Coloniality of Epistemic Power in International Practices: NGO Inclusion in World Bank Policymaking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Are international organisations’ inclusive practices better than top-down ones? This article analyses an attempt to dismantle formal hierarchies to integrate civil society actors in development policymaking at the World Bank. It argues that inclusive practices have not fully challenged the coloniality of epistemic power in North/South relationships because they did not democratise the capacity to influence meaning negotiation. Not only did the Bank not fully democratize its formal policymaking processes, but when it includes NGOs, the coloniality of power mediates their capacity to influence meaning-making. Therefore, despite “better” (liberal) practices of inclusion, interactions between the organisation's employees and NGOS workers are still mediated through remnants of colonial and racial devaluation. By adopting an international practice-based approach, this article analyses colonial epistemic violence through informal rules and practices. The case studied is the inclusion of NGOs at the World Bank under the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (1999–2014), with data from 31 publicly available interviews from the Bank’s Oral History Project, 41 first-hand interviews (realised between 2017 and 2019), and archival material (speeches, memoirs, memos, and internal reports).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.050 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.085 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.020 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".