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Three Strategic Principles will underpin the Bank Group's work: (i) focusing on outcomes… (ii) applying selectivity…and (iii) expanding the Bank Group role as a politically realistic knowledge provider and generator.
Creation of Intellectual Support for Privatisation and Globalisation
Why is the Bank giving so much important to the creation and provision of knowledge? Ostensibly, it is to better tackle the challenges of global poverty eradication and improving people's lives. However, there appear to be other reasons.
It is an open secret that the World Bank directly intervenes in the policy making processes of the countries to which it lends money. In the last 15 years or so, the Bank has been consistently pressurising Governments along the path of Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation (LPG), forcing open more and more sectors of the economy to global private capital. Simultaneously, it has been pushing for the 'commercialisation' of these sectors, that is, the operation of these sectors along commercial lines, as a market, so as to create an enabling environment for privatisation.
All over the world, there has been massive resistance to these polices, and tremendous accumulating evidence that the policies are harming the poor and destroying the environment. The Bank is therefore increasingly being called upon to present justification for these policies. One of the most important ways in which this is done is through the use of knowledge. In effect, this is the creation of the 'intellectual' support to build up the rationale and justification of privatisation and globalisation.
