Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T02:44:14.011Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

New development approaches and the adaptability of international agencies: the case of the World Bank

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

William Ascher
William Ascher
Affiliation:
Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.
Get access

Abstract

Certain “realist” views of the international economic regime construe international financial agencies as straightforward reflections of the power and interests of nation states. However, the World Bank's responsiveness to a wide range of demands for new development priorities and approaches also depends on the compliance of its huge staff. The staff's discretion in shaping, implementing, discrediting, or resisting these approaches requires an organizational-theoretic analysis of the sources of acceptance of or resistance to particular initiatives. Role-set theory accounts for many of the motivational sources of resistance. The capabilities to resist new initiatives through “bureaucratic politics” can be understood through March and Simon's emphasis on the importance of absorbing uncertainty. On the basis of these theories and findings on attitudes expressed by Bank staff, strategies can be developed to enhance the Bank's responsiveness to such initiatives as greater emphasis on the alleviation of poverty. Theory and findings also provide a basis for speculating on the characteristics required of an international agency to warrant treating it as an autonomous variable in the international system.

Type
Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , Summer 1983 , pp. 415 - 439
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1983

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

The research upon which this article is based was supported by an International Affairs Fellowship of the Council on Foreign Relations.

1. Huntington, Samuel P., “Transnational Organizations in World Politics,” World Politics 25 (04 1973), p. 339CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Krasner, Stephen D., “Regimes and the Limits of Realism: Regimes as Autonomous Variables,” International Organization 36 (Spring 1982), p. 499CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. The competition between these positions is somewhat confounded by two factors. First, Krasner, ibid., points out that this latter position is held not only by certain nonrealist approaches (functionalism, transnationalism, idealism) but also by some “structural-realist” approaches that accept that, because the principles, norms, rules, and procedures constituting an international regime are generally more stable than the distribution of power among nations, the features of regimes and the results of regime actions will not maintain a one-to-one correspondence to the configuration of nation-state power and interest. Second, in terms of demonstrating whether or not actions of international entities follow nation-state interests, no assessment of a given action can escape being controversial. For example,Moulton, Anthony, in “On Concealed Dimensions of Third World Involvement in International Economic Organizations,” International Organization 32 (Autumn 1978), pp. 1020CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1032, argues that despite the common presumption of Third World countries' weakness in the aid relationship, major Third World countries' have captured the hearts and minds of the World Bank's senior management. Moulton assesses Bank policies as being heavily influenced by the development thinking and priorities of Indian and Pakistani economists, and hence not necessarily in the perceived or actual interests of the United States or other developed nations generally presumed to dominate the aid relationship. Yet Moulton also notes that the agreement on basic development approaches was shared by the U.S. Agency for International Development (p. 1020). Therefore it would be difficult to argue that the World Bank's orientation runs counter to the perceived interests of the U.S. government, inasmuch as its own development agency espoused the same orientation. On the one hand, it is difficult to establish that USAID represents the perceived interests of the United States, since other U.S. governmental agencies have held different development perspectives; on the other hand, it is also impossible to establish whether the USAID position is optimal for U.S. interests.

4. Keohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph S., “Transgovernmental Relations and International Organizations,” World Politics 27 (10 1974), p. 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. March, James G. and Simon, Herbert A., Organizations (New York: John Wiley, 1958)Google Scholar, especially chap. 5.

6. Heclo, Hugh, Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974)Google Scholar, especially chap. 6.

7. Brewer, Garry D., Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Consultant (New York: Basic Books, 1973)Google Scholar.

8. See Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Blau, Peter M., Bureaucracy in Modern Society (New York: Random House, 1956)Google Scholar; Wilensky, Harold L., Intellectuals in Labor Unions: Organizational Pressures on Professional Roles (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1956)Google Scholar; and Wilensky, , Organizational Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 1967)Google Scholar.

9. Soares, Glaucio Dillon, “Intellectual Identity and Political Ideology among University Students,” in Elites in Latin America, Lipset, Seymour M. and Solari, Aldo, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 431–34Google Scholar.

10. The proposals, and part of the literature, are summarized in Alston, P., “Human Rights and the New International Development Strategy,” Bulletin of Peace Proposals 10 (Fall 1979), pp. 281–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar;Bergsten, C. Fred, Managing International Economic Interdependence: Selected Papers of C. Fred Bergsten 1975–1976 (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1977)Google Scholar, chap. 23; Cox, Robert W., “Ideologies and the New International Economic Order: Reflections on Some Recent Literature,” International Organization 32 (Spring 1979), pp. 257–302Google Scholar; Dolman, J. and van Ettinger, J., eds., Partners in Tomorrow: Strategies for a New International Order (New York: Dutton, 1978)Google Scholar; Independent Commission on International Development Issues (Brandt Commission), North-South: A Program for Survival, The Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues under the Chairmanship of Willy Brandt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and U.S. Department of the Treasury, United States Participation in the Multilateral Development Banks in the 1980s (Washington, D.C., 1982)Google Scholar.

11. See Asher, Robert and Mason, Edward, The World Bank since Bretton Woods (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1973)Google Scholar, chaps. 14, 20, 21; and Hürni, Bettina, The Lending Poicy of the World Bank in the 1970s (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1980)Google Scholar, chaps. 1 and 2.

12. Hürni, , Lending Policies, p. 83Google Scholar.

13. Cox, Robert W., “The Executive Head: An Essay on Leadership in the ILO,” International Organization 23 (Spring 1969), pp. 205–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Ibid., p. 230.

15. The attitudes reported in the following analysis were explored through 60 formal interviews with World Bank personnel during 1980, reviews of internal Bank memoranda and the project documents of selected countries in each of the World Bank's six regional divisions, and numerous informal discussions with Bank officials and staff. This research was greatly facilitated by a fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations and the cooperation of the IBRD Projects Advisory Staff.

16. March, and Simon, , Organizations, p. 165Google Scholar.

17. See Squire, Lyn and van der Tak, Hermann, Economic Analysis of Projects (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; and Balassa, Bela, “The Income Distribution Parameter in Project Appraisal,” in Economic Progress, Private Values, and Public Policy, Balassa, and Nelson, Richard, eds. (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1977), pp. 217–32Google Scholar.

18. See Hicks, Norman and Streeten, Paul, “Indicators of Development: The Search for a Basic Needs Yardstick” (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 25 04 1978)Google Scholar.

19. Hürni, , Lending Policies, p. 80Google Scholar.

20. Rourke, Francis, “Bureaucracy in Conflict: Administrators and Professionals,” Ethics 70 (Fall 1960), pp. 220–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. Brandt Commission, North-South.

22. See Balassa, “Income Distribution.”

23. Squire, and van der Tak, , Economic Analysis; Ian Little, and Mirrlees, J. A., Project Appraisal and Planning for Developing Countries (London: Heinemann, 1974)Google Scholar; and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development,Manual of Industrial Project Analysis (Paris: OECD, 1969)Google Scholar.

24. Hoffman, Michael, then Director of the World Bank's International Relations Department, wrote in “The Challenges of the 1970s and the Present Institutional Structure,” in The World Bank Group, Multilateral Aid, and the 1970s, Lewis, John P. and Kapur, Ishan, eds. (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1973)Google Scholar: “The Bank can do practically anything it wants to do in pursuit of its objectives (except default on its bonds). The Executive Directors are not only the institution's governing board but its supreme court for interpreting the Articles of Agreement and their implications for operational work…The important issues to discuss are not whether the Bank can do this or that but whether it should and how” (p. 17).

25. Hürni, , Lending Policies, p. 11Google Scholar.

26. Wilensky, , Organizational Intelligence, p. 84Google Scholar.

27. See Jordan, Robert S., “What Has Happened to Our International Civil Service? The Case of the United Nations,” Public Administration Review (03/04 1981), pp. 236–45Google Scholar.

28. Evan, William M., “An Organization-Set Model of Interorganizational Relations,” in Interorganizalional Relations, ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), pp. 85–86Google Scholar.