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Organizational Impediments to Development Assistance: The World Bank's Population Program

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Barbara B. Crane  and
Jason L. Finkle
Barbara B. Crane
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
Jason L. Finkle
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Abstract

The World Bank has encountered serious difficulties as it has moved from an almost exclusive concern with capital infrastructure into social sectors of development, such as rural development and population planning. The present study, based on an intensive examination of the Bank's experience in the population sector, concludes that the Bank's effectiveness has been constrained by its institutionalized commitments to (i) its clients, the finance and planning ministries of developing countries; (2) its technology for rendering assistance as embodied in its project lending procedures; and (3) its independence from other organizations that provide development assistance. Instead of modifying these commitments in order to improve the Bank's performance in the population field, its officials have recently reorganized the population program in a way that preserves the Bank's basic priorities and procedures without necessarily advancing its population objectives.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , July 1981 , pp. 516 - 553
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1981

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References

1 McNamara, Robert S., Address to the Board of Governors, Washington, D.C., September 30, 1968CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Personal interview, Washington, D.C., December 12, 1973.

3 Soon after the population program got underway, the Bank clarified its objectives in Population Planning: Sector Working Paper (Washington, D.C.: World Bank 1972)Google Scholar. This paper indicated that the Bank expected to concentrate its attention and resources in the largest developing countries—those it considered most critical to the future course of global population growth.

4 This observation is based on the authors' interviews as well as written reports containing the evaluations of external experts. The most important of these evaluations was commissioned by the Bank in 1975 and carried out under the leadership of the late Bernard Berelson, then president of the Population Council. See Report of the External Advisory Panel on Population (Washington, D.C: World Bank, August 1976)Google Scholar. A follow-up review was done by Bernard Berelson and Ronald Freedman in late 1978.

5 Since the early 1960s, students of international organization have given increasing attention to the internal dynamics of international secretariats. See especially the analysis of the International Labor Organization by Haas, Ernst, Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International Organization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press 1969)Google Scholar; Cox, Robert, “The Executive Head: An Essay on Leadership in International Organization,” International Organization XXIII (Spring 1969), 205–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the studies of eight international agencies contained in Cox, Robert, Jacobson, Harold, and others, The Anatomy of Influence: Decision-Making in International Organization (New Haven: Yale University Press 1973)Google Scholar.

6 See Selznick, Philip, Leadership in Administration (New York: Harper and Row 1957), 38–64Google Scholar. This study of the World Bank owes an intellectual debt to Selznick's classic 1949 study of the Tennessee Valley Authority, TV A and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization (New York: Harper & Row, Torchbook edition 1966)Google Scholar. For a discussion of Selznick's framework and its contribution to organizational analysis, see Perrow, Charles, Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman 1972), 117–204Google Scholar.

7 Coale, Ansley J. and Hoover, Edgar M., Population Growth and Economic Development in Low-Income Countries (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1958), 333Google Scholar.

8 Woods, George D., “World Bank Welcomes Family Planning,” The United Nations and the Population Crisis (New York: International Planned Parenthood Federation, Victor Fund Report No. 8 1968), 17Google Scholar. See also World Bank, “The Treatment of Population in Bank Economic Work,” Economics Department Working Paper No. 16 (mimeo), May 28, 1968Google Scholar.

9 Robert S. McNamara, Address to the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, May 1, 1969. In 1966, McNamara had made a major speech in which he held that economic underdevelopment accompanied by rapid population growth was a threat to a country's stability and ultimately to U.S. security. Referring to the developing nations in the southern half of the globe, he asked: “What are we to expect from a hemisphere of youth where mounting frustrations are likely to fester into eruptions of violence and extremism?” See his Address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Montreal, Canada, May 18, 1966, excerpted in The Essence of Security: Reflections in Office (New York: Harper & Row 1968), 147Google Scholar. For a more recent statement, see his Address to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, April 28, 1977.

10 Perhaps the most comprehensive and penetrating discussion of the influence of capital/output models and their deficiencies is Myrdal, Gunnar, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, 3 vols. (New York: Random House, 1968)Google Scholar. See especially chaps. 27–29 and appendices 2, 3, 4, and 7. A shorter version of Myrdal's views appears in his essay, “The World Poverty Problem,” Against the Stream: Critical Essays on Economics (New York: Random House 1972), 65–100Google Scholar. The Bank's early approach to economic development is discussed in Mason, Edward S. and Asher, Robert E., The World Bank Since Bretton Woods (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution 1973), 152Google Scholar; see also 458–59.

11 These effects were convincingly demonstrated by Coale and Hoover (fn. 7). But, as a World Bank economist and collaborator in the Coale and Hoover project commented to the authors, it took considerable time to disseminate their model. Interview with Ravi Gulhati, World Bank, Washington, D.C., March, 1974.

12 Johnson, Elizabeth S. and Johnson, Harry D., The Shadow of Keynes: Understanding Key ties, Cambridge and Keynesian Economics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1978), 233Google Scholar.

13 Galenson, Walter and Leibenstein, Harvey, “Investment Criteria, Productivity, and Economic Development,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, LXIX (August 1955), 364Google Scholar.

14 Kuznets, Simon, Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure, and Spread (New Haven: Yale University Press 1966), 67–68Google Scholar.

15 Myrdal, “The World Poverty Problem” (fn. 10), 99.

16 Selznick's study of the TVA (fn. 6) reveals how it was deflected from its avowed goal of promoting grassroots participation by its reliance on existing agricultural institutions in the region. See esp. pp. 13–16, 145–47, a nd 259–61.

17 Ibid., 16.

18 It should be noted, however, that finance and planning ministries in developing countries have only limited influence in the formal governing bodies of the Bank, as the majority of votes are controlled by the representatives of Western industrialized countries.

19 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Articles of Agreement, art. III, sec. 2.

20 See, for example, World Bank Group, Policies and Operations (Washington, D.C.: World Bank 1974)Google Scholar, and Mason and Asher (fn. 10), 426.

21 For further insight into the role of finance and planning ministries, see Caiden, Naomi and Wildavsky, Aaron, Planning and Budgeting in Poor Countries (New York: Wiley 1974), esp. 243–61Google Scholar. Planning units may or may not be located in finance ministries; in general, planning agencies have a more variable influence than finance ministries, since much depends on the organizational location of planners in government.

22 The force of these ideologies was strong enough to transform the 1974 World Population Conference in Bucharest into a highly politicized confrontation between rich and poor nations. See Finkle, and Crane, , “The Politics of Bucharest: Population, Development, and the New International Economic Order,” Population and Development Review, 1 (September 1975), 87–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 See, for example, Berelson, Bernard, Mauldin, W. Parker, and Segal, Sheldon J., Population: Current Status and Policy Options (New York: The Population Council, Working Papers of the Center for Policy Studies, No. 44 1979)Google Scholar.

24 Finkle, and Crane, , “The World Health Organization and the Population Issue: Organizational Values in the United Nations,” Population and Development Review, 11 (September-December 1976), 367–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Smith, Theodore M., “Management and Family Planning Programs: Indonesia, A Country Profile,” Readings on Family Planning and Population Program Management (New York: Ford Foundation 1973), 26–27Google Scholar.

26 Significantly, the major borrowers are also the most important countries for the Bank from a demographic standpoint: of the 17 top borrowers, all except Yugoslavia, Romania, and Morocco are “key” countries. Seven of these key countries, which accounted for about 25 percent of cumulative Bank and IDA lending as of mid-1979, do not have Bank population projects: Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, and Nigeria.

27 At the conventional 10 percent discount rate used by the Bank and other aid donors, “the grant-equivalent of a normal IDA credit with a fifty-year maturity, a tenyear grace period, and a 0.75 percent service charge is 86.4 percent.” Mason and Asher (fn. 10), 209.

28 This policy was enunciated in McNamara's first address to the Board of Governors of the Bank (fn. 1), and has been a key objective throughout his administration.

29 This conflict was accurately foreseen by Reid, Escott in “McNamara's World Bank,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 51 (July 1973), 794–810CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and by Streeten, Paul, “In the Rostovian Tradition,” Ceres, VIII (January-February 1975), 56–59Google Scholar.

30 See Baldwin, George B., Zaidan, George C., and Muncie, Peter C., “The Population Work of the World Bank,” Studies in Family Planning, IV (November 1973), 294Google Scholar.

31 Thompson, , Organizations in Action (New York: McGraw-Hill 1967), 19Google Scholar.

32 Cyert, Richard M. and March, James G., A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall 1963), 104. See also pp. 99–113Google Scholar.

33 Selznick, TV A and the Grass Roots (fn. 6), 255.

34 A recent and authoritative description of these procedures and their objectives by Baum, Warren, Vice-President of the Bank and head of its Projects Staff, is “The World Bank Project Cycle,” Finance and Development, XV (December 1978), 10–17Google Scholar. See also his earlier article, “The Project Cycle,” Finance and Development, viii (June 1970)Google Scholar. Other accounts by World Bank officials are contained in King, John A., Economic Development Projects and Their Appraisal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1967), 3–15Google Scholar; Chadenet, Bernard and King, John, “What is ‘A World Bank Project’?” Finance and Development, IX (September 1972), 2–12Google Scholar; and Alter, Gerald M., “World Bank Goals in Project Lending,” Finance and Development, XV (June 1978), 23–25Google Scholar.

35 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Articles of Agreement, art. III, sees. 4 and 5. The Bank has made “nonproject” or “program” loans to countries facing acute balance-of-payments deficits in order to meet immediate import needs, and, more recently, to aid longer-term structural adjustment as well. However, this type of loan has only accounted for about 5 percent of total Bank lending through 1980.

36 Of course, even when the project approach is applied to lending for capital infrastructure, problems may arise in adapting projects to local conditions and implementing them successfully; see Albert Hirschman's study of World Bank loans in the mid-1960s, Development Projects Observed (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution 1967)Google Scholar.

37 World Bank (fn. 3), 28.

38 An insightful discussion of problems with the project or “blueprint” approach to development assistance—particularly in areas like rural development and family planning— is contained in Korten, David, “Community Organization and Rural Development: A Learning Process Approach,” Public Administration Review, XL (September-October 1980), 480–511CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Berelson and his colleagues arrived at a similar conclusion when they said, “The very thoroughness of the Bank's approach often tends to lend a spurious solidity to the project as defined. . . .” (fn. 4), 42.

40 See Mason and Asher (fn. 10), 235, and Baum, “The Project Cycle” (fn. 34).

41 In several countries—India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh—the Bank stationed a field representative to facilitate implementation after approving a population loan for the country; but this is viewed as an exceptional practice, and the population representatives in India and Indonesia have been withdrawn.

42 World Bank, World Bank, Lending for Population: 1969-yy (Washington, D.C.: World Bank 1977), 8Google Scholar.

43 Hawkins, E. K., The Principles of Development Aid (Baltimore: Penguin Books 1970), 87–88Google Scholar. In the words of Caiden and Wildavsky, a project is expected to be an “oasis of certainty in an environment of uncertainty” (fn. 21), 61.

44 Chadenet and King (fn. 34), 6.

45 World Bank, World Bank. Lending for Population (fn. 42), 22. Peter Heller suggests that there is frequently no economic justification for limiting support for recurrent expenditures, which “may prove as productive as capital expenditure in the development process.” Heller, , “The Underfinancing of Recurrent Development Costs,” Finance and Development, XVI (March 1979), 39Google Scholar.

46 World Bank, World Bank Lending Policies and Procedures in the Population Sector (Washington, D.C.: World Bank 1977), 5Google Scholar. The Berelson report (fn. 4) recommended that the Bank consider sector lending for population programs.

47 Although the number of professionals has doubled, it is still the case that only one or two have had much previous experience with the Bank.

48 Hawkins (fn. 43), 119.

49 Interview with Baum, Warren, Vice-President, Projects Staff, World Bank, Washington, D.C., March 7, 1974Google Scholar.

50 This perspective is well expressed by Rotberg, Eugene H., The World Bank: A Financial Appraisal (Washington, D.C.: World Bank 1976), 13–14Google Scholar.

51 The project procedures of the World Bank and other aid donors, especially as applied in social sectors, have been subject to increasing criticism- by development experts. See Korten (fn. 38); Williams, Maurice J., Development Cooperation: Efforts and Policies of the Members of the Development Assistance Committee (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 1978), 77 and 95–97Google Scholar; Rondinelli, Dennis A., “International Assistance Policy and Development Project Administration: The Impact of Imperious Rationality,” International Organization, XXX (Autumn 1976), 599Google Scholar; and Honadle, George and Klauss, Rudi, eds., International Development Administration: Implementation Analysis for Development Projects (New York: Praeger 1979)Google Scholar.

52 According to several participants and observers, the benefits of a more decentralized and flexible approach to population assistance are illustrated in Indonesia, where the United States Agency for International Development (AID) committed funds with minimum procedural requirements and considerable discretion to AID field personnel and Indonesian family planning officials. See U.S. Congress, House, Select Committee on Population, Population and Development: Status and Trends of Family Planning! Population Programs in Developing Countries, Volume II, Hearings before the Select Committee on Population, 95th Cong., 2d sess., 1978, pp. 579–607Google Scholar; also Heiby, James R., Ness, Gayl D., and Pillsbury, Barbara L. K., AID's Role in Indonesian Family Planning: A Case Study with Several Lessons for Foreign Assistance (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Agency for International Development, Program Evaluation Report No. 2 1979)Google Scholar.

53 Cyert and March (fn. 32), 119–20.

54 Selznick suggests, for example, that the TVA's commitment to organized agricultural interests in the region hindered its cooperation with various federal agencies. See TVA and the Grass Roots (fn. 6), esp. 164–79.

55 Mason and Asher (fn. 10), 750.

56 Other government donors assisting in population programs include, in order of importance, Sweden, Norway, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. In contrast to the United States, these donors have sought to reduce the political visibility and administrative costs of their assistance by providing much of it in the form of contributions to international agencies such as UNFPA and the International Planned Parenthood Federation. A number of them have also entered into arrangements to co-finance projects with either UNFPA or the Bank in which the multilateral agency takes the lead in planning and overseeing the project.

57 By comparison, the Bank had committed a total of $398 million through the end of fiscal year 1980, of which only about $97 million had been disbursed.

58 See World Bank, “Aid Coordination and Co-Financing in the Population Sector: Summary of the Discussion at the Meeting of Population Donor Agencies, London, December 5–7, 1977” (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1978)Google Scholar; U.S., Comptroller General, Population Growth Problems in Developing Countries: Coordinated Assistance Essential (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, ID-78–54 1978)Google Scholar; and UNFPA, Consultation on Population Assistance Coordination, Geneva, 15–16 March 7979 (New York: UNFPA, 1979)Google Scholar.

59 Salas, Rafael M., Statement at the Australian Council for Overseas Aid Conference, Canberra, Australia, August 25, 1973Google Scholar.

60 See Finkle and Crane (fn. 24).