Influencing world bank policy agendas through networks: the possibilities and pitfalls of NGO-Bank 'partnerships'

This paper analyses, through a public policy lens, how the World Bank's policy agenda may be influenced by the relationships specific units within the Bank form with the non-Bank development policy community. The research on which this paper reports begins by auditing World Bank projects in South-East Asia and the Pacific that involve NGOs and, from that, provides a basic typology of the relationships into which NGOs and the Bank are entering. The next phase involves an in-depth study of an NGO-Bank project ‘partnership’ in the region (Kecamantan Development Project, Indonesia) in an attempt to establish more precisely the nature of this interaction. In both phases interviews from stakeholders (NGOs, World Bank, local level officials) will be used in addition to other primary source material. This evidence will then be read against the existing public policy literature on the relevance of networks and policy ‘entrepreneurship’ in changing policy agendas and designs. On this basis, tentative conclusions are reached as to the opportunities, and limits, in NGOs using these relationships to influence the Bank’s policy agenda on participatory-oriented development. This may provide some illumination in regards the engagement versus advocacy dilemma many Northern-based NGOs face. More generally, by working through the ideas that have emerged from the policy network literature over the past decade and applying them to the World Bank’s policy formulation, it seeks to add a new perspective to the emerging work on organisational and conceptual change at the Bank that has come out of the international/development studies field in recent years.