Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization (review)

Pity the World Bank. The academic and policy literature on the Bank in general, and on its environmental behavior in particular, is dominated by critics who see every attempt by the Bank to reform itself and improve its behavior as ineffective at best, and harmful at worst. There are a brave, hardy few who believe the Bank has made significant positive changes in improving its performance. In between, where shades of grey lurk and the Bank's efforts at reform may be seen as an uneven mix of successes and failures, there is a virtual vacuum.

Sociologist Michael Goldman makes an eloquent contribution to the critical side of the spectrum by focusing on how the Bank produces knowledge, and why its knowledge is so influential. He journeys "through the intestines of one of the world's most powerful institutions" to conduct a critical ethnographic study of how the Bank's hegemony is constituted, resulting in a Bank that plays a key role in perpetuating a "highly inequitable global economy" (pp. xiii, 20). He writes, " . . . I learned that one of the Bank's greatest accomplishments has been to make its worldview, its development framework, and its data sets the ones that people around the world choose above others. This is one reason why the Bank's influence continues to grow, even with mounting pressure from ­critics" (p. xv).

Goldman is specifically interested in the rise of the Bank's "green hegemony." He argues that the Bank responded to widespread criticism of its environmental behavior by reinventing itself through the expansion of its neoliberal economic agenda to include environmental dimensions, and that this reinven­tion gave the Bank the means to expand the tentacles of its knowledge and power even more deeply throughout the world. This green hegemony, he writes, has "fundamentally altered the defining features of the Bank's neoliberal agenda by adding as a goal the restructuring and capitalization of nature-society relations that exist as uncommodified or underutilized by capital markets" (p. 7). The Bank's influence, he argues, may not be as well documented as some of the disastrous projects it has funded, but it is a "more mundane" type of "violence perpetrated in the name of development" (p. 12).

Goldman builds his case by analyzing how the Bank collects and produces "green" data; how it implemented its environmental reforms in designing one particular project, the Nam Theun 2 (NT2) hydroelectric dam project in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Laos); its activities in the Mekong region; and its role in promoting the global policy of water privatization. The volume concludes by musing about the possibility of the Bank's demise.

The picture Goldman paints of the Bank is one of unrelenting arrogance and negative outcomes. For example, according to Goldman, Bank research is rarely rooted in serious scholarship and "all roads of inquiry happen to lead back to the bank's latest policy stance" (p. 130). Even more problematic, he writes, is that the Bank's findings are legitimated and treated as "truth" by outside actors throughout the world. Goldman focuses on NT2 as a project representing "the global flagship of the Bank's green incarnation" (p. 157). He traces the flawed production of knowledge for the project by looking at how some consultants for the projects were hired, and how some of the impact studies for the project were carried out. He interviewed consultants who complained that they lacked time to do necessary research and others who saw their findings suppressed, not only by the Bank, but also by the Asian Development Bank and an international NGO. Goldman does not describe whether and how the project was actually implemented, but he does illuminate some of the pathologies involved in the process of knowledge production.

Goldman's arguments will be of interest to constructivists and others who focus on the power of international organizations' bureaucracies and how this power and expertise...