ABSTRACT
Canadian scholar John Mihevc titles the first chapter of his doctoral dissertation in theology ‘The Fundamentalist Theology of the World Bank’. He means it literally, Mihevc, who wrote his thesis on the response of churches and social movements in Mica to World Bank structural adjustment programmes, found striking similarities between the development vision of the Bank and the neo-conservative, right-wing fundamentalist religious agenda on the rise in many Northern countries in the 1980s. The manner in which the World Bank has presented, promoted and defended structural adjustment against its critics closely parallels fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible. Mihevc is not alone in his views. According to the theological interpretation, the Bank has contrived to confer on its own doctrines a status akin to that of divinely ordained natural law. For the Bank or for an exponent of its doctrine like Summers, propositions like these are just common sense, or in more philosophical terms, natural law.
