The" urban adjustment": the World Bank's and the Inter-american Development Bank's policies for cities

Abstract

The process of structural adjustment following the Third-World debt crisis in the early 1980s - and still persisting as a permanent adjustment - seems to have produced a corresponding" urban adjustment". In both the structural and urban adjustments, the roles of the World Bank and, in Latin America, of the IDB, in partnership with local elites and technocracies, were decisive. Despite of the strong interference of the two financial institutions with public policies in the developing world, their strategies for action represent a new theme that has not been fully surveyed by academic research. The purpose of this paper is to study the type of model for a city defended by these institutions, as well as the meaning of this model. In my Master's dissertation at FAUUSP, I found that World Bank and IDB loans - which come to public managers as a" salvation" in times of crises - are not" neutral" and carry with them an agenda: they are intended to model given standards for the use of public resources and for the organization of governments. Both institutions have disseminated public policies that follow corporate profitability criteria and a public management model based on outsourcing, which is subject to private technical staffs from project management companies, private foundations, NGOs, and numerous consultants. Their purpose is to change some local governments in developing countries - particularly those that include territories that support transnational business - into administrative structures that are increasingly trained to respond to big private interests and are free from any commitment to real democracy.