Development Project Suffering from the White Savior Syndrome: Representations and Agency in the World Bank’s Climate Change Action Report

Abstract

In this study a video report, ”Climate Change Action Plan Delivers $83 Billion and Results” (2020), produced by the World Bank is analysed to convey if it reproduces colonial power relations. Colonial hierarchies present the Global North as a foundation and source of development and the Global South as the underdeveloped periphery. This work studies the dichotomy and the social injustices within the framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA). The framework is a transdisciplinary approach to analyse discourse and the means of reproducing power relations with discourse, and therefore, social critique is employed alongside with linguistic analysis. The methods are applied on both verbal and visual data, making this a multimodal study. The research questions of the study are: 1. In the data, what types of groups are indexed with personal pronouns ‘we’ and ‘they’? Who are we and who are they? 2. How are these groups and their agency represented in the data linguistically and visually? 3. How do these representations reflect the power relations between the Global North and the Global South? The first question was answered with a linguistic analysis, whereas the answers to second and the third question consisted of both verbal and visual analysis. The data suggests that ‘we’ refers to the World Bank itself, and that the institution represents itself as an organisation with resources and knowledge. The analysis shows that the World bank assigns itself agency, especially in the form of helping, while simultaneously representing ‘they’, the Global South, in the position of needing the help with no agency or resources. These positions were interpreted to replicate and reinforce colonial power structures and therefore contribute to ongoing social injustice.