Rewriting Responsibility: World Bank Self-Legitimation and Development Discourse in Rwanda, 1980-2009

This paper examines World Bank project reports in Rwanda from 1980 to 2009, spanning the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, to explore how the World Bank sustains its legitimacy through its narration of development project outcomes. Through a critical discourse analysis of 37 paired project documents spanning the pre-, cross-, and post-genocide periods, this study examines four major categories of discursive mechanisms, including blame attribution, redefinition of success, state representation, and institutional positioning, that the Bank employs to retain its institutional credibility across project outcomes. The findings of this analysis provide empirical support for theoretical critiques by scholars such as Cammack, Mkandawire, and Andersen. Notable findings include that the Bank maintains a stable rate of explicit blame toward Rwanda while reducing its own visibility in failure narratives, redefines success criteria between appraisal and completion reports to boost satisfactory outcomes, omits human impact from over 90% of outcome evaluations, and applies asymmetric critique-to-praise ratios when characterizing Rwanda versus itself. Based on these findings and the Bank's operational structure, which includes its own evaluation group, this paper recommends independent, standardized evaluation processes to improve accountability to the populations it serves.