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In search of world governance: books on the Bank.

Article Excerpt
Anthony Bebbington, Michael Woolcock, Scott Guggenheim, and Elizabeth Olson (eds.), The Search for Empowerment: Social Capital as Idea and Practice at the World Bank, Kumarian Press, 2006.

Diane Stone and Christopher Wright (eds.), The World Bank and Governance: A Decade of Reform and Reaction, Routledge, 2006.

Ngaire Woods, The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank, and Their Borrowers, Cornell University Press, 2006.

The expectations were high in 1945 when countries signed on to found a World Bank and an International Monetary Fund (IMF): they would help bring about a better world. The IMF would help prevent financial crises like the one of 1929, which in many respects was the prelude of World War II. The World Bank would help countries in their reconstruction and development.

Three recent books shed some light on the evolution of these two giants of world government from very different points of view. The book edited by Diane Stone and Christopher Wright is a very insightful but still eclectic collection of papers on the World Bank's change in direction (with an occasional excursion to the IMF) over the past ten years. The book by Ngaire Woods is painstakingly researched but at the same time misses the point, as it treats the IMF and World Bank squarely as governments of developing countries rather than as outside organizations with a relatively small impact on the total of development of those countries. The third book, edited by Anthony Bebbington, Michael Woolcock, Scott Guggenheim, and Elizabeth Olson, is actually a description of the rise and fall of the usefulness of the concept of social capital in development. Theoretically it is an elegant concept, but in the daily practice of development cooperation, its usefulness is limited.

The World Bank and Governance, edited by Stone and Wright, has a highly illuminating introduction and carefully written chapters on a wide variety of changes inside the Bank--concerning,...