(with Diane Stone; 2019) and from 2019-2021 was the elected chair of the Section on International and Comparative Administration within the American Society of Public Administration.
Moloney applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Who Matters at the World Bank?: Bureaucrats, Policy Change, and Public Sector Governance, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Who Matters at the World Bank: Bureaucrats, Policy Change, and Public Sector Governance dips into a discussion of the 1992 “Wapenhans Report”. This Report, which has never been publicly released by the World Bank, was an internal assessment of the Bank’s organizational culture, its lending incentives, and any potential liability risks to the World Bank as an institution but also its member-states as a result of such organizational incentives. The Report was obtained by the book’s author.Follow Kim Moloney on Twitter.
Page 99 occurs in Chapter 4. The page highlights Bank power over client states, observes the then-limited alternative financing mechanisms for poor countries, notes a Bank culture in which disciplinary debates among staff may not always be professional and, in some cases, how staff arrogance and “lack of political acumen” (Moloney, 2022, p. 99 citing Pomerantz 2005, p. 55) may hamper Bank relations with its client states. One of two footnotes on page 99 briefly notes a separate internal Report in which its author relayed that Bank staff did not believe that their organization suffered from internal corruption. Several years later, multiple cases suggested the inaccuracy of such absolute statements.
Who Matters at the World Bank has ten chapters, one Appendix, and one Postscript. Chapter 1 provides a birds-eye view along with the book’s research questions. Chapter 2 introduces the book’s theoretical and methodological approach while Chapter 10 is the Conclusion. Chapters 3, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are the heart of the book. It is where I explain “who matters” at the Bank. That is, which internal and/or external stakeholders influenced policy change (and who was sidelined, and why) within the Bank’s most prescribed project sector: public sector management and public sector governance. It explains how this sector, which had fewer than 3% of Bank projects in 1980 would by 2012 not only become the Bank’s most important project sector (% of projects with this sector focus) but also the only sector to have an internal organization-wide Council. The Postscript updates the book’s 32-year timeline (1980-2012) to 2020 and finds that this sector remained as the Bank’s most important project sector and that the Council still had no internal peer.
However, it is arguable that a book exclusively focused upon answering “who matters” within sector policy changes (and who did not matter) is incomplete without Chapter 4 and its page 99. Actors influence policy change. But so too do internal incentives within an organization, staff personalities, Bank-state relations, what is or is not project “success” and as importantly, whether there are (or should be) liabilities for project failure. Chapter 4 and its page 99 hit at the heart of incentives-based influences. When paired with Chapter 9’s discussion of the relative non-influence of internal evaluative actors and external non-governmental organizations on policy change within this sector, both chapters – when combined -- suggest that yes, determining “who matters” in any policy change is important. But if we do not also understand an organization’s internal incentives, any conclusion will be incomplete. Chapter 4 and its page 99 provide key parts of this additional analysis.
--Marshal Zeringue
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