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Despite such strategic persuasion, governance advocates met with stalwart resistance
until they attained a strong internal champion who could effectively manipulate a shift in the
Bank’s policies. In 1995, James Wolfensohn became President of the World Bank. He quickly
attacked the existing rationale for rejecting the governance concept. Wolfensohn’s embrace of
the good governance concept – particularly its focus on anti-corruption efforts -- opened the door
for more open dialogue within the organization. This was furthered by Wolfensohn’s selection of
Joseph Stiglitz, a renowned institutional economist, as Chief Economist of the World Bank.
Governance ideas and norms quickly began to deeply permeate development thinking and
practice across the organization. Eventually the diffusion and internalization of governance ideas
resulted in the institutionalization or “mainstreaming” of good governance into project lending.
However, to many critics within and outside the Bank, governance as it has emerged in theory
and practice is not qualitatively different from preexisting neoliberal ideologies and structural
adjustment practice. Although it appears on the surface that there has been a “good governance”
revolution, the particular way in which persuasion, manipulation and socialization surrounding
the governance agenda has occurred may have in reality enacted very little real change in how
the Bank as a collective actors understands and pursues development.
The external catalysts for the good governance agenda have been examined in depth in
other works.
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We focus here on the nature of the discursive debate within the Bank that
eventually produced the good governance agenda that the Bank widely espouses today. The
story highlights the struggles that occur within international organizations between hegemonic
and “subordinate” or “counterhegemonic” cultures that ultimately shape the process of
organizational discourse production. In mapping this ongoing dialogue, we begin to see how the
content of the good governance agenda was shaped. We also begin to understand why critics
remain so cynical when posed the question of whether or not the good governance agenda truly
represents something new in development theory and practice.
The Ideational Debate Begins…
The Bank’s internal debate on the relationship between good governance and development began
in the late 1970s. The initial interest in governance issues arose at that time within a very small
group of operational staff in the Bank’s African division. The group uncovered increasing
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See especially Miller-Adams 1999, Santiso 2001, and Weaver 2005.
Convention