The World Bank, between Transformation and Resilience

Since its creation, the role and mission of the World Bank have gradually expanded, allowing it to acquire its present leadership role in development policy. Faced with the crisis of legitimacy of the 1990s, this institution implemented profound, continuous changes. The promotion of new poverty reduction strategies that insist on the principle of policy appropriation by national actors and, more generally, take political economy and institutions into account constitutes a major turning point. There are nevertheless real limits to the application of these strategic changes. Indeed, the difficulty had by the World Bank in carrying out genuine reform is the result of structural constraints : the institution’s dominance by the United States and other large industrialized countries hinders the development of internal government and the objectives of its three principal missions (finance, development aid and development research) contradict one another. Moreover, the hegemonic position the World Bank has created for itself as well as its exclusively economistic and orthodox vision ensure that the new themes and approaches it adopts are systematically refashioned in keeping with the dominant paradigm of the market. While this institution has shown a formidable capacity to stimulate innovative orientations, it thus struggles to realize them in practice