Sanjay Pradhan , The World Bank Group The Relevance of Political Science to the World Bank

By the mid 1990s, scholars, practitioners, and policy makers alike had begun to recognize the critical importance of good governance for growth and poverty reduction. Yet corruption, its mirror image, remained “taboo” at the World Bank up until the historic “cancer of corruption” speech in 1996 of then-Bank President James Wolfensohn that formally brought governance and anticorruption into the forefront of the Bank’s agenda (see Figure 1). In 1997, the World Development Report: The State in a Changing World broke new ground within the Bank, taking stock of the erstwhile work on governance and addressing what the institution could do to enhance its ability to help client countries improve governance and reduce corruption. Since then, the Bank has promoted many programs within the broad theme of governance, covering key areas including in particular administrative and civil service reform, decentralization, public financial management, tax policy, anticorruption, and legal and judicial reform (Figure 1). These programs have been mainstreamed into Country Assistance Strategies (CAS) and lending operations to help address governance and corruption concerns. In parallel, the Bank has supported and encouraged empirical research on governance and corruption, developing extensive data bases and diagnostic tools. In combination with scholarly research grounded largely on the new institutional economics, this has led to the general acceptance by both the academic and development community of the significant impact that the quality of governance institutions has on the welfare of citizens and thus the urgent need to address poor governance. Analytical Frameworks Help Guide the Design of Governance and Anti-Corruption Programs