By the mid 1990s, scholars, practitioners, and policy makers alike had begun to recognize the critical importance of good governance for growth and poverty reduction. Yet corruption, its mirror image, remained “taboo” at the World Bank up until the historic “cancer of corruption” speech in 1996 of then-Bank President James Wolfensohn that formally brought governance and anticorruption into the forefront of the Bank's agenda (see Figure 1). In 1997, the World Development Report: The State in a Changing World broke new ground within the Bank, taking stock of the erstwhile work on governance and addressing what the institution could do to enhance its ability to help client countries improve governance and reduce corruption.The presentation was made at the APSA 2005 meeting, “Panel on Politics and Development Programs: APSA and World Bank Collaboration.” Panel participants included: Margaret Levi (APSA President 2004–2005), Ashutosh Varshney, Anna Grzymala-Busse (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor), Daniel N. Posner (University of California Los Angeles), and Timothy Frye (Ohio State University) from APSA; and Sanjay Pradhan, Edgardo Campos, Richard Messick, and Maks Kobonbaev from the World Bank Public Sector Governance Unit.