Cultural Geography

the hegemony of the west, and to abandon the

myth of development were forged – and perhaps

reached their apogee – in the crucible of what

Perry Anderson calls ‘the neo-liberal grand

slam’ (2000: 15) and the disappearance of the

entire political horizon of the 1960s generation

(2000: 17). His call for ‘renewal’ in terms of

‘accommodation’ and ‘consolidation’ must cast

a long shadow over the prospects for doing

development differently.

ETHNOGRAPHY

At the end of October 2000 I attended a small

seminar organized by the World Bank, the

ground zero of conventional development prac-

tice, on social capital (Woolcock and Narayan,

2000). The meteoric rise and institutionalization

of social capital within the Bank, one of the most

important multilateral regulatory institutions, is

an intriguing issue in itself – and indeed was one

of the topics under discussion. What was it about

this nebulous and rather elastic term, or perhaps

about Robert Putnam (2000) and his social capi-

talist boosters, that provided a language, within a

powerful and complex institution dominated by

economists and engineers, capable of addressing

social relations, poverty and the role of civics?

How, in other words, do we grasp social capital’s

institutionalization – a discursive embedding – in

the World Bank in terms of knowledge, power

and practice? And what on earth might it repre-

sent, if anything, for the way the World Bank

does business? Is it something that the anti-Bank

NGO community might put its collective shoulder

behind? Might the fact that a group of left-

of-center sociologists and economists singing the

praises of social networks, peasant confedera-

tions and decentralized social funds under the

flag of the International Bank for Reconstruction

and Development give the street protestors of

Seattle and Washington DC any reason to

rethink the nature of the beast?

Most of those present felt marginal to the Bank:

economists who had fled in moral apoplexy from

the harsh realities of implementing austerity

measures, and anthropologists soured by the

Bank’s resettlement and indigenous peoples

policies. Among the Bank’s disenfranchised,

social capital had, it turns out, a strategic appeal:

it was a useful way to stimulate debates within

and among the Bank’s divisions and to provide a

ground on which the hegemony of the neoliberal

doctrine might be engaged. It was a discourse,

moreover, with which some economists felt a

degree of intellectual comfort. The workshop

revealed, on the other hand, that in terms of

staffing, resources and legitimacy within the

Bank structure, the social capital group remains

wholly insignificant. The center of gravity within

the institution resides elsewhere, quite specifically

with the unassailable power of the ‘structural

adjustment people’.

Yet the overwhelming sense from the assem-

bled Bank operatives – project managers in

Indonesia, members of the operations and evalu-

ation division, researchers, and one high-ranking

administrator – was that the World Bank was in

some sort of ‘crisis’. On its face this is not exactly

plausible. But at stake in this invocation of crisis

was a series of internally and externally generated

struggles and conflicts best understood in terms

of Gramsci’s notion of ‘moral and intellectual

leadership’. It had, after all, been a rough year for

the world’s major development institution, the

global purveyor of conventional development

wisdom. Not only could large numbers of low-

income countries not afford to borrow from the

World Bank – and a raft of middle-income states

were not interested in borrowing – but the total

Bank lending ($24 billion) was in any case trivial

in relation to private capital flows.

There were various ‘rebellions’ – a term

deployed by a high-ranking Bank official – over

indigenous peoples and biodiversity policies; the

Bank, along with the International Monetary

Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organization

(WTO), has borne the brunt of worldwide popu-

lar protest as the emblem of all that is wrong with

globalization; and to round off the year, there

were two high-visibility resignations. Joseph

Stiglitz, the Vice-President of Research – indis-

putably the voice of theoretical and ideological

leadership in the conventional development

community – resigned, and was then fired at the

behest of US Treasury Secretary Lawrence

Summers. Stiglitz himself referred to the

prospect of being ‘muzzled’, a product of his

frontal assault on US Treasury/IMF adjustment

policies and their handling of the Asian financial

crisis. Several months after Stiglitz’s exposé of

the Bank and the IMF in the New Republic

(2000), Ravi Kanbur, a long-standing Bank

insider who at the time was overseeing the draft-

ing of the World Bank’s flagship text, the World

Development Report 2000 (WDR 2000), on

‘attacking poverty’, also resigned in another bout

of internal warfare (Wade, 2001).

In so far as poverty reduction and its relation

to growth have been a source of substantial

debate and conflict within and outside the Bank

since the 1980s, WDR 2000 – a bellwether and

reference point for future development policy –

was naturally going to be passionately debated.

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