water in the city of Bogotá<sup>10</sup> . Since Colombian officials knew it would be easier to receive funds for electricity than for potable water, a preliminary report prepared by the office in charge of contacts with the Bank suggested applying only for a loan for the electricity project. The total requested, however, would actually cover the funds needed for both the electricity project and the potable water one<sup>11</sup> .

# _Program vs. Project: The Bank’s Changing Attitude_

Even though the propensity of the Bank to disburse loans to individual projects was expressed in its Articles of Agreement, during the years of transition from reconstruction to development there was a significant internal debate on the scope and extent of this mandate: more precisely, about the “special circumstances” defined by the Articles that would allow the institution to make exceptions.

As agreed by all of the authors who wrote about the first years of the Bank – the period of European reconstruction before the Marshall Plan, which also lingered after the introduction of the Marshall Plan (for example, Italy’s loan in 1950) – the first loans from the Bank went towards large programs of reconstruction. The first and largest loan ever disbursed by the Bank was given to France in 1947 in the amount of $250 million<sup>12</sup> . Loans given to other European countries all had the same characteristics: they went towards “governments’ reconstruction programs” and “deviated from what was expected to be the standard pattern for loans” (Kraske 1996, p. 55). In the opinion of Bank’s vice president Robert Garner, however, the loans for European reconstruction were supposed to be an exception: “the feeling at the time was that [they were] not to form a precedent for the normal operations”<sup>13</sup> .

In other words, the Bank’s top management did not think that it was part of the Bank’s role to provide overall program loans to developing countries. Exceptions in favour of program loans were made reluctantly, for example in the case of the reconstruction of post-War Europe.

The Bank’s documents, however, did not completely abandon the rhetoric of “planning” and “programs”. During those years, programs of development which would frame the effort of modernization of a country were not at all uncommon, and many missions and institutions produced programs of this kind. Bank’s publications remarked that “the Bank would prefer to [...] base its financing on a national development program, provided that it is properly worked out in terms of the projects by which the objectives of the program are to be attained” (IBRD 1950b, p. 8).

> 10 “Ensanches del acueducto de Bogotá”, Marzo 26, 1953, Lauchlin Bernard Currie Papers, Rare Books, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (henceforth LBCP). See also Lauchlin B. Currie, “Resumen del Plan para Bogotá”, Mayo 28, 1953, LBCP.

> 11 “As [the electric] company is in a better position to contract foreign loans than is the Waterworks, it is recommended that the application for a foreign loan be limited to the electric company”, “Waterworks”, January

> 1, 1953, p. 4, LBCP. See also “Expansion of Electric Power for Bogotá,” January 1, 1953, LBCP.

> 12 Equivalent to $2.4 billion in 1994 (Kraske 1996, p. 55).

> 13 Oral History Interview, Robert L. Garner, July 19, 1961, p. 6, 01 Columbia University project, WB IBRD/IDA 44 Oral histories.

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