ABSTRACT
Originally created as part of a global financial architecture aimed at reducing the likelihood of global economic crisis and now situated as the preeminent institution in the broad international development community, the World Bank has witnessed tremendous transformation of its mission, structure and operations over its 65-year existence. In this chapter, we focus on the World Bank as a lender of international development funds. We first briefly describe some of the major transformations that the Bank underwent through the mid-1990s in order to set up an extended discussion of the incorporation of the ‘governance and anticorruption’ (GAC) agenda into the World Bank’s lending operations. We show how the GAC agenda emerged as the product of crises of legitimacy and effectiveness linked to the failures of structural adjustment lending during the 1980s and early 1990s. We argue that the GAC agenda remains ill defined almost 20 years after its emergence, for three fundamental reasons: (1) the challenges of creating better governing institutions in the developing world; (2) the disbursement culture that drives bureaucratic decisions within the Bank; and (3) the question of to which constituencies the Bank should be responsive.
