The World Bank in a post-pandemic age: scaling up an ever-expanding agenda

This paper explores how the radical expansion of the World Bank’s loan portfolio since the COVID-19 pandemic impacted its policy vision. Building on a thematic analysis of International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and International Development Association (IDA) commitments in 2020–2024 and drawing insights from the Bank’s research output and ongoing bureaucratic restructuring, it finds that this resurgence in lending has not brought about a substantive change in the organisation’s policy priorities. Instead, the Bank scaled up its operations primarily by reinforcing its conventional normative concerns and redeploying some of its extant offer, while making only modest forays into relatively new areas consistent with its remit. I argue that this state of affairs can largely be explained by the peculiar way the Bank’s policy universe evolves – by layering new concerns over continuously reworked extant norms and instruments, leading to an ever-expanding, ever-revised agenda with considerable resilience. Crises in the past half-decade have not aggravated the otherwise formidable challenges the Bank encountered in a changing development landscape, enabling the organisation to rely on this default mode of adaptation without having to substantially recalibrate its policy outlook.