World Bank
The World Bank was founded in 1944 to finance reconstruction following the Second World War and today is the main route of development finance to middle and low income countries.
Owned by its shareholder governments, and therefore dominated by the richer countries that own most of its shares rather than by the poorer ones to which it lends, the institution became synonymous in the 1980s with ‘structural adjustment policies’ based on neo-liberal ideology.
During the 1990s, however, the Bank also became increasingly interested in the negative impacts of its policies on working people, and the importance of involving labour unions and other civil society organisations in decisions affecting them.
In 2003 the World Bank decided to conduct a consultation exercise on a much larger scale than it had done before in the course of drafting its annual flagship publication, the World Development Report (WDR). The theme of the 2004 report was Making Services Work for Poor People and the Bank commissioned Public World to organise and moderate a multi-lingual electronic discussion, over seven weeks.
Based on an early draft of the report, and leading to substantial revision, it was the first time the Bank had undertaken such an exercise in languages other than English. We conducted it also in French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish -- and, crucially, every contribution was published in all five languages within 24 hours of being received. For more information about our services of this type, please email admin@publicworld.org.
We have also supported the World Bank's work on the role of social policy in development, and were commissioned to write a paper on civil society and workforce participation in public service development and improvement as part of that work. You can download it here.
