Publication: Evolution of the World Bank’s Thinking on Governance
Date
2016-01
ISSN
Published
2016-01
Author(s)
Lateef, K. Sarwar
Abstract
The preparation work for the 2017 World
Development Report on Governance and the Law in 2016 will
coincide with the 25th anniversary of the World Bank’s
decision to broaden its ongoing work on public sector
management to embrace key issues of governance in the Bank’s
borrowing countries. This paper provides a broad overview of
the major Bank reports on governance that went through a
review process at a sufficiently high level in the
institution that they can reasonably be described as
reflecting the Bank’s considered views at the time on the
subject. The objective is to review the evolution of the
Bank’s thinking on governance and assess the relevance and
effectiveness of the work and its implications for the
forthcoming World Development Report. Section two of this
paper begins with a brief account of how the Bank came to
focus on issues of governance, reviewing the major upheaval
of governance in many of the Bank’s borrowing countries in
the 1980s, the legal constraints the Articles of Agreement
impose on the Bank’s work on governance, and a brief
overview of the Bank’s initial policy statement on
governance issued to the Bank’s Board in June 1991. Section
three reviews major Bank work on governance as reflected in
successive World Development Reports and examines the Bank’s
analysis of the issue of corruption, reviewing how the
Bank’s thinking on this symptom of poor governance has
evolved. Section four steps back to assess what the Bank got
right and some of the issues it missed or failed to address
adequately. Section five draws attention to the dramatic
changes experienced by the developing world in these past 25
years, and points to the need to better understand the
implications of these changes for the governance context
facing developing countries.
Citation
“Lateef, K. Sarwar. 2016. Evolution of the World Bank’s Thinking on Governance. World Development Report Background Paper;. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/26197 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”