The present chapter focuses on market promotion in the strategic planning and project work of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank. Having laid out the broad canvas of work undertaken by each agency, the chapter asks what benefits might be expected from applying a rule of law vocabulary, with its long-standing connotations of non-instrumentality and legal autonomy, to the explicitly goal-oriented work of economic development. In doing so it draws in particular on the Bank's explications of the rationale for its rule of law work.

US FOREIGN ASSISTANCE

About a decade after the end of the first US foray into legal intervention abroad, the ‘law and development movement’ of the 1960s–70s, the current wave of US rule of law work began, in the mid-1980s, with USAID-funded ‘administration of justice’ programmes in Central America and the Caribbean. The earliest programmes were created to gain bipartisan congressional support for the Reagan administration's military policies in Latin America. They focused in the main on criminal justice and law enforcement. In some countries (notably El Salvador), they were accompanied by targeted efforts to reshape the legal infrastructure in support of a market economy, through trade liberalisation, privatisation, and the nurturing of a business sector.These two prongs of what are now called ‘rule of law assistance’ – ‘democracy promotion’ and ‘market promotion’ – have traditionally been kept apart, both within the US policy-making apparatus and ‘in the field’.