Governance became an integral part of the World Banks agenda in the 1990s. Analysts have noted (Singh, 2003) that this was a strategy employed by the Bank to offset the critique of the abysmal failure of its goal of reducing poverty and inequality by raising growth.

So rather than reassess its flawed neo-liberal policy formulation, the Bank blamed the lack of progress on its key objective (a poverty free world) on poor policy implementation and thus weak governance. The convenient prognosis of the Bank was that good policies are vital but are unsustainable within poor governance and weak institutions and this has led to misguided resource allocation, excessive government intervention, arbitrariness and corruption, which have deterred private sector investment and slowed growth and the poverty-reduction effort.

The World Bank defines governance as 'the manner in which power is exercised in the management of a country's economic and social resources for development' . The Bank makes no mention of democracy and is therefore not necessarily concerned with the issue of legitimacy in governance. The Bank further states that, based on its Articles of Agreement which state that it should be a non-political institution, it focuses only on the technocratic aspects of governance.