Maritta Koch-Weser Scott Guggenheim Editors Social Development in the World Bank Essays in Honor of Michael M. Cernea Social Development in the World Bank Maritta Koch-Weser • Scott Guggenheim Editors Social Development in the World Bank Essays in Honor of Michael M. Cernea Editors Maritta Koch-Weser Scott Guggenheim Earth3000 Edmund Walsh School Bieberstein, Germany Georgetown University Washington, DC, USA ISBN 978-3-030-57425-3 ISBN 978-3-030-57426-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57426-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access publication. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Michael Cernea Introduction From the Editors: Scott Guggenheim and Maritta Koch-Weser Despite the global success of development in reducing poverty, hundreds of millions of people still live in abject poverty and danger, in shanty towns and favelas, or in rural communities and tribal lands. They live in poorly governed or conflict zones that have been shelled to pieces, and they suffer from climate change, famine, crime, and corruption. “Putting People First”, Michael Cernea’s mantra first published in his seminal book of the same name, rings even more true now than ever. The phrase originated at the World Bank, more than 40 years back, when that institution was at its most significant as the world’s largest and leading development finance institution. “Put- ting People First” became a movement. This book documents how concepts and strategies from applied social science can be used to improve the quality of international development and thereby people’s welfare and life prospects. The book recapitulates and presents voices from the time, decades ago, when social specialists first joined an international development insti- tution, the World Bank. They were guided by Michael Cernea, the World Bank’s first social scientist. This book presents the story of how change in a large develop- ment agency became possible. But the essays contained in this book are of more than historical interest. Social development continues to matter if we are to make progress in solving some of the world’s major new social challenges—from internal and international migrations to ethnic, cultural, and religious divides, to collaboration on managing the global commons—our shared climate, water, oceans, and biodiversity. vii viii Introduction To Our Readers This book is assembled for development practitioners who care to make a difference. We hope that our book makes a contribution to the continuous search for social strategies that will reach people on the ground most effectively. Perhaps, the most important lesson from the experiences recounted in this book is not about under- standing the reality “out there.” Michael Cernea’s genius lay in his ability to use the structures and vocabulary of the World Bank itself to generate a willingness to bring social specialists into the core of World Bank thinking and operations. Social practitioners continue to work at the World Bank—but many more will now be working out of national development banks and agencies in emerging economy countries, in bilateral finance institutions in higher income countries, or in non-governmental organizations, consultancies, and academia. They will face many of the same challenges that Michael and his colleagues did. We hope that this book helps them find their own way through them. The book is also written for the aspiring practitioners among you, students engaged in development-oriented studies who are now at the outset of their careers. Uses The goal of this retrospective is to provide some insights for building a social development agenda for the future. If you want to find out how to orchestrate the introduction of new ideas and skills in the daunting and resistant context of large bureaucratic organizations, then you may be fascinated by Part I of this book, which shows you how Michael Cernea went about turning the World Bank leadership’s general curiosity about social development into a strong and supportive constituency of senior managers who became convinced of the value of social analysis. As top-level support grew, Michael and his colleagues began to embed social develop- ment into the normative structure of the Bank, removing it from the realm of the outlying curiosity and instead making it part of the routine ways in which the World Bank manages its policies and programs. If you want to envision what development anthropology practice means, where it is a needed and indispensable element of development team work, and what kinds of contributions it has made—you will be interested in Part II. The essays in this section describe personal professional experiences, real life cases from different regions, which will help you understand how this first generation of the World Bank’s social development practitioners turned social knowledge into development practice. You will find that this is not a facile parade of successes and failures, but rather a carefully differentiated assemblage of demonstrative regional and sectoral experiences. Some of them may resonate with you and your own focus of work today. In Part III, we portray for the 1970–2000 period one of the most contentious and thought-provoking challenges in social development—involuntary displacement Introduction ix and resettlement, mostly in connection with large dams and irrigation infrastructure. The controversies that swirled around resettlement marked a major turning point for both the Bank and its social development staff. We give extra room to this topic because it will stay with you, the next generations of practitioners, for a long time, involving not just the technical language of development programming but funda- mental issues of ethics, rights, and responsibilities. Origins While we now hope that this book may become a useful reader for practitioners and academic programs, it was initially only modestly intended as a “Festschrift” for Michael Cernea, the decades-long thought leader on social development at the World Bank. Special credit goes to our colleague William Partridge, who led the way to the 2011 Bieberstein symposium honoring Michael Cernea. Most of the contributors to this book came together then, exchanging experiences and following up with their own write-ups. Some in our social science core group—among them Gloria Davis, Shelton Davis, and Jonathan Brown—were no longer alive, but they left us small texts or oral histories, which we include here to commemorate their fundamental contribution. And some have watched the processes we describe from outside the prism of the World Bank—Robert Wade’s portrait of the India-Narmada project is a case in point – providing a close-but-distant portrayal of the controversies and issues at play. The Bieberstein Meeting, May 2011 The contributors to this book came together in Bieberstein, Germany, to celebrate the work of their former World Bank mentor and colleague, Michael Cernea. Michael Cernea’s seminal 1980 book Putting People First and the policies on involuntary displacement and resettlement, cultural heritage, indig- enous peoples, and more, which he managed to mainstream at the World Bank, had long become quality standards in development work worldwide. Since the early 1970s, Michael Cernea pioneered social analysis and planning in international development work with singular foresight, tenacity, and success. At the World Bank, Michael Cernea introduced and mentored a community of social development professionals throughout all of the Bank’s regions and sectors, many of whom went on to become senior professionals in the Bank and other development institutions. He also was the first to succeed in getting social development codified in the World Bank’s governing policies and operational procedures, enabling changes which improved the quality of development for millions of people the world over. His importance for devel- opment was recognized by his disciplinary colleagues when they awarded him (continued) x Introduction their highest honor, the Malinowski award (included here). The social devel- opment framework that he built at the World Bank continues to have relevance for today’s practitioners the world over. All of the participants in the Bieberstein group had been inspired by Michael Cernea at some stage of their careers.