The Governance Turn in the World Bank Discourse from a Normative IR Lens: Cosmopolitanism or Communitarianism?

When structural adjustment programmes which had dominated the lending conditionality of the leading international financial institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) in the 1980s failed to deliver the expected success stories, governance gained traction as a predictor of aid effectiveness. Development discourse and practice began incorporating governance indicators and defining a governance concept in line with the effort to reassess the role of the state in development. This paper examines whether the inclusion of governance in the development discourse of the World Bank in the 1990s reflects cosmopolitan or communitarian ethical norms. Normative international relations theory permits an assessment of the so-called governance turn in World Bank conditionality which interrogates the understanding of the state and of the international community which are put forth. Key World Bank publications from the 1990s are selected for content analysis. The first level of analysis interrogates whether the conceptualization of the state emerging from the documents reflects a communitarian or cosmopolitan approach. The second level of analysis focuses on the universalism-particularism tension in the cosmopolitan-communitarian debate. What emerges from the analysis is a hybrid of cosmopolitan and communitarian sensibilities where the technocratic approach of the World Bank allows operationalizing conditionality and (good) governance in a list of indicators without a consistent normative framework.