‘Correcting Course’ on the ‘Reversals of Fortune’? A Critical Discourse Analysis of the World Bank’s Ongoing Development Project

Abstract

This study applies a Critical Discourse Analysis on the Poverty and Shared Prosperity series, a textual chain authored by the World Bank (WB). The research aims to discover the latent and manifest ideologies, discourses, representation strategies, and power relations embedded therein. The findings suggest that the WB has discarded its convergence narrative (positing a narrowing of inequality over time) as a ‘reversal of fortunes’ (owing to external factors: the COVID-19 pandemic, armed conflict, and climate change) has apparently taken hold, undoing years of purported ‘progress’ on poverty reduction. The historic and ongoing effects of colonialism are erased in these data, as are the impacts of imposed Westphalian statehood on subaltern and Indigenous Peoples. To mitigate the macabre prospects that lay ahead, the WB is now advocating for more targeted, conditional, and active labour market programming. Rather than maintaining the neoliberal status-quo, the paper calls for the WB to jettison its unremitting (and now green) structural adjustment project on countries of the global South and be brought under greater scrutiny and democratic control in order to truly reduce poverty and advance the shared prosperity of all.