ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects critically on policy reconfigurations for development, with a focus on the role of the World Bank. It traces the trajectory across a set of core policy paradigms as promoted by the World Bank since the late 1970s. This highlights the shift from a more structuralist orientation in development in the early 1970s towards a neoliberal frame, emblematically summarised as the Washington Consensus during the 1980s, which then itself gave way to the post-Washington Consensus in the late 1990s. These transitions capture the attempts by the World Bank to manage the fallout from its neoliberal policy experimentation in developing countries and is situated against the backdrop of an unprecedented expansion of private sector flows to the developing world. Finally, the chapter highlights how, since the millennium, whether through the post-Washington Consensus or not, development discourse has become entirely oriented towards the promotion of private sector (and financial) interests and this is perhaps most blatant in the recently reinvigorated promotion by the donor community of public–private partnerships (PPPs) across any area of public service provision.
