International development assistance remains controversial in the twenty first century. Broadly defined as the provision of finance, resources, and expertise to facilitate national development, libraries of works have critiqued its impact, strengths and weaknesses, and efficacy to the development of recipient countries. Emerging in both material and ideational forms (with the former providing loans, grants, and supplies and the latter transferring ideas, knowledge, and skills), many who review international development assistance highlight the significance and impact of its ideational forms, particularly its capacity to shape ways of thinking and behaving. Following this line of inquiry, the World Bank has often been recognised as a powerful source of ideational influence.
The World Bank is widely considered the worldās leading development institution (Barnett and Duvall 2005: 59; Griffin 2006: 571; Broad 2007: 701; Weaver 2010: 112; Vetterlein 2012: 35), concerned with both project financing and intellectual output. While its impact as a financial lender has diminished over the past 2 decades, being overtaken by private investment, its ideational influence remains strong. A large part of its ideational strength derives from its capacity to coercively and persuasively shape the policy pursuits and institutional structures of its developing member countries, in turn affecting mainstream understandings of development assistance.
This book evaluates the World Bankās coercive and persuasive ideational impact by critiquing its provision of technical assistance. Defined as the transfer or adaptation of ideas, knowledge, practices, or skills to foster development (McMahon 1997: 2), the importance of technical assistance derives from its capacity to internalise in recipients particular ways of thinking about and responding to development (Smith 2008: 238). Less coercive than conditions attached to loans, while more hands-on than abstract research, technical assistance involves one actor attempting to shape the mindsets of one or more other actors.
It is here suggested that the more successful technical assistance activities of the World Bank derive from a more voluntary, and less coercive, policy transfer process. Regarding technical assistance as a tool of policy transfer (āa process in which knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions etc., in one time and/or place is used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements, and institutions in another time and/or placeā (Dolowitz and Marsh 1996: 344)), the main contribution of the book is to identify that the success of policy transfer depends upon the recipientās perception of the validity of those policies, with perception being influenced by the ways in which those policies are presented, packaged, and transferred (Seabrooke 2007: 264; Broome and Seabrooke 2012: 6). Arguing that the process and perception of technical assistance are instrumental to the effective and ongoing transfer of policy options, the bookās focus is not on what is said but how it is said.
The issue of importance here is that ādevelopmentā is a contested idea. What one actor regards as development may be (and often is) entirely different from another actor. For this book, the tension between coercion and voluntary consent becomes significant to recipients justifying the acceptance and adoption of highly contested development policy reforms. If, as Adler and Haas (1992: 371) contend, āPolicy coordination is, ultimately, based on consent and mutual expectations,ā then the relational dynamics between actors involved in policy movement is important. As such, the book reveals that the more collaborative, voluntary, and consensual the provision of technical assistance, the better the success rates of policy transfer; the movement and adaptation of policy is most successful where there is collaborative design of projects and voluntary and consensual engagement. Synonymous policy packages have been presented to different countries, but those packages were received more or less favourably depending upon the way the policies were transferred. When attached to a conditional (and thus coercive) loan, recipients were often less receptive to the transferred policies. When devised in a more collaborative fashion, however, the policies were more readily accepted. Consequently, it is here argued that sustainable policy movement concerns not just the issues of technical soundness, but moreover the relational dynamics that surround the transmission of policy.
The World Bank (2008: 1) has recently recognised the importance of āpolitical economic factorsā to the success of its development programs, but such a conceptualisation remains quite narrow:
It is widely recognised within the international development agencies that understanding the political context of reform processes is important for engaging effectively in policy dialogue that promotes policy change. It is also recognised that a failure to anticipate political and institutional challenges is often a chief cause of unsuccessful policy reform processes.
Even though the World Bank (2008: 1) notes the importance of āstakeholder influence and interests, and associated power relationsā to cost-benefit understandings of whether policies are accepted, the institution has said very little about the importance of relational dynamics between itself and its member countries to the social construction and movement of development policy.
Drawing upon a combination of primary sources (loan agreements, implementation completion reports, and staff appraisal reports) and secondary sources (scholarly books and journal articles), this study concludes that the more voluntary and consensual the process of policy transfer, the greater the possibility of policy acceptance. In sum, the evidence reveals that the process and perception of policy transferāfor example, the presentation and packaging of policy options and the dynamics between technical assistance providers and recipientsāare influential in facilitating the effective transference of policy reforms. The book therefore makes an analytical contribution to issues of importance in international development assistance, global governance , and public policy . It does so through a theoretical and empirical approach that offers a unique and comprehensive account of the ideational role played by a global governance actor that is largely missing from the literature.
There are three main fields of study on the World Bank: those that examine it as an organisationāinstitutional-level analyses, notably from constructivist discourse, that focus on how ideas circulate within international organisations (see Park 2005; Vetterlein 2007; Weaver 2007; Chwieroth 2008); those that analyse policy movement from the World Bank to recipient audiencesāhow ideas and practices move from the āinternationalā to the ādomesticā (see Teichman 2004; Smith 2008); and, those that review the on-the-ground impact of World Bank development assistance (see Babb 2005; Engel 2010a). The former and the latter fields are substantial and comprise the bulk of literature on the World Bank. In contrast, the movement of ideas and practices from the World Bank to recipients has received comparatively less attention. This study fits into this middle category.
In addition, much of the literature emphasises the institutionās coercive influence. This can be readily identified in a plethora of works analysing its provision of conditional structural adjustment loans and credits between the 1980s and 2000s (Pender 2001: 398ā400; Larmour 2002: 250ā252; Barnett and Duvall 2005: 43; Peet 2009: 136ā141). As such, scholarship is dominated by a view of the World Bank as a coercive actor compelling developing countries to accept and adopt prescribed development policies. While there is merit in such an argument, with evidence affirming the coercive nature of some of its activities, it overlooks the complexities of the situation. In practice, coercive development practices are prone to failure. In order to understand the complexity of international development assistance, one must also understand the role of non-coercive instruments used to persuade recipients to adopt particular policies. This bookās critical point of enquiry enables it to tease out this complexity by analysing technical assistance as a tool of policy transfer.
This is not to argue, of course, that there is no academic literature on the persuasive side of World Bank development assistance. Since 2000, an increasing number of works have reviewed its non-coercive instruments. Such works, however, have typically been limited to particular types of services (i.e. online knowledge platforms) or narrow time periods [(i.e. 2000ā2004) Stone 2000: 243ā260; Goldman 2000; King 2002; Wilks 2002a, b; Broad 2006]. While several journal articles have recently analysed World Bank technical assistance (Wilson 2007; Smith 2008; Walker et al. 2008), there is yet to be a comprehensive book on the subject. The World Bank and Transferring Development: Policy Movement through Technical Assistance provides that book, drawing upon several decades and a broad range of technical assistance activities, critiquing the ways in which the World Bank attemptsāboth successfully and unsuccessfullyāto persuasively socialise recipients in its developing member countries.
The study offers two useful extensions on current World Bank literature: the issue of technical assistance remains under-explored and conceptually there is value in drawing upon insights from policy studies when exploring the operationalisation of non-material influence. With international development assistance remaining a source of controversy in the twenty first century, be it through the 2016 launch of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) reaffirming the importance of global partnerships and capacity building (United Nations 2016) or the protectionist trends emerging from Brexit and the presidential appointment of Donald Trump undermining multilateral relationships, this books offers timely and valuable insights into the successes and failures of development policy movement from a global governance actor to its developing member countries.
Development: A Constructed Idea
āDevelopmentā is one of the most debated concepts in the social sciences. Its controversy arises from it being a social construction, an interpretation of the betterment of human life. As Sachs (2010: xvi) contends, ādevelopment is much more than just a socio-economic endeavour; it is a perception which models realityā. Not an absolute or universal truth, it consists of a series of normative positions that change ...