Ideas, institutions and the World Bank : the social protection and fragile states agendas

Ideas and institutions are frequently used as explanatory concepts regarding policy development and change. There is an on-going debate as to the explanatory weight that each should be afforded; Weiss and Carayannis (2001) identify a spectrum of opinions, with ‘institutionalist’ approaches that embed ideas within institutionalist frameworks at one end, and ‘constructivist’ approaches which argue that ideational concepts should be dis-embedded from institutional considerations at the other. Drawing on 43 interviews with senior World Bank staff and a documentary analysis, this paper traces two policy agendas – social protection and fragile states – to identify the institutional and ideational features of the World Bank that a developmental agenda must navigate to achieve prominence in the Bank’s work. It finds that the success of a policy agenda is determined by whether the ideas fit with a macro-ideational dominant paradigm, and identifies several institutional features such as the incentive structure and lending mechanisms that influence an agenda’s success.