"[We need to] end the analytic near-monopoly of the World Bank (and the other multilaterals) on the details of pension reform, privatization of water systems, the ideal bank deposit insurance system, and so many of the other nitty-gritty issues of economic and social reform. The World Bank needs to foster and directly finance more use by country borrowers of its own competitors-including local research institutions and world class high-cost private consultancies-not only in implementing but in designing policies and programs. Then the Bank staff can and should take much more of a hands-off approach to policy design."

- Nancy Birdsall, (former Director, World Bank Policy Research Department),'The World Bank of the Future: Victim, Villain, Global Credit Union?' remarks at American University, April 2000

"This whole desire to build a research empire here, to duplicate a Harvard or a Yale, to try to do better than they do, to publish, has been very counterproductive. There is a lot more of an argument to have indigenous research because it would be a lot more suited to the cultural and other peculiarities of each nation."

- Mahbub Ul Haq, World Bank Oral History Project, quoted in 'The World Bank and the State, a Recipe for Change?', Bretton Woods Project, 1998 -

"The Bank knows that the number of absolute poor is a politically sensitive number. It is possible that people who calculate such numbers - in the Bank or elsewhere - are inclined to make methodological choices that produce a relatively favourable result ... It raises the question of whether the world is served by having as the principle provider of development statistics an organisation exposed to arm-twisting by its member states and needing to defend itself against constant criticism. We would not want Philip Morris research labs to be the only source of data on the effects of smoking even if the research met professional standards."

- Robert Wade, Professor of Political Economy, London School of Economics, letter to Prospect, May 2002

"World Bank intellectuals have their quota of power as long as their discourse does not interfere with the central interests of its main member, the US, and of financial capital and multinational companies"

- Humberto Campondonico, CEDLA, Reality of Aid, 2001 -

"The idea of transforming the World Bank into a Knowledge Bank should be opposed."

- Yves Tavernier, Member of Parliament, France, Report for Commission des Finances, December 2000 -

"The World Bank has assumed major responsibility for overseeing and managing the integration of the world economy and especially the incorporation of poor countries into it on terms they do not set. Control over relevant information, or even the claim that the World Bank is the major repository for and distributor of knowledge about development, entrenches and enhances the World Bank in that global role. As it asserts its role as a development advisory service and knowledge manager, the World Bank becomes even more powerful and dominating, in both affluent and poor countries. ... If there is a useful role for knowledge managers located within aid agencies, it must be as facilitators, not gatekeepers."

- Joel Samoff and Nelly P. Stromquist, 'Managing Knowledge and Storing Wisdom ? New Forms of Foreign Aid, Development and Change', September 2001 -

"The Bank's knowledge agenda often tends to be centralized and absolutist and draws on economistic and technocratic models. These trends contribute to the emergence of a narrow knowledge agenda that both neglects sociocultural issues and those concerning a wider political economy. Thus, the plural nature of knowledge is denied and the Bank's own problematic role in knowledge generation is not reflected upon."

- Lyla Mehta, 'The World Bank and Its Emerging Knowledge Empire', Human Organisation, Vol 60, No 2, Summer 2001 -

"Often the inquiry into the present state of knowledge is not broad, or profound, enough to raise fundamental issues."

- Prof. Yash Tandon, Director, Southern and Eastern African Trade, Information and Negotiations Initiative in Knowledge and the Post-Washington Consensus -

"Through its funding the World Bank casts a grey cloud of conformity over research produced by many different organisations."

- Mohamed Suleiman, Institute for African Alternatives, comment at meeting with World Bank WDR team, June 1997 -

"In a policy world obsessed with the belief that only "global expertise" is valuable, the Bank has no real rival. The regional development banks and UN agencies fall over themselves to cooperate with the Bank, anxious to get a piece of the action from the large loans that may follow. Political scientist Robert Wade, a veteran of Bank research, believes that the Bank's legitimacy in the global marketplace of ideas and commerce depends upon the authority of its research and policies. 'Like the Vatican, and for similar reasons, it cannot afford to admit fallibility.' It cannot admit its research weaknesses because financial markets demand the illusion of certainty, an illusion that severely constrains a type of knowledge production that could be responsible, reflexive, and situated. That is, the World Bank staff constructs their values and world views in terms of a 'self-reinforcing congruence' with 'the values of the owners and managers of financial capital' the Bank's ultimate provider."

- Michael Goldman, 'The Power of World Bank Knowledge', article for Bretton Woods Project

"There is no 'Knowledge Bank' only an 'Opinion Bank' and, worse still, an opinion bank with monopoly power. This Monopoly Opinion Bank (I cannot help myself - henceforth, The MOB) may not be the only source of knowledge in education in developing countries, but they are the predominant producer and arbiter of what counts as knowledge. If there were applicable anti-trust legislation, their research enterprise would be broken up. The MOB's defence is that their knowledge "management" (George Orwell lives) systems are trying to incorporate all knowledge from all their partners. The MOB explicitly heralds the whole world as its partners - countries, other aid agencies, NGOs, other civil society organisations, indigenous people, the poor of the world, etc. They claim to be listening to and working with all these partners and distilling best practice from all their experiences (Samoff and Stromquist 2001). This is neither possible nor sensible nor true. Knowledge is contested within and among all these groups, and The MOB distils the knowledge it wants to promulgate."

- Steven J. Klees, 'Knowledge, Power, And Politics: The World Bank And Education', in NORRAG News, July 2001 -

Engaging the Bank in constructive critique is "like a small firm confronting a multinational enterprise, or a guerrilla army engaging a nuclear power."

- Alice Amsden, 'Why Isn't the Whole World Experimenting with the East Asian Model to Develop? Review of The East Asian Miracle,' 1994, in 'World Development' 22, (p.4)

"The western systems of knowledge have generally been viewed as universal. However, the dominant system is merely the globalised version of a very local and parochial tradition."

- Vandana Shiva, 'Monocultures of the Mind', 1993, Zed Books, London and Third World Network, Penang (p.9)

"[World Bank] researchers are not free to follow intellectual inspiration ... and the atmosphere is much more deferential than one would find in universities. There is an understandable concern with what superiors will think of their conclusions."

- Nicholas Stern and Francisco Ferreira, "The World Bank as 'Intellectual Actor'," 1997, in 'The World Bank: Its First Half Century' Washington, D.C., Brookings Institution.

"Like the Vatican, and for similar reasons, [the World Bank] cannot afford to admit fallibility."

- Robert Wade, 'Japan, the World Bank, and the Art of Paradigm Maintenance: The East Asian Miracle in Political Perspective,' 1996, in 'New Left Review', May-June, (p.5).

"The knowledge management system is fragmented and insufficiently integrated with operational processes. It is also supply rather than demand driven, and insufficiently orientated towards the needs of clients."

"There is no shared understanding of what the knowledge bank is, nor how its various elements fit together".

"There is a fairly widespread (but as yet unmeasured) perception that the Bank's 'internal market' is a significant disincentive to knowledge sharing, as it places staff working on similar issues in competition with each other".

- Strategic Compact Assessment, World Bank, March 2001

"Due to its financial clout alone, the Bank as a globally leading (if controversial) think tank and a globally committed donor has a special position in international development policy. Because it has in many cases the power of definition and interpretation, its publications must be taken seriously"

- Dr Cord Jakobeit, Visiting Professor of Political Science at the University of Hamburg, Development and Cooperation, November/December 1999, p. 5

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The World Bank as a Knowledge Bank: Selected Critical Comments