Is silence still golden? The curious case of Jim Kim's World Bank leadership
That's the World Ban k Have you heard from the World Bank recently? Or, more precisely, have you read much about the Bank recently? I haven ’ t. Well, that’s not entirely true: I read about the ' Big Idea 2013: Learning Fast From Failure ' by President Jim Kim. But g iven the amount of debate during the nomination process ( Selection versus Election: A Wasted Opportunity at the World Bank? ), Kim’s first months in o ff ice ha ve really turned out well for the Bank – from an organizational communications standpoint. Any question about the legitimacy of the nomination process, accountability of the Bank or other criticisms all but died down when the Korean Chinese -American medical doctor/anthropologist took over the leadership of the Bank in July 2012. So what can ‘we’ (development researchers, anthropologists, political scientists, blogger) learn from this ‘golden silence ’ that has since engulfed the Bank and took it out of the critical headlines ? No matter how