A Review of “The World’s Banker, A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations” by Sebastian Mallaby (Penguin Press, October 2004)

In 'The World’s Banker', Sebastian Mallaby presents an insightful account of the World Bank during the presidency of James Wolfensohn. The author loses his cool when he discusses the role of advocacy groups that campaign against Bank projects, substituting research with polemic and a substantive debate with ideology.

“A fantastic force of nature”

Mallaby’s book centers on James D. Wolfensohn, and with good reason. Few other people have shaped the institution as much as its current President, whose second term ends in 2005. Mallaby portrays the subject of his fascination as a “screamer, schemer, seducer; Olympian, musician, multimillionaire; by no means a saint but by any standards a fantastic force of nature”.

'The World’s Banker' leads the reader through the many turns of James Wolfensohn’s presidency – the newcomer’s desire to “walk with the poor”, his decision to put the “cancer of corruption” on the agenda of his institution, Wolfensohn’s growing caution regarding controversial large-scale infrastructure projects, and his eventual return to such projects in the name of a new high-risk strategy. The author neglects other important topics. He gives short shrift to environmental issues. He does not discuss the Bank’s continued insistence on structural adjustment programs, even if under a different name. And he fails to mention how the Bank’s dogmatic privatization policies have wreaked havoc on the infrastructure and social sectors of many Southern countries.

Fundamental contradictions

Sebastian Mallaby claims that social and environmental safeguard policies have increased the cost of doing business with the World Bank to the point that industrializing countries like South Africa prefer to borrow from other sources. He strongly supports the backlash on social and environmental issues that is currently happening at the Bank as a move “back towards its future” (or maybe rather, forward towards its past).

Mallaby recognizes that the current weakening of Bank guidelines contradicts the efforts to fight corruption. “Wolfensohn’s two main instincts on development – that the Bank should listen to its clients, and that development depended upon noneconomic factors such as corruption – were in some ways in tension with each other”, he notes.
Yet his positions are marked by the same contradictions. He dismisses “the idea that you could ignore the political context and proceed by technocratic means alone”. Yet he supports the renewed promotion of large dams in repressive and corrupt countries like Laos. The author thus falls into the same technocratic trap that marks the Bank’s lending.

Mallaby insists that the World Bank should listen to the poor, and not to Northern environmentalists. He argues that it is unfair to apply what he calls the “Volvo” standards of the North in poor countries like Laos. Yet he unquestioningly assumes that Southern governments speak for the poor. He dismisses the safeguard policies, which give the poor a (limited) voice in Bank projects, as “infernal safeguards”. And he ignores that the environment may sometimes be considered a luxury issue in the North, but is a basic source of livelihood for poor people in many countries.

Research substituted by polemic

Sebastian Mallaby, a historian trained at Oxford, writes with British cool. Yet when he discusses the role of advocacy NGOs, he loses his gentlemanly style. With rapid fire, he disparages the NGOs as “ragtag legions” and “globophobes”. Mallaby argues that “discussions with the screamers from the Berkeley mafia will not get you anywhere”. He slanders the activities of International Rivers Network and other NGOs at considerable length. Yet in line with his own advice to the Bank, he did not bother to talk with these groups. He also spent very little time doing research for his book in Southern countries, let alone with project affected-communities.

As a consequence of his sloppy research, Mallaby’s accusations against campaigning groups are ill informed. In his opening salvo, he asserts that a campaign orchestrated by IRN stopped a dam in Uganda that even the affected communities supported. He does not mention that once they were displaced, the affected people found that the promises made to them were broken, and turned furiously against the dam. More fundamentally, the author ignores that Ugandan parliamentarians, civil society groups and academics opposed the Bujagali dam (and favored an alternative) because it was corrupt and excessively expensive. The project eventually collapsed because an anti-corruption investigation failed to clear it and the private investor withdrew from it.

Throughout his book, Mallaby accuses campaigning NGOs of being ill informed and ideologically biased. Given the many errors and misrepresentations in his own account, his accusations fall back on him and undermine the credibility of his book.