World Bank move to censor its own researchers criticized

by Kanaga Raja

GENEVA: World Bank staff members have come out in stinging criticism of the Bank’s move to discipline two staff researchers who separately published articles in a leading newspaper without adequate clearance from the Bank’s External Relations Department, according to the Bretton Woods Project.

The Project <www.brettonwoodsproject.org>, an organization that works with NGOs and researchers to monitor Bank and IMF activities, was commenting on two editorials in the latest edition of the World Bank Staff Association newsletter that highlight the two cases of William Easterly, who was a senior researcher in the Development Economics Department, and Ashraf Ghani, who was a lead scientist in the Social Development Department. Both have since left the Bank.

According to the Project, their ‘crimes’ were nearly identical, in that they both published separate articles in the Financial Times without adequate clearance from the Bank’s External Relations Department.

Ghani contributed an opinion piece in the Financial Times in late September making suggestions about US policy towards his native Afghanistan. The Project says that when he was denied permission to publish, he threatened to resign rather than be silenced. He was eventually forced to take unpaid leave from the Bank. Ghani is now working on secondment to the United Nations.

Easterly’s case seems to be even more ironic in that his article was clearly marked “personal opinion” and that he merely summarized the findings of a book he wrote for MIT Press with the blessing of his managers. Easterly has also taken a new job after being investigated by the Bank’s Ethics Office.

The former head of the Ethics Office, Anita Baker, was rather candid in noting that they are not consistent in enforcement regarding publication. According to her, “the Bank does not have good government, a good self-governing structure.”

The Project says that the Bank has loosely-worded and contradictory guidelines and this provides a lot of leeway for management clampdowns.

The editorials in the World Bank Staff Association newsletter question whether the Bank’s “public image matters more than germane research findings.” The editorials also bemoan the Bank’s internal governance mechanisms.

The Project underscores that these are important issues given the Bank’s ever-expanding publication and training agenda.

The Staff Association editorial also touches upon the issue of staff guidelines and comments that these guidelines on getting articles approved before publishing “comes perilously close to saying that staff members must not publicly suggest changes in the institution’s practice, past or present.”

“How can the institution share ‘best practice’ that inspires any public confidence, if research staff cannot discuss ‘poor practice’ based on high-quality scholarship?” the editorial asks.

David Ellerman, a senior Bank researcher, also writing in the newsletter, expresses concern that public relations staff come to act as “the thought police to the black sheep in the organization who - within public view - are not ‘on message’”.

In this respect, Ellerman urges Bank decision-makers to “begin fostering an atmosphere where the public exercise of critical reason and the open contestation of alternative views is welcomed.”

Ghani also points clearly to where the Bank staff responsibilities lie. “As human beings, apart from our employment at the Bank, we have an individual moral obligation to the poor,” he says, adding, “It is only through individual moral decisions that Bank staff can transform the mission of the Bank from a mere statement into a collective reality.”

If the Bank does not stop adopting particular views as official wisdom, Ellerman warns, there will be a continuing danger  that “critical reason gives way to bureaucratic conformity; a community of  development  researchers  gives way to a company of intellectual clerks.”

He goes further, adding that there seems to be little reasoned basis for a development organization to explicitly or implicitly adopt official views on some of the most complex and subtle questions facing mankind. (SUNS5050)