The World Bank’s human-rights turn framed rights as elements of economic risk governance

Evidence

By 1990, the previously human rights-averse World Bank began to argue that, through its lending programme, it had always been promoting human rights. Its post-Washington-consensus focus consolidated this shift; as the bank moved from ‘market fundamentalism to governance fundamentalism’, it focused on public administration, the rule of law, accountability and transparency, and identified a lack of human rights as evidence of bad governance. Rather than breaking with neoliberalism, the World Bank increasingly concentrated on legal and governance structures that ‘put international property rights centre-stage and included “human” rights as an integral component of [an] international risk-governance mechanism’ that increasingly incorporated ’ “civil society” actors’ into economic governance. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 299

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s stated interest: the interface between human-rights discourse and neoliberal economic policy. Challenges the assumption that human rights and market governance are opposed. — connects to: Rights function as instruments of governance, not just limits on power; WTO trade law was framed as the enforcement arm of human rights. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 57; Rights, rule of law and state capacity served incorporation into global capitalism — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 79
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how ‘governance fundamentalism’ absorbed human-rights language into a risk-management frame, and what that means for critiques of austerity.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: mechanics of how World Bank lending became a vehicle for human-rights promotion claims — what evidence did it cite?

Broader Connections

• Rights function as instruments of governance, not just limits on power #expands (0.85)