In 1926, John Maynard Keynes said that “everything is politics, nothing is policies”. Has the World Bank discovered this truth for itself? What does the 2017 World Development Report say about governance, politics and power? Its very title – Governance and the Law – tries its best to put us off. It sounds more like a learned journal written by be-wigged barristers than one in a series of the most important development publication to emerge every year.