Difficult partnerships: The World Bank, states, and NGOs

Since the early 1990s, World Bank officials in many countries have pressed their government borrowers to include nongovernmental organizations as development partners. What impact has this new partnership norm had in the bank’s borrower countries, and why? This article investigates these questions through longitudinal analy-sis of three cases: Guatemala, Ecuador, and the Gambia. In their first iteration in the 1990s, these bank-sponsored efforts generally failed to take root; yet by the 2000s, NGOs and state actors were engaged in multiple partnerships. This article suggests that over time, bank officials ’ repeated efforts to embed these new ideas fos-tered a social learning process that led NGOs to adopt more strate-gic partnership practices and government officials to see NGO part-ners as useful. Several factors may affect this learning process: levels of professionalism and the growth of professional networks, the presence of effective “bridge builders, ” and the level of histori-cal conflicts. The construction of government-nongovernmental “partnerships ” indeveloping countries was a norm that arose at the World Bank in the 1980s. It was first envisioned for ostensibly practical reasons: non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society actors were seen as important sources of expertise, skills, and resources for development. Over time, however, many bank staff came to privilege NGOs as part-ners in the political activity of strategy design and policymaking. Includ-ing NGOs in these processes was viewed as an implicit means to pro-mote a more open and accountable model of governance. World Bank staff began to promote these partnerships actively under President James Wolfensohn (1995–2005). In the late 1990s, the policy became an important component of the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt relief initiative, through the requirement that civil society participate in the formulation of the Participatory Poverty Reduc-tion Strategy Papers (PRSPs), a condition for debt cancellation. In 1999, Wolfensohn announced that the bank would commit itself to a Com-prehensive Development Framework (CDF) for development assistance based on “partnerships ” with borrowing governments, their civil soci-eties, and other international agencies. As described by some at th