Search results
3402 World Bank Group:2634Prelims 12/11/09 14:56 Page 58 3 The World Bank and new norms of development Introduction The previous chapter outlined how international norms constitute and reconstitute IO identities through processes of direct and indirect socialisation. Demonstrating that IOs consume norms from their social structure and reproduce them explains how and why IOs diffuse the norms they do. Building on this framework, this chapter analyses how direct and indirect socialisation from TEANs led to an identity shift within the World Bank via
This book shows how environmentalists have shaped the world's largest multilateral development lender, investment financier and political risk insurer to take up sustainable development. It challenges an emerging consensus over international organisational change to argue that international organisations (IOs) are influenced by their social structure and may change their practices to reflect previously antithetical norms such as sustainable development. The text locates sources of organisational change with environmentalists, thus demonstrating the ways in which non-state actors can effect change within large intergovernmental organisations through socialisation. It combines an account of international organisational change with detailed empirical evidence of change in one issue area across three institutions.
No struggle for social justice that lacks a grounded understanding of how wealth is accumulated within society, and by whom, is ever likely to make more than a marginal dent in the status quo. Much work has been done over the years by academics and activists to illuminate the broad processes of wealth extraction. But a constantly watchful eye is essential if new forms of financial extraction are to be blocked, short-circuited, deflected or unsettled. So when the World Bank and other well-known enablers of wealth extraction start to organise to promote greater private-sector involvement in ‘infrastructure’, for example through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), alarm bells should start to ring. How are roads, bridges, hospitals, ports and railways being eyed up by finance? What bevels and polishes the lens through which they are viewed? How is infrastructure being transformed into an ‘asset class’ that will yield the returns now demanded by investors? Why now? What does the reconfiguration of infrastructure tell us about the vulnerabilities of capital? The challenge is not only to understand the mechanisms through which infrastructure is being reconfigured to extract wealth: equally important is to think through how activists might best respond. What oppositional strategies genuinely unsettle elite power instead of making it stronger?
late-capitalism’s logistical requirement for people and things to be in the right place at the right time 24/7 ( Srnicek, 2016 ). Humanitarian innovation embodies this cybernetic goal. Optimising precariat behaviour to strengthen decision-making, improve health, employment, life-style choices and, importantly, motherhood and child-rearing practices, is central to the post-social humanitarian regime currently in formation ( World Bank, 2015 ). Humanitarian innovation, moreover, not only targets the behaviour of the precariat, reflecting late
principles and standards governing humanitarian, crisis and refugee response ( UNESCO, 2018 : 10–11). 2 The concept of ‘nurturing care’ emerged in the 2016 Lancet series, Advancing Early Childhood Development: From Science to Scale , and has become a widely accepted norm guiding ECD policy and programming ( WHO, UNICEF, World Bank Group, 2018 ). Works Cited Bassett , L. and Bradley , J. C. ( 2021 ), Early Childhood Development in Humanitarian Standards and Guidance Documents , Moving Minds Alliance , https
have been taken to improve access to formal employment for vulnerable communities (see, for example, World Bank, 2020 ). In 2018, the government allowed camp refugees to establish home-based businesses in all professions, including closed professions ( IFC, 2021 ). Last year, some Syrian refugees were granted exemptions to work in previously closed sectors, including healthcare, in response to the pandemic, and since July 2021, Syrian refugees have been able to get
that is not digital in itself but is intermediated by a digital platform, such as language translation work. Yet, the greater accessibility of microwork for people with lower educational backgrounds has made this field particularly widespread. Indeed, as growing numbers or refugees and poor people survive on ‘petty data work’, organisations like the World Bank ‘have cast microwork as the latest saviour in a long line of measures promising to rescue economies of the Global
digital economy, estimated to be around 15.5 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP), has grown two and a half times faster than global GDP over the past 15 years ( World Bank, 2022 ). Digital labour platforms have increased fivefold in number between 2010 and 2020 globally ( ILO, 2021 ). The demand for online freelance work has grown by an average of around 10 per cent a year, with roughly 90 per cent more projects demanded via online freelance platforms in
participating in the project were multi-sectoral, involving international agencies, local NGOs, religious services, international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, the Tent Foundation and international agencies of the UN system (UNHCR, UN Population Fund/UNFPA, UN WOMEN) and the UFRR. The social enterprise developing the digital work project formed a training team with experience in digital education and projects with refugees. The project spanned a period of fifteen
), ‘ Humanitarian Cash Transfers and Financial Inclusion – Lessons from Jordan and Lebanon ’, Working Paper ( Washington, DC : CGAP and World Bank Group , April ), www.cgap.org/sites/default/files/publications/2020_03_Working_Paper_Cash_Transfers.pdf (accessed 3 February 2022 ). Crisp , J