Governing the Knowledge Economy: the World Bank As a Gatekeeper for Development

This book considers the the changing shape of ?knowledge', ?development' and global institutions of socio-economic governance, within the context of shifts in discursive practices surrounding the notion of our entering a ?knowledge economy'. The work approaches these changes as relatively new variations upon a number of older struggles around understandings of property and wealth and the means by which claims upon them are made. The work's focus is provided by the World Bank's engagement with knowledge economy discourse through a major rhetorical shift in self-image in 1995 when it became the Knowledge Bank. The Bank is approached as a great story-teller playing a number of roles within and housing a range of perspectives upon what development is and can be. Yet the organisation is argued to be made both less useful and more dangerous through an organisational preoccupation with normalising discursive practices around its one officially-approved vision of development. Later chapters consider how engagement with the organisation's reproduction as a Knowledge Bank could potentially be used in opening it up to other voices and other understandings.