Knowledge Use in Environmental Policymaking Process: A case study of the World Bank

The current global ecological crises have caused many debates and elicited several responses from scientists, governments, individuals, and non-governmental groups (Chakrabarty, 2009). The uncertain nature of the environmental challenges prompts research on knowledge production and its different types of utilisation in environmental policymaking. Despite the widespread application of knowledge utilisation arguments to environmental policymaking at different levels and sectors (Jordan and Russel, 2014), there has only been limited analysis of international organizations. The World Bank has highlighted its environmental identity since the 1980s and it is potentially one of the most transformative areas of the Bank but still, environmental knowledge production by the Bank's epistemic community and in-depth research into knowledge utilisation within the institutional framework is limited. The project level expertise is relatively well researched in the existing literature (Richardson and Cashmore, 2011; Axelsson et al., 2012) but how the knowledge shapes broader strategic/policy direction and how the Bank institutionalises and internalise environmental knowledge into its policies and operations are less well understood. This is important for understanding the extent to which such environmental knowledge use is influencing strategic policy outcomes. Understanding how and why such knowledge is utilised in strategic level policy-making and how the institutional settings affect actors' behavior in policymaking is crucial because it sets the framework for decision-making, sets the broader strategic direction of the World Bank in terms of its proclaimed sustainability objectives and can thus have a huge impact on how the World Bank operates. In this presentation, I will discuss how the World Bank generates and use research data/ knowledge in its environmental policies and how the Bank’s institutional dynamics affect those utilisation processes by analysing World Bank archive documents and interview data which were conducted with World Bank experts.