WHEN IN MANCHESTER
The World Bank as the World’s Bank: an Analysis to the Ideological Hegemony in Development Research
Knowledge in the 21st century is believed and treated to be a commodity (Mehta, 2001; Robertson, 2009; Kramarz and Momani, 2013). In a globalised network, knowledge can even be attributed as a global public good that can be accrued through research by everyone in the world, given that one has access to them (Stiglitz, 1999). Nevertheless, as the production of knowledge is situated in a political context, those who have the power to engage in the production ultimately legitimises a Gramscian ‘ideological hegemony’ in research. Amidst protests for its neoliberal development programme bias, the World Bank (or ‘the Bank’) declares itself as a ‘Knowledge Bank’ in leading the production of knowledge on understanding poverty (Plehwe, 2007; World Bank, 2020). With access to developing countries’ information through loans and donor engagement, today, the Bank plays a ‘special responsibility’ (Stiglitz, 1999, p. 320) in development research.
By drawing on a Gramscian concept of ideological hegemony, this essay seeks to understand how the Bank, as a leading development organisation, play an important role in development research. This essay contends that the power knowledge of the Bank enables a circular loop of knowledge reproduction and legitimacy. The following section justifies that the circular loop does not only rest on the internal capacity of the Bank but also on how the normalcy of its ideas over time has further embedded the Bank’s structure of dominance. The following section discusses the possibility of counter-hegemony, and the final section concludes.
The Bank, Reproduction of Knowledge, and a Possible Counter-hegemony?
The World Bank has now gone beyond its post-war development imperatives to one at the forefront of research on poverty reduction and global prosperity (Broad, 2006; World Bank, 2020). Its flagship manifestation in research is the Bank’s yearly-themed publication of the World Development Reports (WDR) that provides analysis and policy recommendations for a broad range of development research themes, from global value chains to good governance.
Nevertheless, scholars have critized the Bank’s neoliberal leanings in its publications (Wade, 2002; Rao, Woolcock and Bank, 2007), present through the support of the United States as the largest donor, advocacy of market-oriented values (Inman, 2018) and simplistic modelling of poverty in countries (Rigg et al., 2009). Additionally, scholars have noted that such biases have successfully shaped development research as a result of internal conditions such as the bureaucratic culture of the Bank, the prominence of quality economists and its vast research network (Kramarz and Momani, 2013). Many of its top economists have even voluntarily left the Bank (Wade, 2002; Jones, 2020), the reproduction of knowledge by the Bank continues. Therefore, the power of the Bank to reproduce knowledge does not only reside on behalf of the Bank’s capacity per se but it is also embedded in the Bank’s power in the broader social system (Haugaard, 2009).
Upon the interpretation of Cox (1983), Gramsci’s hegemony rests on the dominance of the bourgeoisie through a combination of consent and coercion to conform to the behaviour the lower classes or proletariats. The institutionalisation of ideas is vital in building the legitimacy and universality of norms of the dominant class. In this case, the dominant class represents the bearer of knowledge. Cox elaborates the five characteristics of understanding hegemony through international organisations of which this essay focuses on two of them, notably 1) that counter ideas are absorbed to assert legitimacy and 2) that norms of world order are ideologically legitimised.
First, the Bank’s legitimacy rests on its ability to ‘keep its friends close and enemies closer’. By academically engaging with its critics, coupled with its capacity to acquire a broad range of data from its borrowing countries, counterarguments to the Bank’s research outcomes are strategically realigned to suit the Bank’s neoliberal ideology (St.Clair, 2006; Nay, 2014). Concerning Gramsci’s ideology hegemony, the absorption of counter-hegemonic ideas refers to as trasformismo (Cox, 1983; Rückert, 2007). For instance, the 2017 WDR on Governance and the Law maintain the idea that a stable good governance system ensures the necessary preconditions of long-term economic growth.
On the other hand, scholars have noted that not all countries possess the same mature institutions and ‘working with the grain’ is needed to push for other means of rapid growth (Khan, 2008; Di John, J. & Putzel, 2009). Nevertheless, the essence of the works of these same critics of the neoliberal paradigm are incorporated and are represented in the 2017 WDR to support the Bank’s claims that elites are unstable, change over time, and its distribution varies over space, time, and focus (World Bank Group, 2017, p. 22).
Second, the Bank presents itself not only as a knowledge bank but also ‘norm entrepreneurs’, ‘enforcers of ideas’, and a ‘platform for global debates’ (Nay, 2014, p. 5). As mentioned earlier, scholars have noted the Bank’s ideological role projected internally through manipulation of data, simplistic metrics on the profile of the ‘poor’, selective regulations, and strong discouragement of dissenting discourse (Hanmer, Pyatt and White, 1999; Broad, 2006). Nonetheless, these arguments have not explained how well the Bank has been able to exert its neoliberal ideology and influence as a universal norm.
Instead, this essay argues that the Bank’s ‘openness’ to share its methodology and data, of which derives from its borrowing countries (St.Clair, 2006), contributes to the vast ‘acceptance’ of its neoliberal ideology and organisational interests (Kramarz and Momani, 2013; Verger, Edwards and Altinyelken, 2014). In particular, Nay (2014) finds that the Bank has been able to assert its dominance through the methodologies it creates to explain, normalise, and make ‘accepted’ broad concepts, in this case on the concept of fragile states. More specifically, through the Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) as an analytical instrument to assess state fragility, the disclosure of its CPIA data quickly became references for other institutions. While not all institutions agreed on the CPIA, along with other indicators by the Bank, the Bank nonetheless set the grounds for the diffusion of knowledge.
The arguments above entail that there is a continuous loop of the reproduction of knowledge and legitimacy performed by the Bank and its network of research (St.Clair, 2006). Ultimately, such loop reinforces an ideological hegemony as coined by Gramsci, in which the Bank’s neoliberal leaning posits structural dominance over knowledge in development research (Verger, Edwards and Altinyelken, 2014).
However, it is also fair to say that not all who have engaged with the Bank’s research have agreed (Kramarz and Momani, 2013) or that other development institutions will stop developing their data and interpretations without the Bank. Building on Kramarz and Momani (2013), it is the exact contestation by others in the field of development research regarding the Bank’s publications that nonetheless contributes to the dominance of the Bank.
Challenging the hegemony of the Bank as a knowledge bank would also entail structurally changing the current loop of knowledge reproduction or create a new loop of knowledge reproduction altogether. The former would mean the massive effort of competing with the Bank’s vast resources and networks. In such cases, even the prominent economists of the Bank such as Ravi Kanbur, Joseph Stiglitz and now Penny Goldberg have ‘succumbed’ to the pressures of the Bank’s neoliberal image (Wade, 2002; Jones, 2020). The latter, as Cox (1983) interprets, follows a Gramscian notion of counterhegemony or ‘new historic bloc’.
For Gramsci, the counterhegemony would necessitate the presence of a ‘political organisation’ capable of rallying the counterhegemons together. In the context of the Bank, counter knowledge to that of the Bank’s knowledge hegemony need to be able to politically enforce collective propaganda in contrast to the power knowledge of the Bank.
Nevertheless, even creating a new knowledge bank in the Bank’s hegemony would also be susceptible to the influence of the Bank’s resources and research networks (Cox, 1983, p. 13). Thus, while it is probable to counter the Bank’s power-knowledge, both means nonetheless highlights the Bank’s prominence and ‘normalcy’ of ideas in the structure of knowledge over time (Haugaard, 2009, p. 276). Noting the Bank’s provision of initial data and indicators, thus laying the foundations for others to develop their interpretations (Nay, 2014), it further embeds the Bank’s power and dominance in the ‘knowledge network’ (Stone, 2003).
The World Bank as the World’s Bank
This essay has illustrated how the Bank, as one of the world’s prominent development organisations, plays an important role in development research. Furthermore, contrary to other research on the internal capacity of the Bank (Hanmer, Pyatt and White, 1999; Banerjee et al., 2006; Rigg et al., 2009), the hegemony of the World Bank is contingent upon how the Bank can assert itself as the world’s knowledge bank in a broader social system (Haugaard, 2009).
From a Gramscian perspective, the Bank asserts its ideological hegemony through the absorption of counter ideas and legitimisation of its neoliberal norms (Cox, 1983). In essence, these means reinforce a circular loop of knowledge reproduction that establishes a structural dominance of the Bank in development research (St.Clair, 2006). Additionally, this essay has anticipated that a counterhegemony to the Bank’s power knowledge is possible given that it can build political clout. Nevertheless, such a counterhegemony would unavoidably engage with and ‘accept’ the Bank’s structures of dominance.
As part of the series ‘When in Manchester’, this piece was originally an assignment the author completed for the course Understanding Development Research at the University of Manchester.
