ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the educative use of the 'law of the project'. Transnational institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF are not supposed to meddle in the political affairs of creditor nations. Indeed, the Bank's charter forbids such meddling. The Bank is supposed to focus on economic matters such as growth and poverty reduction. The chapter considers how the Bank's ambitious programme of social transformation worked out on the ground in some Sulawesi villages, where the author carried out long term ethnographic research. It reveals the limits of the law of the project as a means to govern conduct. The World Bank in Indonesia has devised a massive programme to reform conduct. Its mode of operation is governmental. The chapter examines two extensions of the Bank's sub-district development program, one focused on changing the culture of corruption, the other focused on conflict management. The social development team's interventions in Indonesia were unabashedly governmental.
