The World Bank's public sector management and governance agenda: Actors, tensions, and policy change (1983 to 2007)

Constructivist scholars in international relations ask why an international organization sometimes deviates from its stated mission. Organizational culture has become the constructivist scholar's key explanatory variable for explaining this deviance. But organizational culture is difficult to define or describe. An alternative framework focuses upon the international civil servants' role in shaping policy change. If we accept a long-held public administration assertion that there is no dichotomy between politics and administration and that Max Weber's ideal-types were "methodological devices," then we refocus our discussion away from trying to understand a civil servant's apparent "deviance" from an organizational mission. Instead, we expect that civil servants will have the power to create policy, to reflect upon external and competing internal demands, and to bring their personal attributes or characteristics to their job. This dissertation highlights how and why policy changed within the World Bank from 1983 to 2007. The specific sector focus is public sector management and governance. The dependent variable is policy change within the World Bank's public sector management and governance sector. The explanatory variables are derived from stakeholder theory, bureaucratic politics, and organizational-tensions theory. The focus is on policy outputs and organizational process rather than the Bank's development outcomes. The dissertation findings encourage international-organization scholars to reconsider the nature of international civil servant life. Through its detailed history of policy change, the dissertation breaks apart actors such as the NGOs and explains why certain NGOs were more likely than others to have the Bank's ear. The dissertation is also able to explain why the United States was not always the principal actor driving sector policy shifts. Despite perceptions that the Bank has a dominant intellectual perspective, competing views coexist within the same organization. These "minority" positions can influence subsequent policy change. By changing our focus from the organization to a specific sector, we may begin building a theory of policy change and eventually a theory of organizational change for international organizations.