King & McGrath's Knowledge for Development: Comment 2

I have been reading King and McGrath’s Knowledge for Development again, this time the chapter on the World Bank. I am struck by the treatment of the publications of the Bank, especially of the World Development Report 1998/1999, Knowledge for Development.

King and McGrath seem to take the book too seriously. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a good book and indeed an important book. But it sometimes seems as if King and McGrath are reifying the World Bank, treating the book as the rational product of its “corporate” mind. They seem to seek “the truth” about what the Bank really believes in the pages of its publication.

The problem may be methodological, in that the Bank’s “Knowledge for Development” is there, and King and McGrath have little option but to analyze what it says for their “Knowledge for Development” book. Moreover, it is far easier to do so, than to accurately capture the complexity of the Bank’s behavior and how it changes over the years. But the World Development Report is not “revealed truth”.

Of course the problem may simply be that King and McGrath and I differ in our opinions of how to interpret the WDR. Unthinkable as it may be for anyone who reads this blog, King and McGrath may be right and I may be wrong.

The World Development Reports have been published, more or less annually, since 1978. A decision is made, at a high level in the Bank’s bureaucracy, as to the topic for the next year’s WDR. A staff member is selected, and given the responsibility for producing a report. People are recruited from the Bank staff to work on the project during the year’s preparation effort. Consultant’s are employed to produce materials for the report. Many authors work on the structure and language of the report. Drafts are vetted, in whole or in part, by many organizational units within the Bank, generally each farming the task out to a single staff member. The importance given by the WDR team to the comments depends in part on the authority of the comments and of the person making them. The Chief Economist of the Bank is especially influential in that the effort is bureaucratically under his authority, and in the case of the 1998/99 report since the incumbent Chief Economist was very interested, and was later to be awarded a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the understanding of the role of knowledge in economic development.

Still, the number of people involved in producing a WDR is small compared to the total staff of the World Bank. A side bar in a chapter of the WDR may be written by a different author than the body of the chapter, and both may be modified by other authors, and the modifications may reflect the opinions of different groups commenting on the drafts. King and McGrath note that the Bank’s Knowledge for Development reflects both the view that the Bank should identify “best practices” from development experience and apply them broadly, and the view that development knowledge must be situated in country situations and developed by participatory processes. Indeed, these views are not contradictory, but apparently contradictory ideas can and do coexist in books produced by the WDR process.

World Development Reports are published in hard copy, and on the web. They are widely distributed, and widely known. But I suspect that they are not all that widely read, and the number of people who read them analytically and modify behavior based on a WDR is rather modest. After all, a Ph.D; economist or other senior professional on the Bank staff has spent years studying his field, absorbed large amount of theory and practical experience, and is not likely to have an epiphany on reading the bureaucratically vetted product of a committee.

Moreover, the Banks individual activities are developed by teams of Bank staff and consultants in conjunction with stakeholders from the countries involved and under influence of other donors, NGOs, etc. I suspect that few if any of those influential in the development of a Bank loan will have read a specific WDR. (It is more likely that such a person will be trying to apply approaches derived from many WDRs.) Moreover, the influence of a WDR that has been read will be moderated by large numbers of other theoretical or policy documents that are felt to bear on the activity.

Carl Dahlman, Director of the WDR 1998/99, has successfully sought to make the report more influential by creating a K4D unit within the Bank, by training people in K4D approaches, by leading K4D assessments in Bank client countries, by helping to develop financing activities out of those assessments, and by other means. Others -- who more or less agree with the policy thinking in the K4D WDR -- have pushed e-Development projects, helped run a S&T strategy exercise for the Bank, published Constructing Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education, and created a Global Information and Communication Technology Department within the World Bank Group. Indeed, the K4D-WDR can be seen (albeit, perhapss not by King and McGrath) as a means by which a faction of the Bank staff lead by Dahlman and allies sought to influence the Bank’s program.

King and McGrath see the K4D movement in the Bank in terms of larger intellectual movements in the donor community and the world, as do I. I would emphasize the information revolution more than they do – institutions all over the world have been increasing attention to information and knowledge activities as changes in information and communication technology and infrastructure made such efforts more cost-efficient. I would also emphasize the effect of the “Washington Consensus” which reduced the Bank’s business activities involved in lending to state-owned enterprises, and the Bank’s staff’s self preservation response of finding other things to do.