The World Bank and the Knowledge for Development (K4D) Initiative: A Post-Structuralist Investigation of the World Bank’s Attempts to Govern Global Development Knowledge

Abstract

In 1999, the World Bank launched the K4D initiative as part of its new development agenda. The Bank also established itself as the global development knowledge bank suggesting that these moves would yield more pro-poor development results. This thesis examines the Bank’s knowledge ventures and contends that they are part of the apparatus of advancing the Bank’s neoliberal agenda. The governmentality approach is used to argue that the knowledge ventures are a move away from the direct and interventionist mechanisms of control prominent in the earlier development agenda, but at the same time, representative of new, more subtle and indirect mechanisms of control. Furthermore, a close investigation of the literature published in connection to the knowledge ventures and the practical projects created as part of these ventures, reveals that neoliberal policies traditionally promoted by the Bank feature prominently in the propaganda surrounding the Bank’s knowledge ventures.