Deliberative Capacity Building or Hegemonic Absorption? The Democratic Credentials of World Bank-Funded Deliberations

In the book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Jodi Dean critiques deliberative democracy for failing to provide a viable alternative politics. Deliberative democrats, she argues, “acquiesce to a political arrangement inadequate to the task of responding to the gross inequality, immiseration and violence this capitalism generates.” One empirical manifestation of this critique is the incorporation of the deliberative democratic ethos to the language of so-called institutions of neoliberalism, particularly the World Bank. Critics argue that the Bank’s re-orientation towards the discourse of participation is “largely a victory of form over substance.” On the part of the lender, the discourse of community empowerment and country ownership are “instrumentalised” to legitimise the World Bank’s controversial development agenda. On the part of the state, taking out loans for participatory programs can serve as “smokescreens for elite control” where the poor are called to take part in collective decision-making while the private sector continue to reap huge profits from the delivery of services poor communities have authorised. How can deliberative democrats make sense of these criticisms? Have deliberative democratic procedures been absorbed by the hegemony of market ideology? Can deliberative experiments in the global south be scaled up through World Bank-funded loans without compromising the virtues of democratic deliberation? On balance, how can loan-funded programs enhance the quality of national democracies? This paper unpacks these questions by characterising the precise ways in which World Bank-funded programs shape the character of a borrowing country’s deliberative system. I propose a normative framework to assess whether these contribute to deliberative capacity building or render deliberative processes vulnerable to hegemonic absorption. It examines the case of the Philippines—one of the World Bank’s showpieces for its National Community Driven Development Projects.