Communities of Practice in World Politics: Collective Learning, Contestation and Coloniality at the World Bank. A morning talk about the art and craft of research by Maïka Sondarjee.

Abstract: By defining international communities of practice (CoPs) as domains of knowledge, this book investigates the adoption of new practices via collective learning, i.e., the redefinition of what is acceptable and feasible. Explaining how inclusive practices at the World Bank became institutionalized, it shows that while changes in presidents can influence practices of international organizations, shifts in collective thinking are even more important to understand world ordering. Since the 1980s, despite stability in their overall political rationality, World Bank employees arranged in CoPs collectively learned that program ownership and consultation in policymaking were more effective than top-down practices. Collective learning happens at the boundaries between CoPs when practitioners interact with others inside or outside the formal walls of an organization, through processes of boundary encounters, boundary brokering and the use of epistemic boundary objects. However, while learning that more democratic practices rendered their projects and policies more effective, Bank employees did not fully challenge colonial epistemic hierarchies in North-South relations. This CoP framework draws from, combines, and extends various strands of cutting-edge IR scholarship (i.e., practice-oriented and constructivist IR), management theory (communities of practice), organizational studies (narratives and day-to-day procedures), as well as development and critical studies (feminist and decoloniality approaches). 
 

Maïka Sondarjee is an associate professor at the School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa. Her latest book is entitled Communities of Practice in World Politics. Collective Learning, Contestation and Coloniality at the World Bank (Routledge, 2024). She also published Tu viens d’où? Réflexions sur le métissage et les frontières” (2024) and Perdre le Sud. Décoloniser la solidarité internationale (2020). She edited to collective books: Perspectives féministes des relations internationales and White Saviorism in International Development (with Themrise Khan and Dickson Kanakulya). She regularly contributes to the journal Le Devoir, LCN and Radio-Canada, and she hosts a podcast called On se livre with Léa Clermont-Dion. She was awarded the Young Researcher Awared by the Office of the Vice-Provost Research and Innovation (UO), the Talent Award from the Social Sciences Research Council (SSHRC) in 2021, and the Alice Wilson Award from the Royal Society of Canada in 2020.