Who Matters at the World Bank? Bureaucrats, Policy Change, and Public Sector Governance

This book answers the question, “who matters?” in a 32-year history (1980–2012) of policy change within the World Bank’s public sector management and public sector governance agenda. The book is anchored within the public administration discipline and its understanding of bureaucracy, bureaucratic politics, and stakeholder influences. In response to constructivist scholars’ concerns about politics and the organizational culture of international civil servants within international organizations, this book uses stakeholder theory and a bureaucratic politics approach to suggest the normality of politics, policy debate, and policy evolution. The book also highlights the fact that for 21 of the 32 years, it was the international civil servants of the World Bank and not external stakeholders who led, developed, and institutionalized this sector’s agenda. In doing so, the book explains how one sector of the Bank’s work rose, against the odds, from encompassing just under 3 percent of approved projects in 1980 to its inclusion within 73 per cent of all projects approved between 1991 and 2012.