The World Bank: Development, Poverty, Hegemony

Interview by Mike Gismondi

Photo: Permission provided by David Moore

David Moore, a Canadian, received his doctorate in Political Science from York University in Toronto. He taught at Athabasca University for a number of years in the early 1990s, and has since taught in Australia and currently teaches at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa in the program in Economic History and Development Studies. He has written academic articles on Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and on theories of development in the Third World.

David and I were colleagues during those days at Athabasca University and spent many hours discussing development, hegemony, and revolution. We also went canoeing and camping with the kids and kept talking about theory! Nowadays I hear that David bicycles around Durban a lot, reads as many good novels as he can, and enjoys 'social realist' movies.

I caught up with David Moore in late November 2007 in Camrose, Alberta He was presenting the talk The Impossible Dream: World Bank Visions of Development and Africa, at the Ronning Centre of the Augustana Campus of the University of Alberta. Following much lively discussion, David and I drove back to Edmonton, where we continued to discuss his ideas about the World Bank, as well as his new book The World Bank: Development, Poverty, Hegemony published by University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007.

Aurora: – It’s been a few years since we taught together David at Athabasca University. You have since taught in Australia and you’ve been teaching in South Africa recently. Maybe just tell us where you’re teaching now and then we will get into the book.

David Moore: I teach at University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, which is a large university. Recently the English liberal university of historic days has been merged with a historically quote unquote Indian university …reflecting many of the transformations going on in South Africa. Ably advised by the World Bank, I’m sure.

Aurora : Well, that’s what I was wondering. You’ve written and edited a new book on the World Bank, and you’re living in a country where the World Bank must play a big part?

David Moore: Well, it actually doesn’t have that much of a role in South Africa because South Africa doesn’t have big debts or big loans with the World Bank. But at the moment of transition in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the World Bank did have advisory technicians around trying to convince South African policy-makers/future South African policy-makers to do ‘x’ and ‘y’. So in a sense, I suppose you could say that in South Africa, the World Bank operates as more of a knowledge bank than a lending bank.

And you have lots of former members of the Communist Party and former members of the various liberation parties in South Africa who have since joined the World Bank, so you have ex-Communist so and so, now information officer or public relations or something with the World Bank, and you have very well-known activists who have been Vice President of Human Resources or something for the World Bank, so you have, it’s – you could call it an epistemic community¹, I guess, that the Bank is trying to create to make their policies work in South Africa.

It’s a different case in many other African countries who were so deeply in debt in the late 1970s and ‘80s that they were forced to take on conditionalities such as privatization, releasing controls on exchange rates, letting more imports come in, and that sort of stuff in the rest of Africa and the Latin American countries that you know more about than I do. So it’s a bit different, but still, if there’s a knowledge bank that is trying to create some sort of consensus about what development is - South Africa’s probably not a bad case.

Aurora: Let’s talk a bit more along these lines, ‘cause you’ve kind of positioned the book to focus on that topic of the knowledge bank, or hegemony, more broadly – maybe describe the book for me a little bit within the larger literature. There have been a few books about the World Bank recently and a couple of good ones, like Goldman’s book, Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization, 2005.

David Moore: And Goldman’s interesting too because he does talk about hegemony. Now hegemony is a process by which the ruling classes, the dominant classes, the intellectuals who try and articulate the strategies for the ruling classes — hegemony’s the process by which they try and gain consent among both other intellectuals who would represent third world countries or NGOs or civil society, trying to bring them around to the ideas of liberalism, or, more starkly, neo-liberalism through intellectual and moral leadership. Okay, so this is a classic Gramscian sense of what hegemony is. So I’m trying to use these concepts to look at how the World Bank is part of an emerging global system of institutions which could conceivably be called, as William Robinson the sociologist at Santa Barbara says, a transnational state which is controlling the world.

Aurora : That’s a large image.

David Moore: I’d say it’s a much more unevenly and contradictorily emerging system of social and economic institutions, but I think we could see the World Bank emerging as some sort of a international ministry of development, let’s put it like that, within this new world that we’re seeing come into place.

So it’s more an investigation of ideas around sustainability, participatory democracy and good governance. Graham Harrison, in the book, talks about the development of governance states in Africa. Thomas Wanner discusses how, in Orwellian fashion, the environmental discourse on sustainability is twisted by the Bank to persuade us that the environment is best served by the market. Robert Wade talks about how the big report in 1993 The East Asian Miracle: Growth and Public Policy, tried to account for the East Asian economic miracle. He outlines all the struggles within the World Bank, among economists and writers who are trying to put this report together, how they try and massage the report to account for the fact that there is an industrial policy there, but they don’t want to really say that.

So the World Bank book started as a critical analysis of various world development reports², which the World Bank publishes every year, and they have published hundreds of thousands of them, and they’ve become sort of a template, at least they hope they’ll become sort of a template for development thinking around issues like the role of the state. So it started out as a critical review of a series of these world development reports. To some extent, it remains that. To another extent, it is an analysis of the way the World Bank has attacked issues like poverty, and some of the chapters are critical of some of the critiques of the World Bank that have become almost popular common sense within anti-globalization movements. The chapter by Scott MacWilliam, Plenty of Poverty or the Poverty of Plenty? The World Bank at the Turn of the Millennium says, “Well, the real problem with the World Bank is not that it wants to create poverty, but that it actually doesnt have the capacity to really transform social relations of production; what he says is that they do not attach labour to the means of production. In other words, the Bank is not strong enough. So theres sort of a counter-critique of critiques in there at some level, and theres also people like Patrick Bond, (Civil Society and Wolfowitzs World Bank: Reform or Rejection?) whos quite well-known for suggesting that the Bank be nixed. He says, Should the Bank be fixed, i.e. reformed, or nixed, i.e. thrown out the window and start over with something new? So theres a lot of spread in there between, completely negative accounts or accounts which are a little bit subtler in their analyses.

Essentially, I think it’s trying to look at the ideas, the way in which the intellectuals who are in the World Bank cope with new problems emerging, with contradictions. I think one of the sub-issues that come out in a few chapters is whether the Bank can be seen as simply a representative of the imperial state, i.e. United States, or, if it’s emerging in some sort of a new formation in which there is a global state emerging, and it’s not necessarily American interests which will determine the future of the world. So I think we’re just at the edge of a new sort of stage because we have China, which has capital that it can invest in countries without any of the conditions of the World Bank. We have Venezuela, which I think is setting up some sort of a bank for the South …

Aurora : That’s one of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s strategies, Banco del Sur or Bank of the South³.

David Moore: We have countries like Nigeria, who are paying off their IMF debts because they have lots of oil, so they’re no longer going to be subject to these conditionalities. So the World Bank is representative of the contradictions within the global economy and that’s kind of interesting to study at this time.

Aurora : Well. That’s a good start Dave.

David Moore: You don’t even have to ask questions.

Aurora : I do have a couple things I have written down, but I want to start with one of the chapters that I read more closely on poverty and on participation. And for those people reading this interview and who might want to adopt this book for their classes, I thought you could give them a little example of what the authors are trying to do there, how the Bank has become a world expert on participation, and rapid rural assessment and participatory rural assessment, and at getting the voices of the poor involved in decision-making – yet we end up, tragically in some cases, governing the poor through participation.

David Moore: Yeah, Susanna Schech and Sanjugta vas Dev, (Governing Through Participation? The World Bank’s New Approach to the Poor) two scholars at Flinders University in Australia, where I used to work, are using more of a bio-politics, Foucauldian analysis of the Bank’s strategies about participation. Now, they’re reviewing a three volume set of books that the World Bank commissioned around, well, they were to be published in the year 2000, which was going to be a big, big, big year for the World Bank ‘cause this is a new millennium and it was a poverty report, Attacking Poverty.

Anyway, there was a huge amount of money and resources set up, established to really jump into this issue, and this was during the tenure of James Wolfensohn, who’s probably well-known for trying to incorporate all sorts of green issues and participation issues. He was kind of the representative of the Clinton regime, which was not the traditional type of just economic policy. So participation had become a flagship of democrats all over the world in the moment of post-Cold War thawing and democracy emerging all over the place, and of course, there were lots of critiques of the World Bank emerging – “Well, look, this is just a bunch of experts coming in, telling us what to do” and people asking –“I want to get more people to participate.” Now, I guess the issue is what is participation really about? Do you actually change the terrain of discourse to more democratic to reflect the aspirations and desires of people who are really poor and really excluded from decision-making processes, economic processes? So it went out, and it was supposed to talk to lots of people. And they had this big Internet exchange where everybody around the world could participate in this global forum. Well, Susanne and Sanjugta kind of analyzed the people who did participate in that, and of course you have the small percentage of the world population who can actually participate in Internet discussions about how to change the World Bank.

Aurora : Quite small I would wager.

David Moore: But regardless of the numbers of people involved, what Susanne and Sanjugta reflect upon is how the notion of participation brings people into a process defined by the Bank and its co-operating institutions. So ‘participation’ within certain parameters brings many people into very powerful structures that delimit the terms of entry and activity. If people participate in these projects, they are also co-opted into their frameworks. In his discussion of how the Bank has tried to become the ‘knowledge bank’ he extends this idea to catalog the ways in which the World Bank tries to set the boundaries and what ‘development’ in the very broad sense means to researchers and policy makers, too. This goes far beyond loaning money for dams. And Richard Pithouse, in his chapter (Producing the Poor: The World Bank’s New Discourse of Domination), is also a review of these voices of the poor, and they did videos and, God, they probably sponsored an opera somewhere, Voices of the Poor (World Bank 2000) through kind of reviewing it along with a book that was written in South Africa by Ashwin Desai, We are the Poors (2002) which doesn’t iron out all the contradictions and all the conflicts and the class differences and gender differences and race differences. It – this book brings the voices of the poors, with an ‘s’, to front and centre stage and lets them speak for themselves, whereas the Voices of the Poor kind of irons this out with a very mechanistic and sterile discourse. (In the World Bank book) all poors are the same. They don’t really contradict much, and so it’s a kind of positioning of a very sterile, removed, antiseptic, technicist way of ironing out all the real voices. So Desai counter poses these two books. And I’m not sure exactly what he proposes at the end, whether it’s just going to be a much more opening up of space for these voices, or whether the World Bank can listen to them or not.

So we are getting into some pretty fuzzy, swampy waters here with the Bank – I mean, Pithouse’s critique is similar to the critique by the right wing. The right wing has this critique of James Wolfensohn, who they see as just mission creep multiplied, by thousands.

Aurora : By mission creep you mean they are doing too much, straying from their true purpose?

David Moore: The Bank is doing too much, doing too much. What the hell does the World Bank have to do with participation? What the hell does the World Bank have to do with green development? And so there’s a critique from a more orthodox leftist perspective too, that the Bank should just be concentrating on encouraging states to invest in public goods like infrastructure and education and that sort of thing. And that was a critique of Wolfensohn that emerges as he was removed from the Bank. So I think as we look at these discourses of opposition, we can see a number of different possibilities for a new world emerging, whether it’s based on a radicalized civil society, or a stronger state, or even a sort of new United Nations which would represent voices from below.

Those are also some of the implicit critiques, but the book doesn’t really address those per se. The book is trying to look at how, as the world changes, as production and processes of accumulation change around the world, how do the organic intellectuals within the World Bank try and shift that discourse to something that can maintain the structures of power as they are.

I think that you can see it as an institution which reforms along with changes in the world economy and changes in the power of big states, so it does come down to a sort of analysis of power and ideology, and I think that’s more important to me than looking at the economic policies that come up.

Aurora: What struck me was the part of the book where you’re describing the mix of employees in the Bank itself, in the different departments, their different backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, and you kind of cast it within that framework of the tension between the Bank and civil society, the world social forum, social movements and you see this tension within the Bank itself between the policy makers, ideologues and leaders, and the actual employees. You seem to be saying that there might be some potential for transformation from within.

David Moore: I think I may have been a bit whimsical about that.

Aurora: So?

David Moore: But we do see these social indications of globalization in the World Social Forum, so you get lots of energetic radical youth meeting at Porto Alegre and in Nairobi to challenge the World Bank, but at the same time, I think something much more subtle is happening. Now, I don’t know if the World Bank has rules like the United Nations that somebody has to be, there has to be a particular quota from every country, but I looked at the web page of their Institute of Distance Education – so here we have Athabasca University in Washington. (The Distance Education Institute has since been folded into the World Bank Education site)⁴.

And I looked at all the people who were employed by this unit, it was just a global mosaic. It was this Bangladeshi guy doing computer design, and this English woman doing graphics, and this Columbian guy doing educational psychology, whatever, and it struck me that this is in Washington, a picture of the global middle class, or the global intelligentsia, or the global technocrats. And at a real level, this is a kind of world institution which is emerging.

Now, what kind of ideologies, what kind of policy-making practices do these people develop? What do they disseminate? Of course, much more famous than distance education, is the World Bank Institute⁵, which I think gives scholarships to all sorts of people to go to Japan or whatever and study, or go all over the world.

So what kind of consciousness is emerging from these people? And it’s also happening at a much higher level, if you look at many finance ministers in Africa and even Presidents, sometimes, like the President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf - she was a World Bank hotshot for a long time. If you look at one of the Prime Ministers of Ivory Coast (Alassane Ouattara)⁶, he was in the IMF, and so at a level of powerful economic decision-making, you’re seeing a lot of these clones, so to speak. And if you look at Robert Wade’s article on the miracle in East Asia, you just see the schools that these people have gone to and the Anglo-American style of economics that emerges from this discourse. So at that level, you’re seeing some sort of a new institution emerging.

Aurora: Like Pareto’s circulation of elites, or C. Wright Mills’ power elite that moved around from market sector to military to government sector in America in the 1960s.

David Moore: It has become much more global than it was… forty years ago.

Aurora: So, maybe you were being too whimsical about change from within!

David Moore: And what sort of global civil society is emerging as well, you could say a Polanyian double movement or counter-movement in opposition to this. But it’s kind of interesting that the world social forum, the funding that comes to the world social forum is coming from institutions like George Soros’ Open Society and Ford Foundation.

Aurora: Let’s switch gears here and explore your concerns about the state, its absence in the discussions.

David Moore: One thing that’s kind of interesting here, if we’re looking at global civil society, global institutions like the Bank, the IMF, the bilaterals, the United Nations Development Programme - where is the state in all of this? Sure, we have, African states, failed states. We think of Latin American states, caudillo states. And there’s a sort of commonality between this civil society, which is anti-state in a kind of leftist way, and neo-liberals, which are anti-state in a “let the market go” kind of way. But both of them need a state to implement their policies. World Bank policies have to be signed off by the state. The state has to be seen to be the one who’s asking for this assistance, right? Although it’s very much a façade, and you can see this in the way these programs are written up and that poverty reduction, whatever poverty reduction strategy papers that they have to write, and they have to fit the template that the World Bank sets up, and all o participatory review processes, they’re all confined within some sort of Foucauldian grid.

We were discussing this yesterday - this guy from Quebec about how fair trade social economy organizations are changing.

Aurora: Agreed. He was arguing that fair trade alternative vendors initially eschewed the state for direct consumer to producer connections across the globe, but now they see the need for a state to protect their labels and certifications and to prevent the corporate opportunists using the fair trade ethos in the market. So they need the state.

David Moore: He says, “Look, you, if you’re going to, have standards about fair trade and organic foods - coffee or whatever –and as the corporates come in with these fake standards to jump on the discourse, to, conflating the idea of fair trade and fear trade, free trade – (laughs) fear trade, that’s a good concept.

The state has to arbitrate contradictions between capital and labour, and so what sort of state is emerging from this configuration of forces? And certainly in the late 1990s, after the World Bank had experimented with the structural adjustment programs, which were just saying ‘let the market rule, get the prices right, get the exchange rate right, and these incentives will flow to agriculturalists to produce for the market.’ Well, that didn’t work. And we’ve seen in the last decade of development the good governance discourse, where the state becomes seen as the agent which can, through the law, transform property relations and clean up corruption. So there’s recognition there that the state is a necessary tool for development in the neo-liberal mold, and, of course, the consequences of that have actually been neo-conservatism and send in the bombs. Perhaps it’s a natural progression, but perhaps it’s more on contingency than that, but anyway. So there’s recognition that the state is necessary. Now, so there’s been a process of restructuring these states, successful or not, we don’t know. But at the same time, I think civil society, radical civil society emerging has also recognized, or is beginning to recognize, that the state has to be a focus of action. So I think we’re, I think we’re coming back to the state in many ways. Even Fukuyama (The End of History?) has said, “Politics 101: rebuild the state,” and he’s said he’s not a neo-conservative anymore.

Aurora: I’m not holding my breath.

Well, let’s wrap it up. Is there anything else you’d like to say about the book? You’re teaching it right now at Carleton University. How’s that going?

David Moore: I think it makes a good text for senior undergraduate or postgraduate work. I think there are more and more books like this coming up around, and maybe it’s like Hegel’s Owl of Minerva. Like we’re publishing these things now, but we can only perceive what was in the past. So maybe the World Bank is dead. Then the global conjuncture right now is going to become a radically transformed institution, or it will disappear. So in that case, this will be an interesting, historical little text of failed hegemonic attempts or an indicator of some sort of success of new global institutions emerging to manage the contradictions of globalization.

Aurora: I hope you’re right Dave. Before we go, “What are you thinking about these days?” This book was something you worked on over the past few years.

David Moore: Yeah, it’s a combination of classical texts that emerged in the ‘90s when people really started to think about the Bank and its intellectual mission, and some newer texts by new scholars coming up around the world. But I think it’s a project to investigate how ideas can become dominant and accepted and part of the consensus about what makes things work socially and economically.

Now, well, I’m concentrating on a place where hegemony has failed, which is in Zimbabwe, which is widely around the world seen as a disastrous regime, and I think that’s right, although for very many different reasons. So I’m trying to think, well, why is this idea that the liberal world can be created, is it actually possible, or is it impossible? So I’m looking at that. I’m kind of reversing the terrain, reversing the route of investigation. This book looked at how could hegemony be possible? How is it being constructed? But I think now I’m kind of turning that around and saying, “Well, is it impossible?”

I don’t know if that’s conservative or something deeply radical.

Footnotes:

1Epistemic Community means a group of experts who claim authority over a body of knowledge related to a specific issue. (Sundstrom 2000)

2see: http://go.worldbank.org/LOTTGBE9I0

3see: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7207

4see: http://go.worldbank.org/GMDMICVFF0