Attempting Illiberalism: The World Bank and the Embedding of Neo-liberal Governance in the Philippines

Introduction Over the last fifteen years or so neo-liberalism has undergone important changes, from a paradigm largely concerned with economic policy to one that now stipulates a more complex form of governance (see Hout and Robison, this volume, p. 2 ff.; cf. Jayasuriya 2005a).Nowhere has this been more evident than in the area of development. Problems associated with the application of the Washington Consensus (Williamson 1990) have been critical in giving rise to a new approach to the constitution of market society, which specifies the requisite institutional arrangements that liberal markets are now thought to require. Assuming that liberal markets and their complementary institutional matrices present a pathway to poverty reduction, this new neo-liberal development governance1 builds in particular delivery devices and complementary political technologies that are tasked with achieving and maintaining reform.