ABSTRACT
In this chapter we examine the challenges faced by the World Bank in addressing issues concerning ethics and human rights. We show how, even though the staff have some awareness of the ethical aspects of their work, institutional forces in the organisation constrain how the World Bank thinks and speaks about such matters. We focus our attention particularly on two recent experiences: the production of the World Development Report (WDR) 2006 on Equity and Development, and discussions surrounding the World Bank’s activities in the human rights field. In this chapter we emphasise the significant role of expert knowledge, and in this case especially economic expertise, and how this shapes or ‘frames’ ideas (Bøås and McNeill 2004) and thereby also action. In order to understand the significance of expertise in the Bank, it is necessary to study how processes of knowledge formulation are themselves embedded within sets of social relations among professionals in the Bank, as well as relations between the Bank and others outside. Expert knowledge must be seen in the context of social relations among communities of professional advisers, consultants, policy-makers, aid administrators and managers inside and outside the Bank, relating also to its organisational culture (Mosse forthcoming). Bank experts need audiences that legitimise their knowledge. In many cases, these audiences are other bureaucrats or actors that are dependent on funds provided by the Bank to carry out activities that have been defined and promoted by the Bank’s experts, thereby generating a circular dynamic between the expertise, the audience, and the legitimacy of that expertise (St. Clair 2006a). Moreover, because of the need to maintain a sense of coherence in an organisation that is highly heterogeneous and complex, new ideas and themes tend to be built upon older and well established WB ideas and discourse; and critical views are excluded, in a process of what Wade (1996) calls ‘paradigm maintenance’. Where disagreement arises, consensus is reached through internal negotiation and contestation processes that take place behind closed doors. And ideas that are not suited to the tools of analysis and instruments of policy of the Bank (for example the role of human rights in bringing about fair development processes) tend to be excluded.
