| | From the mid-1990s, the World Bank has been exceptionally busy in Africa. A formerly-established relationship between the Bank and African states - best known as conditionality based structural adjustment lending - has been overlain with another reform agenda, perhaps best summarised as 'governance' . In the Bank literature, and in liberal political analyses, governance is associated with a move beyond the 'bad old days' of conditionality and the coercion that this connotes. This is the implication of the quotation that begins this briefing. But, once one details the initiatives that form the structures of the Bank's governance agenda, we can see that 'governance' has allowed a consolidation of Bank intervention into some African states. This 'architecture of governance' is a statement of the material dominance of the Bank and IMF, and it contains within it key moments of Bank and IMF effective Bank 'veto' . This briefing will detail the principal components of the governance architecture, largely constructed by the World Bank. |
