Worthy of Continued Support? The Paradox of Community-Driven Development at the World Bank

Abstract The World Bank’s community-driven development (CDD) interventions have outwardly been presented as powerful instruments of good governance, social cohesion, and empowerment. However, their far-reaching expansion has taken place in the absence of conclusive empirical evidence on their operations and effects. To make sense of this paradox at the core of CDD, this paper situates these programs in the Bank’s institutional context. It proposes that CDD operations have effectively served the Bank’s imperative to lend. Their expansion has been supported by an assertive discourse of success and reform, which has further helped confirm the Bank’s identity as a “knowledge bank” with social development expertise. In parallel, mounting evidence of CDD’s ineffectiveness in terms of empowerment, governance, and social capital has largely been handled by fostering ignorance. Inconvenient findings have been avoided, stifled, mitigated, or removed from the CDD narrative to protect and promote programs. However, tensions and contradictions have occasionally arisen from the CDD paradox. They have been assuaged by systematically reframing problems and shortcomings as signals that programs require tailoring, improvement, and expansion. In so doing, CDD discourse has generated momentum for the survival, persistence, and growth of interventions, regardless of their effects on the localities that have experienced them.