The World Bank's risk management approach to poverty as a form of neoliberal governmentality? The case of the "social risk mitigation project" in Turkey

In the 2000/2001 World Development Report, the World Bank offered a new approach named ? social risk management? for poverty reduction. The World Bank documents present the aim of social risk management as to provide instruments to the poor and the vulnerable to decrease the impact of being exposed to risk. The empirical focus of this project is the Social Risk Mitigation Project (SRMP) in Turkey, which is a World Bank project that depends on the social risk management framework. Through in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, this study considers the World Bank? s implementation of the ? Social Risk Mitigation Project? by locating it at the intersection of the broad bodies of literature on development, globalization, risk, neoliberalism, and neoliberal governmentality. Here, by doing an ethnographic study, I explain what kind of activities the World Bank executes under a social risk management project, how different actors (World Bank consultants, state institutions and officials, NGOs, scholars, etc.) get involved in the implementation, what kind of power relations take place between these different actors, in which directions institutions are changed, what kind of subjectivities are formed, how local factors and processes intervene, and what kind of (especially unintended) consequences emerge as a result of project implementation. Although development interventions can fail in their own terms, they still have regular effects which may be very different from what was initially intended. Therefore, when I refer to the impacts, I consider both the intended and unintended impacts of the project. I explain some major unintended consequences that have emerged after/due to the execution of this project in Turkey. I contemplate on the consequences of the establishment of a Project Coordination Unit (PCU) by the World Bank to implement the project and demonstrate that creation of such a private body under a public institution leads to significant power struggles. I also explain how the Justice and Development Party (AKP), as a party that redefined social assistance as charity by incorporating Islamic values with neoliberalism, benefited from the SRMP for increasing its public support and how the AKP? s use of this project for its political aims further brought about the creation and spreading of discourses about the poor, the Kurdish population, and the emergence of a culture of poverty in the country. Finally, relying on my interviews with the scholars who did research within the context of the Social Risk Mitigation Project, I elaborate on the question of whether or to what extent this experience of producing knowledge for the World Bank plays a part in the reconstruction of scholars, or in this case Turkish scholars, as neoliberal subjects. I argue that although the researchers are in a position to act as neoliberal subjects in their knowledge production activities, it won? t be accurate to say that they have become neoliberal subjects as a result of this experience. I aim to…