(b) World Bank
Despite an explicit prohibition in its Articles of Agreement
from “interfering” in the political affairs of a member state,
by the late 2000s the World Bank had also become an important
player in the governance debates now plaguing development
policy. The role of politics-by-other-name can be
traced back to the 1997 World Development Report, which
was heavily influenced by the theories of Douglass North
and new institutionalist political economy (World Bank,
1997). In 1999 the Bank began conducting “institutional and
governance reviews” in selected countries: “analytical reports
that focus[ed] on the functioning of key public institutions”
and studied “the feasibility of reform recommendations with
a rigorous assessment of political realities and constraints to
reform” (Manning & Buresˇ, 2001, p. 1). Although their scope,
execution, and impact varied widely, these reviews cemented
the role of governance analysis in the Bank’s work, even
though the first guidelines produced for political-economy
work in the agency’s operations actually came from social
development specialists instead of governance ones (Social
Development Department, 2007, 2008).