Can the World Bank's 'global practices' meet country needs?

At a time when nearly all other aid donors are looking for ways to give partner countries a greater voice in determining development priorities, the World Bank is building a powerful framework to consolidate its own technical expertise that some fear could have the effect of isolating the bank from the needs of its client countries. Earlier this week, the World Bank’s management reached out to staff for more input into the design of its “global practices,” the organizational restructuring of the bank’s technical offices. A memo from the “global practices solutions vice president,” which was posted on the bank’s intranet, called for ideas on how best to “promote a collaborative culture” within the structure to “ensure success for our clients.” Reorganizing the bank’s technical staff into global practices is a central pillar of President Jim Kim’s ambitious reform efforts. The global practices are meant to help the bank better create and manage its practical development knowledge and disseminate it around the world. But as the plan enters its implementation stage, a central debate on decision-making that was at the heart of the design of the practices has yet to be resolved, at least publicly. Last week, after a talk at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Pamela Cox, the bank’s former vice president for change management, was asked by a current bank staffer about the global practices plan. Cox instead talked about then-president Jim Wolfensohn’s reform efforts at the bank in the 1990s. During that reorganization, she said, there were two clear goals: to better curate knowledge across the bank’s regions, but also to get closer to the bank’s clients. “One of the value propositions of the bank is actually having the country presence, but linked to the global network, so any system … has to satisfy both of those things,” she said. “If you go too global, you lose all that embedded knowledge that you have on how you get your hands down and dirty and into development.” Cox, whose abrupt retirement mid-reform was announced without explanation by Kim last summer, said she didn’t know the best way to strike that balance. But reading between the lines, the message seemed to be: This time around, half the plan is missing. According to a source familiar with the conversation around the design of the global practices, whether the model would adequately serve the client country needs was hotly debated within the team in charge of leading the reform process, until it became clear that Kim had made up his mind. How that debate fed into current plans is still unclear, since details of the bank’s new operational model have yet to emerge — even as the bank prepares the global practices to “open their doors” on July 1. In one of Kim’s recent updates to staff on the status of the change process, he said the bank had “moved firmly into implementation” of the reforms, and laid out important milestones for the spring. Almost all of them were related to the global practices — the word “knowledge” was used 14 times in Kim’s brief letter; “global practices,” 11. But with all the talk of creating, curating and disseminating its own knowledge, there has been little talk of how the bank is going to respond to the demands of borrowing countries. The intense focus on the reorganization of technical offices — once called sectors, now global practices — has highlighted how little attention has been paid so far to other important areas of the bank’s operations, particularly to any reforms of country and regional offices, or the role of country directors and their relationship to the practices. How the new structure will address pressing issues of quality control in the bank’s operations also remains unclear. Those areas of reform, along with knowledge management, were central to the recommendations by the bank’s Internal Evaluation Group in its report on the bank’s previous organizational structure, released last year. Despite Kim’s pledge to turn the bank into a “solutions bank” (as opposed to the “knowledge bank” envisioned by Wolfensohn in the 90s), knowledge has so far ruled the day. That’s given concern to some who see the management of the bank’s technical areas as only one part of a complex balance of priorities. Some bank insiders suggest that the creation of powerful global practices harkens back to an era before Wolfensohn’s reforms, and the new system has raised fundamental question of what role regional and country offices will play in the future. That’s partly by design — there was a tension in the previous model that often worked to the detriment of the bank’s expertise — and the relationship between the two sides of the bank’s operations may become clearer with the release of the bank’s operational budget. But the full scope of management challenges may not become clear until the global practices are actually in place. There are many people at the bank with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, one that Kim is determined to upset. But when it comes to the balance of power within the bank, a dramatic shift to the global practices will certainly have trade-offs that reach beyond the bank itself. So far, the discussion of those trade-offs, how they will be managed and how the bank’s new model will better respond to the clients it serves, is happening only behind closed doors. Read more development aid news online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive top international development headlines from the world’s leading donors, news sources and opinion leaders — emailed to you FREE every business day.