Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are often overtaken by events.

The spring meetings in Washington this year were overshadowed by the sudden drop in technology share prices.

The annual meetings, officially opened on Tuesday in Prague, have been dominated by industrialised countries' attempts to manipulate oil and currency markets in the name of global economic stability, not to mention the riots which swept the city yesterday.

But behind the immediate concerns lie the continuing struggle to define what the IMF and the bank should be doing - and how each can avoid treading on the other's toes.

Horst Kohler's first speech to the conference as managing director added little to his earlier pronouncements. He has insisted that the fund should concentrate on its core competency of promoting macroeconomic and financial stability. IMF officials privately say this marks a halt to the headlong expansion into the minutiae of poverty reduction led by his predecessor, Michel Camdessus.

Mr Kohler also envisages a simplification of the long lists of conditions the fund places on its lending.

But this view may be diluted by the second role he wants the fund to take on - "to make globalisation work for the good of all". In practice, this means the fund will stay engaged in poor country development, for which critics say it is unqualified.

Practical efforts to concentrate the fund's role have also been only partially successful. For example, despite US pressure, the fund retains its extended fund facility - a lending capacity widely associated with the sort of long-term lending to middle-income countries Mr Kohler wants to eliminate.

Despite the rhetoric from the fund about wanting to clarify its development role, critics worry it retains the capacity to slide back into the sort of highly complex, politically charged interference in poor countries it has vowed to eschew.

Over at the World Bank, the mood is one of expansion rather than contraction. James Wolfensohn, its president, has pushed forward his long-term project of changing the bank into an overarching development agency rather than a builder of dams of dubious worth.

This week, the bank's shareholder countries issued a gentle reminder that the bank could not do everything, and that it needed to work out a clearer plan of which "global public goods" - advances in social and technological infrastructure which benefit all developing countries - it was best at.

This should not be too difficult to manage. More challenging to the bank could be the conflicting views of its shareholders about which countries it should be targeting its efforts at. The US administration, under pressure from a Congress that would like the bank slimmed down, has started to push a strong argument that the bank should withdraw from middle-income countries which already have access to private capital markets.

This got a rough ride in the bank's policy-setting development committee.

Yesterday Trevor Manuel, the South African finance minister, said those who thought private markets could substitute for bank and fund and other development finance were "fundamentally naive and simply reflect their own distance from our complex reality".

With developing and emerging market countries increasingly trying to flex their muscles within the bank and fund - and pressing for a greater representation - this dispute among shareholders may mean more uncertainty to come. www.ft.com.prague