International Organizations in Development and Global Inequality: The example of the World Bank’s pension policy

Initial models of development debates on how to achieve economic growth have been added to by a focus on social issues such as education and political participation. These debates and discourses about development are shaped by international organizations (IGOs) as they produce reference/action frameworks for actors in development policy. The paper suggests conceptualizing IGOs as world organizations considering four dimensions: (1) world semantics; (2) the inner-organizational dynamics within IGOs; (3) external relations of IGOs to their organizational environment; (4) the kind of world order concerning development and global inequality established by IGOs. To illustrate the model the paper explains World Banks pension policy.