THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY 2021, VOL. 42, NO. 2, 348–365 Change and stability at the World Bank: inclusive practices and neoliberal technocratic rationality Maïka Sondarjee School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa, Canada ABSTRACT Arguing that international development policymaking is technocratic is not new. However, examining technocracy as a political rationality sheds new light on intentionality, on the evolution of policymaking practices, and on change and stability as part of a single process. In short, the meaningful adoption of new inclusive practices (change) has stabilised World Bank employees’ mode of thought and action (stability). My overall argument is that World Bank employees translate potentially radical new knowledge, tools and concepts through a neoliberal tech- nocratic rationality, thereby translating radical practices into techno- cratic ones. The concept of translation can further our understanding of how inclusion has reinforced rather than challenged the status quo. I thus consider both stability and change at the World Bank from 1980 to 2010, without downgrading either. This article also explores the spread of this political rationality to borrowing governments and pop- ulations through self-censorship and mirroring mechanisms, rendering old fashioned conditionalities obsolete. This research is based on exten- sive interview material and archival analysis. At the end of his career, Ismail Serageldin, former economist and vice president at the World Bank from 1972 to 2000, argued in an interview that the organisation ‘is not just more of the same – more of the past – we are a new paradigm. We’re behaving in a new way’. 1 While many of the officials and employees interviewed for this research also claim that despite stability in macroeconomic policies, the institution has undergone much change since the 1980s, many external observers point to greater stability than change in the Bank’s ideology and practices. 2 While the term ‘paradigm shift’ is too dramatic, it cannot be denied that the Bank’s policymaking practices have changed in some ways since the now infamous Washington Consensus. The inclusion of other stakeholders has had an impact on the rela- tionship between the World Bank and aid-receiving governments and populations, if not on macroeconomic policy priorities. A clear example of the impact of this novel inclusion is the significant procedural differ- ence between the policy elaboration process for the Policy Framework Papers (PFPs) of the 1980s and that for the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) of the 2000s, which were written with more government and popular participation. Despite changes in the participants included at the table, there was a high level of similarity in the policy content ARTICLE HISTORY Received 20 November 2019 Accepted 9 October 2020 KEYWORDS World Bank political rationality neoliberalism technocracy inclusive development © 2020 Global South Ltd CONTACT Maïka Sondarjee maika.sondarjee@uottawa.ca https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2020.1838893