By 1990, the previously human rights-averse World Bank began to argue that, through its lending programme, it had always been promoting human rights. Its post-Washington-consensus focus consolidated this shift; as the bank moved from 'market fundamentalism to governance fundamentalism', it focused on public administration, the rule of law, accountability and transparency, and identified a lack of human rights as evidence of bad governance. Rather than breaking with neoliberalism, the World Bank increasingly concentrated on legal and governance structures that 'put international property rights centre-stage and included "human" rights as an integral component of [an] international risk-governance mechanism' that increasingly incorporated ' "civil society" actors' into economic governance.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 299