By the mid 1990s, scholars, practitioners, and policy makers alike
had begun to recognize the critical importance of good governance
for growth and poverty reduction. Yet corruption, its mirror image,
remained “taboo” at the World Bank up until the historic “cancer of
corruption” speech in 1996 of then-Bank President James Wolfensohn
that formally brought governance and anticorruption into the
forefront of the Bank's agenda (see Figure 1). In 1997, the World
Development Report: The State in a Changing World broke new ground
within the Bank, taking stock of the erstwhile work on governance
and addressing what the institution could do to enhance its ability
to help client countries improve governance and reduce
corruption.The presentation was
made at the APSA 2005 meeting, “Panel on Politics and
Development Programs: APSA and World Bank Collaboration.” Panel
participants included: Margaret Levi (APSA President 2004–2005),
Ashutosh Varshney, Anna Grzymala-Busse (University of Michigan
at Ann Arbor), Daniel N. Posner (University of California Los
Angeles), and Timothy Frye (Ohio State University) from APSA;
and Sanjay Pradhan, Edgardo Campos, Richard Messick, and Maks
Kobonbaev from the World Bank Public Sector Governance
Unit.