If I may draw upon a citation from a Jnl of World Systems Research article I did last year...
Precisely the institutional role Stiglitz had to continue playing--defending a key Washington Consensus institution, the World Bank--led soon enough to his South African delegitimisation. In January 1999, his World Bank Pretoria-based colleagues set up a formal meeting with 50 members of the SA NGO Coalition (Sangoco), where Stiglitz went on to reverse tack on the larger economic issues (including his Helsinki-speech consent to allowing inflation rates to rise to 40 per cent--he reduced the figure to 8), once some embarrassing questions about "moral hazard" were put to him. As recounted by Sangoco vice president Mercia Andrews and Campaign Against Neoliberalism in South Africa coordinator George Dor,
We asked him for his views on the
contradiction between his speech in Helsinki
and the World Bank contribution to the
[homegrown structural adjustment] Gear
strategy. He told us he didn't know much
about South Africa ... We put it to him that
perhaps the Bank should take action against
its staff members on the Gear team who got
the employment predictions so horribly wrong
by suggesting that Gear would generate
hundreds of thousands of jobs each year when,
in reality, hundreds of thousands are being
lost. Everything in his tortuous reply
suggested that he was not particularly
concerned whether Bank staff members produce
work of poor quality and that staff members
can get away with shoddy work that has a
profound impact on people's chances of
finding employment.
Our engagement with him highlights a
significant retreat from his Helsinki
position. There are a number of possible
reasons. His Helsinki speech may have been a
deliberate strategy to create the impression
of change. He may have been reigned in by the
World Bank after Helsinki. Perhaps he felt
restrained in Johannesburg by the need to
talk the language of his entourage. He
portrays the confidence that he has the ear
of the institution but insider talk suggests
that he is a maverick who is not to be taken
too seriously. Whatever the reason for his
retreat, his hero's halo has now vanished.
[International Viewpoint, 310, April 1999;
for an official Sangoco report on the meeting
in the same spirit, see also NGO Matters,
January 1999.]