Adjustment in Africa and Fifty Years of the Bretton Woods Institutions: Change or Consolidation?

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Abstract
Responding critically to the 1994 World Bank report (Adjustment in Africa: Reform, Results and the Road Ahead) this article examines the circumstances of adoption of structural adjustment lending (SAL) by the World Bank and the IMF. It argues that the present adjustment paradigm of the multilateral institutions has undergone successive reconceptualizations designed to co-opt a variety of sources of intellectual and political challenge manifested during the 1980s. However the emerging syntheses remain precarious in both intellectual and policy terms and have been characterised by equivocation and lack of real action. Hence they should not be seen as constituting a fundamental departure in the approach to adjustment. The article discusses some of the critiques levelled against adjustment by African and other development economists and urges fundamental rethinking of adjustment and particularly in Jive areas: conditionality, design, ownership, monitoring, and impact on democratic consolidation.

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