nuclear power projects

Enron, ,

environment: conservation (see environ-mental conservation; and specific organi-zations); EA definition of, ; economicvaluation, , , –, ; environ-mental agencies [see environmental pro-tection agencies, foreign; EnvironmentalProtection Agency (U.S.)]; environmentaleconomics policymaking workshop, ,– ; environmental monitoring, –;impacts of WB policies/projects, –

(see also environmental degradation;Laos). See also environmental assessments;

Index

environmental states; environmentallysustainable development

Environment Department (World Bank):creation, ; EA training seminars, –

(see also environmental assessments); EPAsfostered, n; research advantages,

environmental assessments (EAs): benefitsand shortfalls, –, –, –,n; censorship, –, n (seealso censorship); Daly on negative opin-ions, – ; Ghana gold mine expansionproject, –; NT dam project, ,–, –, –n; purpose andneed for, –, , , , n; staff

training, –

environmental conservation: conservationfinance, –; environmental monitor-ing, –; language of conservation,–, ; in Laos, –, , –,–, –, , –, –,n, nn, (see also Laos); NBCAs,, , , , –; neoliberalismand, , (see also green neoliberalism).See also specific organizations

environmental degradation, –; defor-estation, , – (see also forestry andlogging); EAs as protection against futureliability, – (see also environmental assessments); environmental economic“undervaluation” and, ; Ghana goldmine, –; Indonesian TransmigrationProject, , n; NT dam project,–, nn–, n (see also NamTheun Dam project); opposition to WBsparked by, –. See also deforestation;and specific countries and projects

environmental impact assessments (EIAs).See environmental assessments

environmental monitoring, –

environmental protection agencies, foreign,– , –, n

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA;U.S.), –

environmental states, –; agency re-structuring, –, –, –;asset valuing, –; birth of, – ,–, –, , –, –;hybrid state actors, –, –, –,–; Laos as, , –, –, ,– (see also Laos)

environmentally sustainable development:defining, ; as discursive field, –;emergence of green neoliberalism and,–, – (see also environmentalstates; green neoliberalism; green science,World Bank production of); Johannes-burg summit (see World Summit on Sustainable Development); Laos model(see Laos; Nam Theun Dam project);NAS and, – , ; NEAPs, , –,n; negative impacts, – (see alsoenvironmental degradation; Laos; resettle-ment of populations); and water policy, (see also water; water privatization);WB loan conditions (see loans, WorldBank)

Escobar, Arturo, ,

Esteva, Gustavo, ,

ethnic minorities. See indigenous peoplesand ethnic minorities

Europe, –, . See also North-South re-lations; and specific countries and agencies

Falloux, Francois, –

famine,

feasibility studies, –, n

Ferguson, James,

Fifty Years Is Enough campaign, –

Fiji, n

financial policies of the World Bank: McNa-mara era, –, , –, n, n;“reluctant Banker” period ( –), –, , –; research budget/funding,, , , , n, n; sources ofcapital, (see also bonds, World Bank).See also loans, World Bank

Finland, , , n

Fiscal Decentralization Initiative for Centraland Eastern Europe (FDI),

fisheries studies (Mekong region), –,–n, n

food, , –. See also agriculture; famineForest Management and Conservation

Project (FOMACOP), , , n

forestry and logging: deforestation, ,–; forest categorization, , –;in Laos, , , –, –, –;Tropical Forest Action Plans (TFAPs),

former Soviet Union, –. See also RussianFederation; Ukraine

Index

Foucault, Michel, –, , ;power/knowledge, , ,

France: colonial legacy in Laos, ; and theearly WB, –, , ; opposition towater privatization, , t, ; waterTPN funding, n

Gabbrielli, Emilio,

Gabon, tGalbraith, John K., n

Gambia,

Gandhi, Indira,

Garth, Bryant,

Gates, Bill,

GEF. See Global Environmental FacilityGermany, , , tGhana: gold mine expansion project, –,

; water privatization, , , t,

Global Coalition for Africa,

Global Development Learning Network,

global economy, World Bank role in creating,

Global Environmental Facility (GEF; WorldBank), , ,

Global Water Partnership (GWP), ,–

GNP (gross national product), –

Goldwater, Barry,

Gorbachev, Mikhail,

Gore, Al,

Gramsci, Antonio, , –, , ,

Great Britain, –,

Greece, n

green neoliberalism, ; antidevelopmentenvironmentalist agenda transformedinto, –; birth of environmentalstates, – , –, , – (see alsoenvironmental states); borrowing govern-ments reshaped, –, –, ,– (see also Laos); development logic,; emergence, –, , –, ; futureof, –; global impact, –, –;hybrid state actors and, –, –,–; negative impacts (see environmen-tal degradation; resettlement of popula-tions; and specific countries and projects);rise of Bank–style green hegemony, –,–, –; TPNs (see transnationalpolicy networks); training as means oftransmitting, – (see also training by

the World Bank); water policy agenda (seewater; water privatization); WB shift toprompted by widespread protests, , , ,–. See also environmentally sustain-able development; green science, WorldBank production of

green revolution, –, –, ,–n, n

green science, World Bank production of,–, ; censorship, – , –,, n, n; data collection, ,–n; environmental assessments(EAs) (see environmental assessments);environmental monitoring, –; con-straints on research, –, , n;Foucault’s power-right-truth triangle and, –; global impact, –;knowledge hierarchy, –; in Laos,– (see also Laos); legitimization andreproduction, – , ; research andthe project cycle, –; research budget,, , , , n, n; scholarshipflaws, –; WB culture/organizationand, –; WB self-interest and, – .See also green neoliberalism; knowledgeproduction by the World Bank

Grenoble, France, water contract, t,

Guinea, t, ,

Guinea-Bissau, , tGWP (Global Water Partnership), ,

–

Haiti, , –

Halberstam, David, –, n

Hall, Stuart,

Haq, Mahbub ul,

Hart, Gillian, –

Harvey, David, ,

health: EAs as protection against future liability, –; McNamara’s push for, ;structural adjustment’s effect on spending,, ; water supply problems and,

hegemony, , , ; and the analytics of the“terrain of the conjunctural,” –. Seealso green neoliberalism

hegemony of the World Bank: agency creation and state-building, –,n (see also environmental states);debt crisis and, , (see also debt ofborrowing nations); emergence, – ;

Index

fragility, – ; future, –; green neoliberalism and, –, , –

(see also green neoliberalism; green sci-ence, World Bank production of); greenrevolution and, –, – (see alsogreen revolution); growth during McNa-mara years, –, , n (see alsohistory of the World Bank); knowledgeproduction and (see knowledge produc-tion by the World Bank); privatizationpolicies (see privatization; water privatiza-tion); TPNs and, , (see also transna-tional policy networks)

history of the World Bank: birth, –; “debtand adjustment” period (–) (seealso debt of borrowing nations); four peri-ods defined, ; knowledge productionand, –; McNamara era, , –, –, –, , (see also green revolu-tion; McNamara, Robert); post-structuraladjustment era (see green neoliberalism);“reluctant Banker” era ( –), –,, –, –, n; rereading devel-opment history, –; structural adjust-ment era, –

Honduras, , t, , tHungary,

hybrid state actors, –, –, –,–

IBRD. See International Bank for Recon-struction and Development

ICSID. See International Centre for Settle-ment of Investment Disputes

IDA. See International Development Associ-ation

IDB. See InterAmerican Development BankIglesias, Enrique, –

IMF. See International Monetary FundIndia: CGIAR wheat varieties, ; colonial

development, –, ; early WB loans,, n; economic policies(–), ; Indus River water proj-ects, ; loans since /, t, –;Narmada Dam project, , –, n,n; opposition to WB/IMFprojects/policies, , , –; port proj-ect loan (), ; postcolonial develop-ment planning, ; WB borrowing from,. See also Indonesia

indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities:destructive effects of WB projects, –,–, –; indigenous peoples’movements, –; in Laos, –,–, , –, –, , –,n; in Mekong region, –;protests by, , n (see also oppositionto World Bank); subjugation of knowl-edge and interests, –, –; asterm, . See also displacement and dis-possession; populations; resettlement ofpopulations

Indira Gandhi Canal, viii–x,

Indochina, U.S. war in, –, , –,–, n

Indonesia: default possible, –; early WBloans, n; Transmigration Project, ,, n; water privatization opposed,, t

Indus River water projects,

infrastructure: early loans ( –), ,–; McNamara era loans, , ,n; nuclear power projects, – ;Polonoroeste highway project (Brazil),–; railways, –, f. See also dams;electrical power; water

integrated pest management, n

InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB),, , –

International Bank for Reconstruction andDevelopment (IBRD), , –n. Seealso World Bank

International Centre for Settlement of In-vestment Disputes (ICSID), –, –n, n

International Chamber of Commerce,

International Conference on Freshwater(Bonn, ),

International Development Association(IDA), , , n

International Finance Corporation (IFC),n

international finance deregulation, ,

International Monetary Fund (IMF): cre-ation, , –; loan policies, –,–t, n; loans and loan conditions,, –t (see also water privatization);president, ; public opposition, –

(see also opposition to World Bank); andstructural adjustment, –; U.S. hege-

Index

International Monetary Fund (continued)mony over, –; WB/IMF participationin privatization deals, , n

International Rivers Network (IRN), –,n

International Symposium(-a) on Water, ,

Iraq, –

IRN (International Rivers Network), –,n

Israel, n

Italy,

IUCN. See World Conservation Union

Jamaica,

“James” (Zimbabwean opposition organ-izer), –

Japan, , , ,

Johannesburg, South Africa, –, n

Johannesburg Summit. See World Summiton Sustainable Development

Johnson, Lyndon B.,

journalists, WB training for, ,

Kakabadse, Yolanda,

Kasten, Robert,

Keita, Ibrahim Boubacar,

Kenya, ,

Keynes, John Maynard, , ,

Keynesian development, , . See alsoKeynes, John Maynard; modernizationmodel of development

Kissinger, Henry,

knowledge production (generally),

knowledge production by the World Bank,–, –; in Africa, – , –;anthropologists and sociologists, –,n; censorship, – , –, ,n, n, nn, ; consultantsand, – (see also consultants); cooper-ation with borrowing governments,–; data collection, –, , , ,–nn–; development economicsinvented, –; employee careers and,, –, –, – , – ; envi-ronmental state-building, –, –,–, –, –, n (see alsoenvironmental states; Laos); Foucault’spower-right-truth triangle and, –;global impact, –; knowledge hierar-

chy, –; lack of debate, – , ,; “manufacturing consent,” – ;McNamara era, , , –, –, –, , , –n, –n; NGOsand, , – (see also NGOs); in ,–; poor practices, –; privatiza-tion, ; reasons for success, –;research and the project cycle, –,– ; research budget, , , , ,n, n; scholarship flaws, –,, , n; staff training on EAs,– (see also environmental assess-ments); subjugation of subaltern knowl-edge, –, –; time constraints,–, , –; training programs,– (see also training by the WorldBank); and transnational policy networks(TPNs) (see transnational policy net-works); unified voice, –, ; WBculture/organization and, –, –,n (see also culture of the World Bank;organization and structure of the WorldBank). See also green science, World Bankproduction of; publications of the WorldBank

Krueger, Anne, –, –

Kuwait,

KwaZulu Natal (South Africa),

Kyoto Water Forum, ,

La Paz, Bolivia,

Lahmeyer International,

Lake, Anthony,

Laos, –; colonial/imperial legacy,–, ; debt, , , , ;domestic revenue and donors, , –,n; early WB loans, n; environ-mental conservation, –, , –,–, –, , –, –,n, nn, (see also subheadforestry and logging); as environmentalstate, , –, –, , –;forestry and logging, , , –,–, –, n; future dams,–, f, f (see also Nam Theun Dam project); government offices, ,n; hybrid state actors, –, –,–; indigenous peoples, –,–, , –, –, , –,n; institution-building and govern-

Index

ment retooling, , , –, ,–; introduction of scientific proto-col, , –, –; Lao HydropowerOffice, ; Nakai Plateau, –, –,–, , ; NGOs’ role, –, –, ; state circus, ; subjugationof indigenous knowledge and interests,–; Theun Hinboum Dam, –,; uneven development, –, n.See also Indochina, U.S. war in

Latin America: CGIAR wheat varieties, ;Daly at WB Latin American division,– ; indigenous peoples’ movements,–; public opposition to water priva-tization, ; public opposition toWB/IMF, –; shock therapy’s effects,. See also South, global; and specificcountries

laws, World Bank influence on, , –.See also environmental states

Lesotho,

liability, EAs as protection against future,–

Libya,

loans, World Bank, ; alternative projectsrarely considered, , n; categoriza-tion, , –n; debt service loans,–; debt repayment, – , , ,–, n; demand created, , ;early demand, , ; early policies andconditions, –, –; for education,; environmental policies and conditions,–, , –, n, n (see alsoenvironmental assessments; National Environmental Action Plans); farmercredit, –; IDA loans, n; Indone-sian Transmigration Project, n; netinflow, , n; in , –; in ,–; NT dam project preconditions,– (see also Nam Theun Dam proj-ect); post–/ loans, –, n; priva-tization as condition, (see also waterprivatization subhead); project cycle,–; scientific studies dependent on investors, ; speed of loan process, ;structural adjustment policies, –,– (see also structural adjustment);water privatization as condition, , ,– , t, , n, , n;water supply and sanitation loans

(–), – , t, . See alsoborrowing nations; debt of borrowing nations; development projects; and specificcountries, projects, and project types

logging, , , –, . See also forestryand logging

Louis Berger International,

Luffrum, David,

Macedonia, FYR, tMalaysia, n

Mali, tMandela, Nelson, –

Manley, Michael,

Mark, Rebecca,

Marshall Plan, , –

Martin, Claude,

Masire, Ketumile,

Mason, Edward S., n

Mauritius, tMcCloy, John, –, , n. See also

history of the World Bank: “reluctantBanker” era

McCully, Patrick,

McDowell, David, –

McNamara, Robert, , ; committee mem-berships, ; and data collection, –,; and development thinking, –,–; networks of experts cultivated, ; loans, –; and poverty alleviation,, –, –, –; resistance over-come, –; semi-autonomous researchsubsidiary planned, –; social net-work exploited, , n; tenure as WBpresident, , n; and the Vietnam War,, , –, n; WB growth under,, –, ; WB knowledge productionunder, , , –, –, –, ,–n, –n; WB reorganized,–, –, –n

media: reliance on WB publications, ; WBcourses for journalists, –

Mekong region: hydroelectric dams planned,, –, f, f; transboundaryfunding, n; transnational conserva-tion efforts, , –. See also Laos;Thailand; Vietnam

Mestrallet, Gérard, –

Mexico: and the Bretton Woods conference,; and Colorado River dams, ; grass-

Index

Mexico (continued)roots opposition to WB, ; indigenous

peoples’ movements, –; infrastruc-ture loans (), ; structural adjust-ment, , –

Meyer, Eugene, , n

“Michel” (Haitian activist), –

Mill, John Stuart, –

mining, –,

Mitchell, Timothy, n

modernization model of development,–,

Monod, Jerome,

Montreal, Canada, tMorita, Noritada, –

Morocco, n

Morse, David,

Morse Commission Report, –, n

Mozambique, t,

Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency(MIGA), n

Munich, Germany, tMyanmar, f

NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agree-ment), ,

Nakai Plateau people, –. See also Laos:indigenous peoples

Nam Theun (NT) Dam project, –,–, , f, –; environmentaland social assessments, , –,–n, n; environmental conser-vation and, , –, n, n (seealso Laos: environmental conservation);feasibility studies, –; independentevaluation, ; NGOs’ role, –, –; “no alternative” attitude, , ,n; population resettlement, –,, , –; private investment,–; projected costs and revenues,–; subjugation of indigenous knowl-edge and interests, –. See also Laos

Nam Theun Electricity Consortium(NTEC), , , . See also Nam Theun Dam project and Nam Theun PowerCompany (NTPC), its successor

Nam Theun Power Company (NTPC), ,

National Academy of Sciences (NAS),– ,

National Biodiversity Conservation Areas(NBCAs), , , , , –

National Environmental Action Plans(NEAPs), , , –, n

national politics, WB forbidden from inter-vening in, –

Nature Conservancy, –

NBCAs. See National Biodiversity Conserva-tion Areas

NEAPs. See National Environmental ActionPlans

neoliberalism: central power fortified by decentralization agenda of, ; defined,; and environmental conservation, ,

(see also green neoliberalism); “freedomand sovereignty of capital” question for-mulated, ; and North-South relations,–, , –, –, – (see alsoNorth-South relations); opposition/protests, –, – (see also opposi-tion to World Bank); poverty reductionethics, –, – (see also water;water privatization); regional differences,; rise of, –; training in WB policies,– (see also training by the WorldBank); WB knowledge production and,– (see also knowledge production bythe World Bank). See also privatization;structural adjustment; water privatization

Nepal, , n, n

Netherlands, , n

New Partnership for Africa’s Development(Nepad), ,

NGOs. See non-governmental organizationsNicaragua, , tNiger, , t, t, tNigeria, , fNixon, Richard, ,

non-governmental organizations (NGOs):conservation finance, –; employeetraining, –, ; in Haiti, ; incor-porated into WB project assessment, ;Lao employees, –; Lao laws written,, ; launched by WB, ; NBCAspromoted, ; and the NT dam project,–, –, ; role in WB develop-ment policies/projects, –, –; and“Ted’s” rural modernization project, ,n; and water policy, – (see alsowater; water privatization); in Zimbabwe,

Index

–. See also transnational policy net-works; and specific organizations

North-South relations: agricultural knowl-edge, –, –; debt crisis and (seedebt of borrowing nations); IndiraGandhi on, ; green neoliberalism and,–, –, – (see also environ-mental states; green neoliberalism); greenrevolution and, –, ; hybrid state actors and, – (see also hybrid stateactors); neocolonial attitudes, –, ,n; postcolonial capitalist relations,–, , –, –, – (see alsoneoliberalism); postdevelopment scholars’views, –; and privatization, (seealso privatization; water privatization);structural adjustment era’s effects, –

(see also structural adjustment); “terrainof the conjunctural,” –; Truman doc-trine, –; and WB role as “defender ofworld’s poor,” (see also poverty allevia-tion); without the WB, . See also envi-ronmental states; knowledge productionby the World Bank; South, global; andspecific countries

Northumbrian Water,

NTEC. See Nam Theun Electricity Consor-tium

NTPC. See Nam Theun Power Companynuclear power projects, –

Olivera, Oscar, –

Operations (World Bank divisions): defined,; EA guidelines, –; environmentalresearch and the project cycle, –;constraints on research, –, , n

opposition to water privatization: public opposition, , , , –, t, , –n; water companies’ reluctance,–, n

opposition to World Bank, , –,–; antidebt campaign, ; bondboycott and disinvestment, ; durability, –; in Haiti, –; by indigenouspeoples, , n; Johannesburg Sum-mit protests, , f; Narmada Damprotest, , –; Washingtonprotests, – ; payment refusal urged,; political opposition, – ; spectrumof opposition actors, ; TPNs and,

–; transnational opposition, – , –, , –, ; WB green ne-oliberal shift prompted by, , , , –

(see also green neoliberalism). See alsoopposition to water privatization

Orange Farm township, Johannesburg,South Africa, –, n

organization and structure of the WorldBank: Clausen’s reorganization, –;environmentally sustainable developmentand, –; five institutions, –n;hierarchical and punitive nature, ,–, –, n (see also censor-ship); knowledge hierarchy, –; Mc-Namara’s reorganization, –, –,–n; presidents, , n (see alsospecific individuals). See also culture of theWorld Bank; and specific departments anddivisions

Oxfam, ,

Pakistan, , , –, n

Panama, , t, tPAPDA (The Haitian Platform of Advocacy

for an Alternative Development),

Pathet Lao, , . See also LaosPeru, , –

Philippines, , , , –

Pigg, Stacey, –

Poland, , tPolanyi, Karl,

policy networks. See transnational policynetworks

Policy Research Department (PRD; WorldBank), –, , nn–. See alsopublications of the World Bank; researchby the World Bank

politics, national, WB forbidden from inter-vening in, –

Polonoroeste highway project (Brazil), –

the poor, ; absolute poor, , ; structuraladjustment’s effects on, – (see alsostructural adjustment); and water, – ,, – , , –, – (see alsowater; water privatization). See also agri-culture; poverty; poverty alleviation

population control,

populations: “accumulation by disposses-sion,” – , ; classification andquantification, , , ; difficulty of

Index

populations (continued)knowing/valuing project effects on,

–, n; displacement (see dis-placement and dispossession; resettlementof populations)

Potsdam, Germany, tpoverty: Dakar Poverty Forum, ; Gal-

braith on diagnosis of, n; green revo-lution’s effect on, ; idea introduced toLaos, –; increased by WBprojects/policies, (see also specific coun-tries and projects). See also the poor;poverty alleviation

poverty alleviation: McNamara era policies,–, –, –; neoliberal ethics,–, –; PRSCs, , , ,n; WB origins and, –. See also thepoor; poverty

Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs),,

Poverty Reduction Support Credits (PRSCs),, , , n

power of the World Bank: Amsden on, ;borrowing nations pressured into accept-ing WB priorities/paradigms, – , –, –, –; Wade on, . Seealso hegemony of the World Bank

PRD. See Policy Research DepartmentPreston, Lewis T., n

PricewaterhouseCoopers, xvii, , ,

privatization: environmental impact largelyignored, n; in Haiti, –; as loancondition, , , –, , – , ,–t, n, , –n; neoliberal-ism and, , –, –, (see alsogreen neoliberalism; neoliberalism); train-ing in privatization policy, ; WB/IMFparticipation in privatization deals, ,n; wider implications, , . See alsowater privatization

procurement, ,

property rights, –

public consultation, , , –

public utilities, –. See also privatiza-tion; water; water privatization

public welfare spending, –, , . Seealso social programs spending

publications of the World Bank, –; aca-demic and media reliance on, ; accessi-bility vs. quality, –n; censorship,

– (see also censorship); policy lineadhered to, –; scholarship flaws,–, , n; self-referentialism,–, , n. See also knowledgeproduction by the World Bank; andspecific publications

Rahnema, Majid,

railways, –, frainforest, –. See also Amazon“Raj” (environmental specialist), –

Ramos, Fidel,

rapid rural appraisal (RRA), , . See alsoenvironmental assessments; social impactassessments

Reagan, Ronald,

redistribution of wealth,

repression and violence, , , , n

research by the World Bank: agricultural re-search and knowledge production, –, –, –n; bias, ; budget andfunding, , , , , n, n;data accuracy and usability, –n;EAs (see environmental assessments); eco-nomic research under McNamara, –;expertise, ; financial/institutional con-straints, –, , n; and the projectcycle, –; research advantages, ;time constraints, , , –. See alsogreen science, World Bank production of;knowledge production by the World Bank

resettlement of populations, –,nn–; Indonesian TransmigrationProject, , , n; in Laos, –,–, –, n; in Mekong regiongenerally, –. See also displacementand dispossession

Reversing the Spiral: Population, Agriculture,and Environment Nexus in Sub-SaharanAfrica (Cleaver and Schreiber),

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, tRio Summit,

risk assessment, . See also environmentalassessments

Roberts, John, –

Roberts, Tyson, , nn–

Robinson, John,

Rotberg, Eugene, –, n

rural modernization projects, –, n.See also agriculture; green revolution

Index

rural poor, –, –, n. See alsothe poor; poverty; poverty alleviation;resettlement of populations; and specificcountries

Russian Federation, t, –. See also Soviet Union, former

Rwanda, , t

Sachs, Wolfgang,

sanitation. See water; water privatizationSao Tome and Principe, , tSaur International (French company), ,

t, –

Save the Children,

Schreiber, Gotz A.,

scientific protocol, introduction of to borrowing nations, , –. See alsoknowledge production by the WorldBank; Laos

Scott, David,

seeds, , –, nn,

Seers, Dudley, –

self-referentialism: among water TPN actors,; in WB publications, –, ,n

Senegal water projects, , t, t, tSerageldin, Ismail, ,

Severn Trent,

Sexton, John,

Shapley, Deborah,

Shiva, Vandana,

shock therapy. See structural adjustmentSinger, H. W., –

Skellet, Colin,

Snowy Mountains Engineering Company,

social impact assessments (SIAs) for the NT

dam project, , –, –, n

social programs spending, –, ,

Soros, George,

Soviet Union, former, –

“Souly” (Lao guide/NGO employee), ,–

South, global: and the Bretton Woods con-ference, –; debt crisis (s), , ,, –, n; energy practices/prices,– (see also electrical power); environ-mental economic “undervaluation,” , ,–, ; green revolution, –, –; and the modernization model of

development, (see also modernizationmodel); political opposition to WB,– ; poverty growth, ; privatization(see privatization; water privatization);public opposition to WB policies/projects, – , – (see also opposition toWorld Bank); rise of environmental states,– , – (see also environmentalstates; Laos); shock therapy’s effects,–, – (see also structural adjust-ment). See also North-South relations; andspecific countries

South Africa: privatization’s effects, –;public opposition to WB/IMF and neolib-eralism, , f, –; railway loan(), –; water prices, –; waterprivatization contracts, , –t, ;water privatization opposed, , , t,, –n

South Korea, , ,

Southern African Civil Society Water Caucus, –n

Southern Water,

Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee,

Spain,

Speed, Hugh,

Spillett, Peter, –

“spirit territories,” n

Sri Lanka,

staff and employees of the World Bank: ca-reer dependent on loan production, , ,–; career linked to approved knowl-edge production, , –, –,– ; dominant paradigm embraced,–; EA training, –; economistsfired/hired (s), –; education andtraining, ; employee exchange program,; external power, – ; under McNa-mara, –, , . See also organizationand structure of the World Bank

State, U.S. Department of, –,

STEA (Lao environmental protection min-istry), , . See also Laos: environ-mental conservation

Stern, Nicholas, –, –n

Stiglitz, Joseph, , n

Strong, Maurice,

structural adjustment (shock therapy),–, –; currency devaluation andenvironmental issues, ; Daly on, ;

Index

structural adjustment (continued)energy pricing/subsidies, –; nega-tive impacts, , , –, –, ,– , , – n; opposition sparked by, –, – (see also opposition to World Bank); and privatiza-tion, , , , –n (see alsoprivatization; water privatization); PRSCs,, , , n. See also specific countries

subsidies: energy, –; water, – ,

Suez (French company): CEO on public-pri-vate partnerships, –; Orange Farmtownship water meters, –, n;percentage of global private water marketcontrolled, ; water contracts, –t,, ; and water NGOs, ,

Suharto, , n. See also IndonesiaSurinam,

sustainable development. See environmen-tally sustainable development

Sweden, , tSwedish International Development Agency

(SIDA), –, , , n

Talbot, John,

Tanzania, , t“Ted” (WB loan manager), –

terms of reference (TORs),

Thailand: dams, f, ; development assis-tance (), ; growth and industrializa-tion, ; impact of WB policies, ,–n; Lao electricity sales to, ;opposition to WB, , ; water privatiza-tion contract terminated, t

Thalwitz, Wilfried,

Thames Water, ,

“there is no alternative” attitude, ,nn,

third world countries. See South, global; andspecific countries and regions

training by the World Bank, –; of bor-rowing nations’ government officials/staff,, –, –, ; CGIAR training,; of development professionals, –;on environmental assessments (EAs),–; environmental economics work-shop, , – ; indigenous education,

–; materials, , ; in the s, ,f; on water policy, , , n; WBprofessional staff,

Transfield Holdings Ltd., , n

transnational policy networks (TPNs), ,, – , –n; funding, – ,–n; opposition movements and,–; rise of, –; role in constitut-ing civil society, , –; on water, ,– , , – (see also water; waterprivatization; and specific organizations);WB role in constituting/supporting,– , ; WB training programs and,–

transnational society (defined),

transportation projects, –, f. See alsoinfrastructure

Trinidad, tTropical Forest Action Plans (TFAPs),

Truman, Harry,

Turkey, , –

Uganda, tUkraine, tUNDP. See United Nations Development

ProgramUnited Nations Development Program

(UNDP): ACBF created, ; GWPfunded, ; Indonesian TransmigrationProject investment, n; and Lao envi-ronmental protection, ,

United States: aid channeled through NGOs,; and the Bretton Woods conference,–; communism concerns, , , ,; democratic expansion strategy, ;economy, , –, , ; food exports,, ; and Haiti, –; hegemony overWB, –, –; international financederegulation, , ; water privatizationcontracts terminated/reversed, ; waterprojects, ; WB pushed to act for U.S.strategic purposes, , –, –. Seealso Indochina, U.S. war in; and specificdepartments and agencies

United States Agency for International Development (U.S. AID), , n

universal values,

urban development, , . See also water;water privatization

Index

Uruguay, t, tU.S. AID, , n

Venezuela,

Vietnam, f, n. See also Indochina,U.S. war in

Veolia Water, ,

Vivendi, , , , , –t. See alsoVeolia Water (its new water business spin-off)

Volcker, Paul, ,

Wade, Robert, –,

Wall Street investment, –, , –, .See also bonds, World Bank; and specificbanks and companies

Ward, Barbara,

Washington Consensus (WC), –, –,, n. See also neoliberalism; struc-tural adjustment

water: Bonn Action Plan, ; cost recovery,– , t, –t, ; cutoffs, –; global policy agenda, , ,– , – , –, –, n;pollution, ; prices, –, , –,–, ; public-private ventures ashistorical norm, –; scarcity and cri-sis discourses, –, – , –,, n; transnational policy network,– . See also water privatization

“Water for the Poor” (WBCSD), –

water privatization, – ; in Africa, –;corporate reluctance, –; effects,–; global market, –; historyand statistics, , ; imposition of,–; as loan condition, , ,– , t, , –t, n, ,n; public opposition, , –,t, , –n; rationale for, –,–, , – , –; TPNs, –, , –; wider implications,

“A Water Secure World: Vision for Water,Life and the Environment” (World Com-mission on Water for the st Century), –,

WaterAid, – , n

“war of position,”

WB. See World BankWC. See Washington Consensus

WCS (World Conservation Society), ,

Wessex Water,

White, Harry,

Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), ,–, –

Williamson, John, n

Wilson, E. O.,

Wits University Municipal Services Project,

Wolfensohn, James, , , n, n

Woods, George, n

World Bank: author’s thesis, ; civil-societyagenda, ; culture (see culture of theWorld Bank); development policies (seedevelopment economics; developmentscholarship; environmentally sustainabledevelopment; green neoliberalism; historyof the World Bank; neoliberalism; struc-tural adjustment); expanding range ofoperation, ; future, –, –;intervention in national politics forbid-den, – ; knowledge production (seeknowledge production by the WorldBank); loans (see borrowing nations; debtof borrowing nations; loans, World Bank);multinational firms as clients, ;

Washington meetings, – ; organiza-tion and structure (see organization andstructure of the World Bank); power (seehegemony of the World Bank; history ofthe World Bank; knowledge production bythe World Bank); public relations spend-ing, , –; sources of capital (seebonds, World Bank; financial policies ofthe World Bank); staff (see staff and em-ployees of the World Bank); uniqueness,; U.S. hegemony over, –, –,–

World Bank Bond Boycott, n,

World Bank Economic Review,

World Bank Institute (WBI), , ,–, nn–. See also training by theWorld Bank; Economic Development Institute (its predecessor)

World Bank Research Observer, –

World Business Counsel for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), –, n

World Commission on Water for the stCentury, –, – . See also WorldWater Council

Index

World Conservation Society (WCS), ,

World Conservation Union (IUCN), n;Conservation Finance Alliance (CFA),–; and Lao environmental issues, ,, –; and the NT dam project, ,–,

World Debt Tables (World Bank), n

World Development Report (WDR; WorldBank), , –, , n

world economy, , –. See also debt ofborrowing nations

World Education,

World Summit on Sustainable Development(Johannesburg summit, ), , – , –, , f, n

World Trade Organization (WTO), ,

( Cancun meetings)World Water Council, –, – . See

also World Commission on Water for thest Century

World Water Forums, , , ,

Worldwatch Institute, . See also Brown,Lester

Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), ,,,

WTO (World Trade Organization), ,

WWF (Worldwide Fund for Nature; for-merly World Wildlife Fund), , , ,

Xie Zhenhua,

Yemen, , t, t, n

Young Professionals program,

Zambia,

Zimbabwe, , , –

Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Develop-ment,

Zinn, Howard,

Index