| This dissertation evaluates the World Bank's (WB) engagement with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in project collaboration and policy discussions. Based on this experience, it appraises the World Bank's potential to support development efforts based on the needs, initiatives and participation of poor people and of NGOs that work with them. The findings suggest that WB claims to be promoting broad and systematic cooperation with NGOs are exaggerated. They also suggest important roles for NGOs as agents of accountability on behalf of impoverished groups in the countries of the South.;Some 300 projects that the WB reports involve NGO participation are reviewed. NGOs are found to be involved primarily as implementors of project components designed by WB and government officials. Cases of more formative participation (indicating greater WB openness to collaboration) occur most often when locally- and nationally-based NGOs work together with international NGOs. NGO involvement has been most common in Africa, but formative roles in project design are more common in Asia and Latin America.;Interview and documentary evidence, interpreted in the light of sociological theories of complex organizations, is used to argue that the WB has limited capacity to systematically engage in genuine, two-way collaboration and that little progress toward institutionalizing such a capacity has taken place. Organizational factors--structural, procedural, social-psychological and ideological--are argued to be integrated with, and to reinforce the role played by the WB in shaping a reorganized global economy.;The priority of rapid capital disbursement, institutionalized in the WB by career incentives, project preparation procedures and called for by its model of development, is argued to be in contradiction with more systematic collaboration. "Organizational myths" of member countries' sovereignty and of development as an apolitical, technical process are shown to be obstacles to systematic cooperation with more values-based, sometimes politicized NGOs.;An "organizational culture" based on technical expertise, efficiency, hierarchy and control of project planning further limits WB collaboration with NGOs. The culture's screening and selection of information to be used in evaluation and decision-making encourages organizational stability and inhibits learning and change. |
