Our Dream is a World Full of Poverty Indicators: The US, the World Bank, and the Power of Numbers

Abstract

With the launch of its Africa Results Monitoring System (ARMS), the World Bank has recently consolidated its ‘results agenda’, and is now rolling out a concerted effort to improve International Development Association (IDA) borrowers' ability to track the impact of lending projects on a range of poverty indicators. Although the US pushed hard for the implementation of ARMS, viewing it as a means of improving its ability to monitor and control the Bank, the initiative has paradoxically also provided the Bank with an additional source of legitimacy and autonomy. This apparent contradiction forces a clarification of the analytical framework we use to investigate international organisations (IOs) to allow us to understand the ‘positive feedback cycle’ that has developed between the Bank and the US regarding the standard with which to judge the IO's performance. The refined focus on the impact of Bank-supported interventions has important implications for the internal ‘battlefield for knowledge’ in the organisation, particularly concerning the competing visions of an ‘economic’ and a ‘multi-dimensional’ conceptualisation of poverty.

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