World Bank Development Policy: A SAP in SWAPs Clothing

Abstract

Education and development rhetoric over the past decade has increasingly focused on the idea of partnerships as central to improving policy. Based on the need for more and better partnerships, sector wide approaches (SWAPs) to development activities have been adopted and extended by many agencies, especially the World Bank (henceforth The Bank). Many hope that partnerships like those associated with SWAPs will change the nature of two decades of neo-liberal economic policy in which Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) enforced by The Bank and the International Monetary Fund (henceforth the IMF or The Fund) wreaked havoc throughout the world. In this paper, I examine the current fervor with partnerships and their embodiment in the rhetoric surrounding SWAPs and The Bank's extension of SWAPs. While I use some of the literature specific to education in this analysis, the underlying problems with these partnerships can only be understood only by looking at their broader applications, which, unfortunately, are yielding development policies that will likely be as devastating to educational and social services as were the SAPs of the last two decades. Partnerships