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This thesis presents an investigation into the changing institutional form and policy content of the World Bank over the last two decades. It does this by relating the former to the contradictory trajectory of capitalist development at a global level. It is suggested that the noted transitions in the World Bank at the close of the millennium represent a series of reactive mediations to the unanticipated results of neoliberal-style reform. The latter are manifest in uneven development on a global scale, recurrent crises across the global South, and the expansion of local and global struggles that target the limits of development in its capitalist fonn. To build this argument the thesis examines the contradictory essence of capitalist development; the position of the World Bank as an international organisation within the context of global capitalist social relations; and the nature of Bank policy prescription in the 1980s and 1990s. Additionally, the thesis concretises this analysis through a case study of the Chilean experience of neoliberal-style reforms that closely mirror the World Bank's prescription of "best practice".