Delusions of Development: The World Bank and the Post-Washington Consensus in Southeast Asia

Delusions of Development looks at the World Bank’s promotion of market-led development in the underdeveloped world and its impact upon citizenship. Using case studies from Southeast Asia, the author details the way in which the Bank, frustrated by earlier efforts, has established a new approach to development that seeks to constitute market society.. However, rather than expanding the representation of the poor, the Bank’s mission is actually designed to constrain politics in the interests of implementing a new institutional market order. The mission, therefore, is subjected to political forces which continue to render the neoliberal project of establishing an idealised notion of market society an impossible mission.