IOs as Diffusers of Knowledge: The Case of the WB a.k.a. “the knowledge bank”

Whose ideas do international organizations (IOs) disseminate? Which channels do they use for knowledge diffusion for which target audiences? Functionalist literature considers information provision as one of the core tasks of IOs that mitigates coordination issues and facilitates international cooperation. By generating and diffusing knowledge products, IOs also legitimize their role as expert policy advisors to member states. Given that possible knowledge sources are in abundance and IOs enjoy extensive capabilities to extract and project them, how exactly do they choose an idea over others? This question and the possibility of bias in IOs’ knowledge diffusion remain understudied. We explore sources and channels of IOs’ knowledge products by using data from the World Bank’s Open Knowledge Repository. The Bank re-imagined itself as “the knowledge bank” in the 1990s and currently offers access to 35000 publications. The WB claims these knowledge products to be not only scientifically cutting-edge but also highly integrated with the country strategy documents, hence providing a basis for policy recommendations. We have built a data set of participants in the Annual WB Conference on Development Economics between 2000-2022 and tested if prior H-index and institutional affinity of scholars have any impact on conference participation and the concomitant publication of their conference papers. Our preliminary analysis shows that the knowledge selected and diffused by the WB tends to be produced in Western institutions by established scholars. According to these results, the WB is a conservative diffuser, which only spreads ideas of influential scholars and not necessarily innovative and risky ones.