It’s almost another language, in both semantics and grammar. The key discontinuity, as we shall see, falls mostly between the first three decades and the last two, the turn of the 1990s, when the style of the Reports becomes much more codified, self-referential and detached from everyday language. It is this Bankspeak that will be the protagonist of the pages that follow.

Countries in the region are emerging as key players on issues of global concern, and the Bank’s role has been to support their efforts by partnering through innovative platforms for an enlightened dialogue and action on the ground, as well as by supporting South–South cooperation.

The Congo’s present transport system is geared mainly to the export trade, and is based on river navigation and on railroads which lead from river ports into regions producing minerals and agricultural commodities. Most of the roads radiate short distances from cities, providing farm-to-market communications. In recent years road traffic has increased rapidly with the growth of the internal market and the improvement of farming methods.

What can quantitative linguistic analysis tell us about the operations and outlook of the international financial institutions? At first glance, the words most frequently used in the World Bank’s Annual Reports give an impression of unbroken continuity. footnote 1 Seven are near the top at any given time: three nouns—bank, loan/s,development—and four adjectives: fiscal, economic, financial, private. This septet is joined by a handful of other nouns: ibrd, countries, investment/s, interest, programme/s, project/s, assistance, and—though initially less frequent—lending, growth, cost, debt, trade, prices. There is also a second, more colourless set of adjectives—other, new, such, net, first, more, general—plus agricultural, partly replaced from the 1990s by rural. footnote 2 The message is clear: the World Bank lends money for the purpose of stimulating development, notably in the rural South, and is therefore involved with loans, investments and debts. It works through programmes and projects, and considers trade a key resource for economic growth. Being concerned with development, the Bank deals with all sorts of economic, financial and fiscal matters, and is in touch with private business. All quite simple, and perfectly straightforward.

i. semantic transformations

Nouns are at the centre of World Bank Reports. During the first two decades, 1950–70, the most frequent among them can be grouped in two main clusters. The first, obviously enough, encompasses the economic activities of the Bank: loan/s, development, power (in the sense of electricity), programme, projects, investment, equipment, production, construction, plant; further down the list are companies, facilities, industry, machineries, followed by a string of concrete terms like port, road, steel, irrigation, kWh, river, highway, railway—and then timber, pulp, coal, iron, steam, steel, locomotives, diesel, freight, dams, bridges, cement, chemical, acres, hectares, drainage, crop, cattle, livestock. All quite appropriate for a bank which offers loans and investments (the only explicitly financial terms in this long list) to promote a variety of infrastructural development projects.footnote3 The second noun cluster is much smaller (just a dozen words), and describes how the Bank actually operates. Confronted with existing demands, its experts analyse numbers, but they also pay visits, realize surveys and conduct missions in the field; the classic ingredients of a scientific approach to a complex situation, which requires the active presence of experts to collect and elaborate the data. Afterwards, the Bank proceeds to advise countries, suggest solutions, assist local governments and allocate its loans. Rhetorically, investment programmes are defined by the needs of the local economy, according to the basic idea that investment in infrastructure will lead to economic development and social well-being. At the end of every cycle, the Bank specifies what has been lent, spent, paid and sold, and describes the equipment—dams, factory, irrigation systems—that has been put into operation. A clear link is established between empirical knowledge, money flows and industrial constructions: knowledge is associated with physical presence in situ, and with calculations conducted in the Bank’s headquarters; money flows involve the negotiation of loans and investments with individual states; and the construction of ports, energy plants, etc., is the result of the whole process. In this eminently temporal sequence, a strong sense of causality links expertise, loans, investments, and material realizations. Apart from the Bank, three types of social actors appear in the texts during this period: states and governments; companies, banks and industry; engineers, technicians and experts. This social ontology confirms the standard account of post-war reconstruction as industrial, Fordist and Keynesian. The protagonists of economic growth are businessmen and bankers, working with industrial companies, economists and engineers to implement projects within a national framework presided over by a state. What has to be managed is the economy—‘the self-contained structure or totality of relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given geographical space’, as Timothy Mitchell has put it—whose results are optimized by a ‘modern apparatus of calculation and government’.footnote4 With the help of the Bank, governments adjust investments and financial parameters so as to modernize countries: that is to say, to industrialize them, beginning with basic material infrastructures. It’s the legacy of Walt Whitman Rostow, author of The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960) and a key policy advisor to American administrations from Eisenhower to Johnson. Development proceeds in stages, and its ‘take-off’ is triggered by the production of raw materials, the creation of infrastructures and an agricultural sector oriented towards exports. Let us pause briefly on a specific passage from 1969. It appears in the general introduction of the Report, in a section on agricultural loans, and its language is so simple, it seems almost featureless: Many developing countries need to transform their agriculture . . . the Bank Group continues to encourage these trends through its lending for general agricultural development, which totalled $72.2 million in the 1969 financial year. Diversification into new crops which provide a source of cash income, or improved production of existing ones, was encouraged by loans or credits to support traditional coffee production in Burundi at its normal level, palm oil development in Cameroon, Dahomey, the Ivory Coast and Papua, afforestation in Zambia, and mechanization of sorghum, sesame and cotton farming in the Sudan . . . A $13 million Bank loan to India will finance the production of seeds of new high-yielding varieties of foodgrains; at full development the project will produce enough seeds to plant seven million acres with the new varieties. This is the first loan the Bank has made for seed production. Aside from the initial injunction that agriculture ‘needs’ to change, the dominant note is one of factual precision: amounts, countries, materials, productive activities, objectives of the investments. Nouns are frequent and adjectives rare: things are being described, not advertised. Verbs specify the type of action involved: to encourage, provide, improve, support, diversify, produce, finance. The present tense reports what is happening now (the bank continues to encourage); when a project has not yet been launched the tense shifts to the future (the credit will finance seed production), while the past accounts for what has been completed (diversification was encouraged, lending totalled $72.2 million). Clearly demarcating past accomplishments, current actions, necessary policies and future projects, this temporal structure reinforces the sense of factuality of the early Reports.

Finance, management, governance Let’s now shift to the most recent decades. Three new semantic clusters characterize the language of the Bank from the early 1990s on. The first—and most important—has to do with finance: here, alongside a few predictable adjectives (financial, fiscal, economic) and nouns (loans, investment, growth, interest, lending, debt), we find a landslide of fair value, portfolio, derivative, accrual, guarantees, losses, accounting, assets; a little further down the list, equity, hedging, liquidity, liabilities, creditworthiness, default, swaps, clients, deficit, replenishment, repurchase, cash. In terms of frequency and semantic density, this cluster can only be compared to the material infrastructures of the 1950s–60s; now, however, work in agriculture and industry has been replaced by an overwhelming predominance of financial activities. Figure 1 is a good illustration of the Bank’s new priorities. The second cluster has to do with management—a noun that, in absolute terms, is the second most frequent of the last decade (lower than loans, but higher than risk and investment!). In the world of ‘management’, people have goals and agendas; faced with opportunities, challenges and critical situations, they elaborate strategies. To appreciate the novelty, let’s recall that, in the 1950s–60s, issues were studied by experts who surveyed and conducted missions, published reports, assisted, advised and suggested programmes. With the advent of management, the centre of gravity shifts towards focusing, strengthening and implementing; one must monitor, control, audit, rate (Figure 2); ensure that everything is done properly while also helping people to learn from mistakes. The many tools at the manager’s disposal (indicators, instruments, knowledge, expertise, research) enhance effectiveness, efficiency, performance, competitiveness and—it goes without saying—promote innovation. To better understand this ‘management discourse’, as Boltanski and Chiapello have called it in The New Spirit of Capitalism, we decided to run a little experiment. We took two related expressions—‘poverty’ and ‘poverty reduction’—and followed their occurrences from 1990 to 2010, comparing their respective ‘collocates’: that is to say, the words that tend to occur most often in their immediate proximity. Near poverty, the dominant note was one of straightforward economic realism: bank was the most frequent word; million, the second; and then total, cost, population, incomes, services, problems, work, production, employment, resources, food, health, agriculture. Which makes perfect sense, because these are indeed the terms that define the perimeter of poverty. What doesn’t make sense, on the other hand, is that only four of them—services, work, resources, health—should reappear near poverty reduction. Poverty is the problem, poverty reduction the policy that should address it; they should have plenty of core terms in common. And instead, the most characteristic collocates of poverty reduction are not cost, population, income—let alone production or employment—but strategies, programmes, policies, focus, key, management, report, goals, approach, projects, framework, priorities, papers. ‘Management discourse’, in all its glory. Never mind employment and income: focus, key, approach, framework—these are the critical terms in reducing poverty. Policy turned into paperwork, with goals and priorities and papers inching their way through the department that—in the acronym-obsessed language of the Reports—is known as prem: Poverty Reduction and Economic Management. The third semantic cluster of the last two decades comprises governance and moral behaviour.footnote5Governance, first of all: this shibboleth of World Bank language first showed up in a crowded sentence of the 1990 Report—‘the strength of managerial institutions and personnel and the quality of governance also determine how well reform policies are actually put into practice’—and then increased its presence to the point that it is now as frequent as ‘food’, occurring ten times more often than ‘law’ and a hundred times more than ‘politics’ (Figure 3).footnote6 Three adjectives have been shadowing governance in its irresistible progress: global, environmental, civil. They are complemented by dialogue,stakeholders, collaboration, partnership, communities, indigenous people, accountability—plus climate, nature, natural, forest, pollution. Even health and education have ended up near the orbit of governance (Figures 4 and 5). Finally, the semantic cluster of governance includes a series of terms which express a sense of compassion, generosity, rectitude or empathy with the world’s problems. Virtually absent in previous decades, these ethical claims emerge in the mid-1980s, and become second nature by the early 1990s, when responsible,responsibility, effort, commitment, involvement, sharing, care are suddenly everywhere.footnote7 Nor is the Bank blind to fragile and vulnerable people, to poverty (revitalized in 1995 by the new Director General James Wolfensohn), and to all that is human (Figure 6). This cluster also includes rights, law, justice and (anti-)corruption. People, behaviour and results are outstanding, significant, relevant, consistent, strong, good, better. Enhancing and promoting what is appropriate, equitable and sound: this is the Bank’s credo. The overall effect is one of dedication and commitment; the Bank’s sense of responsibility is as admirable as its efficiency. Let us again pause on a specific passage to add some texture to our analysis. Here is the opening of the 2012 Report: The World Bank is committed to achieving and communicating results. In its ongoing dedication to overcoming poverty and creating opportunity for people in developing countries, the Bank is making progress both internally and in the field, and it continues to improve the way it serves its client countries. A place full of ‘opportunities’ that the poor may seize in order to change their condition: this is how the Bank sees the world. Within this scenario, its activity consists in establishing the legal and cultural framework necessary for a variety of initiatives to flourish; still investment in infrastructures, in a sense—except that they’re no longer made of stone and steel. The Bank is dedicated and committed, thoughtful, invested in a better world. It is forward-looking, its dedication ongoing, constantly thinking about improving and serving the poor countries that are its . . . clients. Clients? At first, the word is jarring: if dedication suggests a universe of moral justice, client refers to business, rational interests, and power relations. In deliberately linking them within a single sentence, though, the Bank suggests that the two are no longer in opposition: nowadays, business is as attentive to stakeholders as to shareholders; like civil society and the Bank itself, it is socially and environmentally responsible, and engaged in durable governance made of multiple partnerships. Ethics is at the heart of the business world, and of its contractual relationships.

Complexity and crisis Having established the two contrasting paradigms of World Bank discourse, let us briefly sketch the process that led from the one to the other. A few adjustments aside, the intellectual framework that defined the Bank’s operations in the 50s and 60s remained fundamentally in place up to the late 1970s: irrigation, chemical inputs, the Green Revolution and the industrial–infrastructural synergy continue to be the key ingredients of economic take-off. But the belief in a linear approach is losing its force: as the 1960s come to a close, it becomes clear that, if building infrastructure is relatively simple, its reliable long-term operation is not: it requires specialists, qualified workers and the regular supply of key products like electricity—none of which can be taken for granted in the countries of the South. To make things worse, international exchanges seem to respect neither the Bank’s hopes, nor the theories of development à la Rostow. The prices of agricultural raw materials—crucial for the economies of the South—are far from stable and undergo major falls, from which recovery is difficult. The consequences of such instability can be dramatic: as prices drop, developing countries cannot afford to persevere on the virtuous path by which the export of raw materials finances the growth of infrastructure . . . and the repayment of foreign loans. Mindful of its investments, the Bank is worried. The language of the Reports adapts to the changing environment; words like commodities, or improvements, raise the analysis to a higher level of abstraction than, say, hydroelectric plants and cement. And since leading the world by relying merely on material infrastructures no longer seems enough, other ‘factors’ are taken into account: the market, of course, but especially the ‘human factor’. On becoming the Bank’s president in 1967, Robert McNamara places lbj’s ‘war on poverty’ at the centre of its strategy. It’s the time of small-scale farms and cooperatives (faint echoes of decolonization and social unrest); of farmers (previously marginal to the Bank’s policy); of families (and soon of women). Education is now seen as indispensable in maintaining progress, along with school, primary, secondary, educational, training. It’s the time of the explosion of towns (and shantytowns); of rural emigration, and the deterioration of the urban (a ubiquitous adjective) way of life; whence a long list of new problems—housing, drainage,sewers. In the second half of the 1970s, the oil crisis introduces new exogenous elements. Words like debt, borrowed and borrowing become increasingly frequent, along with those that refer to a country’s reliability (or lack thereof): cost/s, exports, co-financing. The discourse of reform—destined for unimaginable success—begins to take shape. And since debt is linked to the evolution of prices, these, too, become more visible in the Reports (in fact, it’s amazing how invisible they had previously been). The crisis reveals the World Bank as, indeed, a bank—and one that finds it difficult to recover its loans: a fact that may seem obvious, but that, until then, had been largely muted. In response to all this, the causal chain linking loans and development, investments and economic progress, is lengthened to include families and education, small farmers and sewers. This is hardly an unfeasible adjustment, and even the logic behind the debt continues to appear reasonably simple: there are loans, faltering exports, problematic reimbursements—the inter-connections are clear, comprehensible. But the world as seen through the World Bank Reports is becoming less linear than it used to be; socio-economic dynamics are harder to disentangle, and there is a faint surprise in the face of events that aren’t following the expected course. At times, the surprise seems genuine; if this were so (but is it possible?) it would speak volumes about the delusions of development in the post-war period. As the policy of infrastructural growth becomes partially destabilized, a sense of indecision and even openness emerges—in sharp contrast with the previous decades, when everything was self-evident and almost automatic. But the openness will not last; at the end of the 1970s, the auto-pilot will be reinserted—this time, en route to ‘structural adjustment’.