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Most of the literature on the World Bank struggles to understand precisely how effective are the Bank’s projects and policies, emphasizing at the same time as reaffirming certain universal parameters with which to measure the good and the bad. This article, by contrast, argues for a different way of seeing the World Bank, that is, for scholarship that interrogates the political rationalities which underlie these distinctions and categories and which make these parameters and measures viable, necessary, and enduring. Indeed, most writings – including the innumerable self‐evaluations carried out by the Bank – simultaneously note the enormity of the Bank’s past misdeeds as well as its unique position as the only global institution up to the monumental task of translating global truths into global plans of action. Because of its unique role as the global development expert, the Bank is always two steps ahead of the pack, always re‐assessing and re‐tooling for improvement in ways that most national and international institutions cannot. Who else can respond so quickly to catastrophes around the globe – appearing one month in Thailand, the next in Argentina, and, in a bomb’s flash, in Afghanistan and Iraq? In a world in which global crises routinely erupt and “require” global experts of development to resolve them, the Bank and its affiliates in the World Bank Group have no rivals. But, rather than ask why the Bank’s responses are ultimately insufficient or flawed, we must first ask how problems get defined in terms of global crises and their solutions in terms of global development institutions in the first place? How did these ideas and institutions become so influential? What power dynamics do they embody?

Multilateral aid agencies generate most of their funds from taxpayers, and therefore, it is necessary to ensure that recipients or borrowers use the funds for the intended purposes. The World Bank is one of the major multilateral aid agencies that fund infrastructure projects in developing countries. Like other multilateral aid agencies, the World Bank uses oversight instruments/auditing tools to manage procurement risk on their funded projects. However, empirical insight about the effectiveness of these auditing tools is limited. This paper aims to assess the effectiveness of one of such multilateral aid agencies’ auditing tools (i.e. World Bank’s procurement post review [PPR]) in procurement risk mitigation on funded projects in a developing country context.

The study is based on secondary data obtained from the World Bank PPR reports carried out in the 2014, 2015 and 2016 financial years. Five projects with the highest loan amounts and five with the lowest loan amounts for the three-year period were selected from the 24 active World Bank projects during the time of the study. A purposive sampling technique was used to select a representative sample from a list of contracts under the 10 projects.

The results of the analysis showed a clear decline in the number of both major and minor deviations over the three-year period while an increase in the number of contracts with “No Deviation”. The study therefore concludes that procurement risk experienced a decline amongst the World Bank projects in Ghana where post reviews were carried out on yearly basis.

The study identifies the need for more frequent PPR and makes a case for the need to investigate whether PPR is a superior auditing tool compared to the other tools.

In 2011, the World Bank announced its intention to conduct a holistic review and reform of its procurement framework. This reform was intended to ensure that its procurement system, which is the means through which the Bank disburses developmental loans and grants is in line with modern trends in procurement, is flexible enough to respond to unforeseen challenges and is coherent. This paper examines both how Bank procurement has evolved since the first formal regulations were issued in 1964 and the implications of the recent reforms for the Bank and its borrowers. Readers will see that ongoing reforms evidence a significant change for the Bank's approach to procurement and its relationship with its borrowers and will dramatically affect the way the Bank-funded procurements are conducted.

I. Introduction For over forty years, a model for Third World development has gained widespread acceptance. Three key premises underpin the traditional development model: (1) the identification of “development” with the maximization of the rate of national economic growth; (2) the quest to achieve Western living standards and levels of industrialization which require the transfer of labor from the agricultural to the industrial sector as well as increased consumerism; and (3) the integration into the interdependence of Third World nations in the global economy and the global marketplace. Increasing the demand for a Third World nation's exports (in other words, export‐led growth) is viewed as leading to the maximization of a nation's Gross National Product (GNP).

In line with contemporary trends in the developing world, countries in South Asia are under pressure from both political and civil societies and the international donor community to recast their administrative systems. New tools and practices in public governance have been advanced to remedy structural deficiencies, procedural flaws, managerial incompetence, and weak accountability in the public sector. International organizations emphasize the need to improve the relationship between governance and socio-economic outcome; and accountability, transparency, probity, predictability, and participation are acknowledged as essential ingredients for effectively managing development. This article focuses on two South Asian countries (Pakistan and Bangladesh) and examines the various measures adopted by their governments to reshape governance and public management in recent times.

The birth of the African Capacity Building Foundation on February 9, 1991, was the culmination of intense efforts and groundbreaking commitment to capacity building in Africa by Africa Governors of the World Bank, the Bank itself and the cofounding Institutions ‐ the African Development Bank and the United Nations Development Program, as well as numerous other individuals. The successes chalked by ACBF towards attainment of its objectives have vindicated those who held the view that establishing an indigenous African institution, with focus on and commitment to the course of Africa’s development was the right course of action at the time. Twenty years on, ACBF has supported nearly 250 projects and programs in 44 African countries and committed more than US$400 million to build capacity on the continent. Projects and programs supported by the Foundation have drawn synergy with and complemented countless other activities of various development institutions operating on the Continent. ACBF’s support has been crucial in the building of development capacity in Africa, whether in ministries of finance and economic planning or central banks. For many among us who dedicated to this initiative and worked towards its realization, we remain humbled by the opportunity to witness the twentieth anniversary of ACBF.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the fluid role of accounting both as a form of power and resistance in the context of World Bank projects in the Island Kingdom of Tonga.

Bourdieu’s concepts of doxa and capital provided the framework for problematizing the fluidity of practices of accounting as both a form of power and of resistance. The authors used a qualitative field study design based on a combination of a documentary analysis of these loan agreements and interviews with key actors and informants.

The role of accounting in relation to subaltern groups is mediated by the doxic rules and existing capital arrangements at the national and the local or village level. Understanding accounting as both capital and as doxa explains why it can be both a form of power and of resistance.

This study provides policy makers and foreign donors of Tonga and other Pacific Islands a deeper understanding on the struggles to implement and the impacts of accounting at local level as accounting is deployed as part of struggles in various social contexts each with its own doxa and capital arrangements.

This study contributes to the growing accounting body of work that seeks to better understand accounting by proposing that role of accounting as a tool for domination is mediated in various social settings by the doxic value and the existing capital arrangements in those settings.

This paper focuses on the World Bank's emerging experience with a promising application of performance-based contracts: Output-Based Aid (OBA) subsidies. OBA is the provision of subsidies for the delivery of and access to social or infrastructure services. Under OBA, subsidy payments are tied to measurable performing outputs, leaving the specific methods of achieving these outputs to the service provider's discretion. While creating better risk allocation, more value for users and contracting agencies, and fewer opportunities for corruption than traditional methods, OBA schemes raise new procurement issues that need to be reconciled in order to achieve optimal results. An issue this paper explores is the tension between the need that contracts be "expenditure-based" with the "performance-based" nature of OBA subsidies.

Good governance is often regarded as essential for a country's economic development. The World Bank's governance framework has guided development projects and governance reform in many developing nations over the past few decades. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the World Bank's approach towards governance reform in the public sector, especially in developing economies of the world.

The paper highlights various aspects of good governance that are relevant to the delivery of social and infrastructural services in developing countries. The paper also discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the World Bank's governance framework, especially pertaining to social and infrastructure sectors in developing economies.

In light of its past experience, the World Bank has expanded the reach of its developmental activities to incorporate governance reform in accordance with the institutional realities prevailing in a developing economy, instead of following a “one‐size‐fit‐all” approach to public sector governance reform. The bank has also encouraged the use of decentralized decision making and private sector participation to achieve greater efficiency, transparency and accountability in the delivery of social and infrastructural services.

The paper provides a useful contribution to the literature concerning the role of international development organizations in formulating strategies that developing economies can follow to pursue public sector governance reform.

The development of Tanzanian civil society is widely understood to be one of the key processes in the democratization of the country, and this vision is also shared by the World Bank. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the intention and impact of World Bank policies aimed at supporting Tanzanian civil society organizations.

The paper uses the Lacanian psychoanalytic approach combined with Foucault's notion of governmentality as a conceptual tool. Within this theoretical framework, a specific World Bank programme in Tanzania, the Social Development Civil Society Fund, is analyzed.

Developed democratic states produce, through the World Bank, the desires of not‐yet‐fully democratic countries to embrace the benefits that (democratic) development can bring. The World Bank programme aimed at the development of Tanzanian civil society is formulated in a way that posits Tanzania as a not‐yet‐fully democratic country. This is achieved through the World Bank's advice and recommendations, which trigger the desires of Tanzanians to participate in development and thus to achieve (always elusive) prosperity and democracy. Moreover, the World Bank programme can be seen as an ensemble of governmental practices advancing the idea of self‐empowerment through which Tanzanians are made governable.

The paper contributes to the understanding of democratic transition, from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as a social fantasy that plays a crucial role in the constitution of global hierarchical relationships and in the construction of the identities of so‐called democratic states and not‐yet‐fully democratic countries. Within this scheme, the World Bank's policies are governmental technologies that trigger desires of not‐yet‐fully democratic countries.