The disciplinary monopoly in development research at the World Bank

Global Governance

Volumn 13, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 479-484

  Rao, Vijayendra ^a   Woolcock, Michael ^b,c  

^a WORLD BANK   (United States)

^b Development Economics Research Group

^c UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 37349036244     PISSN: 10752846     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/19426720-01304003     Document Type: Review

References (7)

1. During the terms of Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern as chief economist, the name of the research department was changed to the Development Research Group (from the Development Economics Research Group) to signal its openness to noneconomics points of view. However, in recent years, this usage seems to have gradually disappeared, and most DEC staff, except for a few holdouts, have reverted to using the old name. In some respects, this represents an interesting repetition of events played out at the founding of the World Bank, which from its inception had an entity called the Research Department. By 1948, however, this name had been changed to Economics Department, though with the rise of project (as opposed to program) lending during the 1950s, as a result of the ascendance of bankers and lawyers, "the Economics Department lost its departmental status, becoming the small and underfunded Economics Staff"; see Jeffrey M. Chwieroth, "Organizational Change 'from Within': Exploring the World Bank's Early Lending Policies," mimeo, London School of Economics, Department of International Relations, 2007 (p. 21). We are not, of course, calling for a similar fate to befall today's DECRG; for our present purposes, we note only that broader political forces play a large role in determining the power and intellectual salience of a given discipline at a particular historical moment.
2. On this, see also John Markoff and Veronica Montecinos, "The Ubiquitous Rise of Economists," Journal of Public Policy 19, no. 1 (1993): 37-68.
3. World Bank research staff who have PhDs in social science disciplines other than economics are Varun Gauri (government and public policy), Monica Das Gupta (anthropology and demography), and Michael Woolcock (sociology). Vijayendra Rao has a PhD in economics but has substantive interests in anthropology and development studies. There are approximately eighty-three full-time research staff at the Bank, though at any given time there are also dozens of consultants employed to assist with various research projects. Staff outside the Research Group can and do publish in scholarly journals, though they have less time, incentive, and mandate to do so.
4. Most prominently, James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Well-Intentioned Efforts to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
5. See David Mosse, "Social Analysis as Product Development: Anthropologists at Work in the World Bank," in Oscar Salemink, Anton van Harskamp, and Anta Kumar Giri, eds., The Development of Religion/The Religion of Development (Amsterdam: Eburon B V, 2005), pp. 77-87.
6. The procedures underpinning this assessment, and the documents produced as a result of it, are available at http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/ EXTDEC/0.,contentMDK:21165468~pagePK:64165401~piPK:64165026~theSitePK:469372., 00.html.
7. Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton, eds., Culture and Public Action (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004).