IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cnpexx/v17y2012i1p35-58.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Seeing Like the World Bank on Poverty

Author

Listed:
  • Antje Vetterlein

Abstract

This article investigates the way in which the World Bank constructs knowledge on poverty by identifying analytic institutions inside the organisation where ideas are developed, ‘anti-poverty advocates’ that populate these institutions and the strategies they employ to foster their agenda. By doing so, the article challenges two common critiques against the organisation. First, the Bank is often seen as an instrument of powerful industrialised countries to impose Western norms on developing countries; second, the Bank has contributed to worsening the situation in developing countries through the policies adopted. I argue that both assumptions are overstated. First, an in-depth analysis of the organisation's operational and organisational level shows a high level of internal advocacy that provides evidence that the Bank as a bureaucracy independently shapes global politics. Second, comparing the discursive level with developments on the policy and operational level reveals that the poverty or social agenda has grown incrementally from the late 1960s even in times when neoliberalism dominated world politics and economy. The article goes beyond such an organisational analysis in critically assessing how the Bank, by making developing countries ‘legible’, has provided standardised responses that ignore local social knowledge with the consequence of crude and self-defeating interventions.

Suggested Citation

  • Antje Vetterlein, 2012. "Seeing Like the World Bank on Poverty," New Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(1), pages 35-58.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:17:y:2012:i:1:p:35-58
    DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2011.569023
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13563467.2011.569023
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13563467.2011.569023?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Eugenia C. Heldt & Thomas Dörfler, 2022. "Orchestrating private investors for development: How the World Bank revitalizes," Regulation & Governance, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 16(4), pages 1382-1398, October.
    2. Jacqueline D. Ifield & Chia-Han Yang, 2022. "Arranged Marriages in Multilateral Partnerships—Investigating Sustainable Human Development Financing of Belize in the World Bank Group: A Brand Relationship Theory Approach," JOItmC, MDPI, vol. 8(4), pages 1-33, November.
    3. Macartney, Huw & Pape, Fabian & Watson, Matthew, 2024. "Shape-shifters, chameleons, and recognitional politics: the asset management industry and financial regulation," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 123564, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    4. John Berten, 2022. "Producing decent work indicators: contested numbers at the ILO [The analysis of sustainability indicators as socially constructed policy instruments: Benefits and challenges of ‘interactive researc," Policy and Society, Darryl S. Jarvis and M. Ramesh, vol. 41(4), pages 458-470.
    5. Christoph Knill & Louisa Bayerlein & Jan Enkler & Stephan Grohs, 2019. "Bureaucratic influence and administrative styles in international organizations," The Review of International Organizations, Springer, vol. 14(1), pages 83-106, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:17:y:2012:i:1:p:35-58. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/cnpe20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.