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1. Introduction
Can the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) be reformed? If not, what does that mean for progressive analysis, strategies and tactics? Should "deglobalization" be the overall approach, and if so, is defunding and decommissioning the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) a feasible alternative strategy? Is the World Bank Bonds Boycott a sufficiently powerful tactic? As the institutions turn 60 years old in 2004, it is appropriate to ask whether a civilized global society - especially the leading African social movements working on debt and finance, as well as environmentalists opposed to BWI projects and policies - should recommend retirement, in part because recent experience suggests that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks."
To be sure, several opportunities arose for institutional change, based upon internal processes and external pressures, since James Wolfensohn became Bank president in 1995. Some followed directly from the late 1990s legitimacy crisis of the BWIs, which was generally understood to combine the institutions' global-governance "democratic deficit," their continued reliance upon the "Washington Consensus" approach to public policy, the Bank's ongoing orientation to controversial mega-projects, and both agencies' failure to relieve Third World debt and international financial speculation born of liberalized capital markets. Some openings were reflected in the 1997-99 tenure of Joseph Stiglitz as chief economist, while other catalysts included international, intersectoral commissions on structural adjustment, dams and extractive industry.
However, the internal procedural changes, rhetorical shifts, individual initiatives and multi-stakeholder forum exercises did not fundamentally change matters. The view from the inside is revealing, as Bank staff in the Middle East and North Africa section complained in a leaked 1999 memo to Wolfensohn, that:
The list of fiduciary tasks is being constantly enlarged with increasing requirements that are burdensome on our borrowers and staff. The list has grown from environment and resettlement a few years ago, to now also include social assessment, financial management and so on. While no one can question the importance of these issues, staff have been put in a straight jacket in how they must approach these issues through detailed "guidelines" enforced by an army of "reviewers" . . . The World Bank is increasingly being drawn into activities which are politically sensitive (participatory processes, involvement of civil society, corruption and so...