With the launch of its Africa Results Monitoring System (ARMS), the World Bank has recently consolidated its 'results agenda', and is now rolling out a concerted effort to improve International Development Association (IDA) borrowers' ability to track the impact of lending projects on a range of poverty indicators. Although the US pushed hard for the implementation of ARMS, viewing it as a means of improving its ability to monitor and control the Bank, the initiative has paradoxically also provided the Bank with an additional source of legitimacy and autonomy. This apparent contradiction forces a clarification of the analytical framework we use to investigate international organisations (IOs) to allow us to understand the 'positive feedback cycle' that has developed between the Bank and the US regarding the standard with which to judge the IO's performance. The refined focus on the impact of Bank-supported interventions has important implications for the internal 'battlefield for knowledge' in the organisation, particularly concerning the competing visions of an 'economic' and a 'multidimensional' conceptualisation of poverty.
The 2011 Affordable Homes Programme introduced dramatic reductions in the level of government grant for new-build construction by housing associations, with an expectation that associations’ rents would rise towards market rates to compensate. Through this paper, I explore London-based associations’ use of cross-subsidy from commercial sale and rental operations to ameliorate the push towards higher rents for social housing. I characterize the spatially variegated response to the Affordable Homes Programme as ‘asymmetric marketization’. The case illustrates the value of bridging between economic geography literatures that acknowledge spatial variation in state–market constellations but offers less developed insights on modes of marketization, and political science literature on the regulatory state that offers a useful framework for disaggregating between modes of marketization but which has overlooked the issue of spatial variation. The significance of this asymmetric marketization is heightened by ongoing concerns over the sustainability of London-based housing associations’ commercial activities, and by the possible extension of commercial-to-social cross-subsidization across other national housing systems.
The notion of global governance has always been intimately linked to that of crisis. In recent crisis episodes the architecture of global governance has been held responsible for weak or ineffective regulatory mechanisms that failed to either prevent systemic crises or to at least give an "early warning" of impending disasters, while in other episodes global governance institutions have been blamed for poor crisis responses and management. Global governance institutions have also been blamed for failing to expand the scope of their jurisdictions to incorporate new systemic risks and new market players, as well as for their inability to adapt to new political, economic, social and environmental challenges. The framing article for this special issue on "Global Governance in Crisis" examines four key features of global governance in the context of the global financial crisis: (1) the dynamic role played by ideas in making global governance "hang together" during periods of crisis; (2) how crisis serves as a driver of change in global governance (and why it sometimes does not); (3) how ubiquitous the global financial crisis was as an event in world politics; and (4) the conditions that constitute an event as a crisis. Due to the complexity and institutional "stickiness" of the contemporary architecture of global governance, the article concludes that a far-reaching overhaul and structural reforms in global governance processes is both costly and improbable in the short-term.The notion of global governance has always been intimately linked to that of crisis. In the post-World War Two period, the decision to seek solutions to a range of domestic and international problems at the global level and subsequent efforts to create organisational blueprints to underpin these arrangements-most famously at international conferences such as those of Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks-was a direct response to the economic turmoil of the 1930s and the cataclysmic wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the period since then has been characterised by the proliferation of global governance institutions. At the same time, however, claims of a crisis in global governance have been repeated at an accelerating pace, especially following the breakdown of the Bretton Woods exchange rates system, the oil shocks and the rise of global finance in the early 1970s. If we look at global financial governance in particular, it seems as if crisis has been the norm rather than the exception, which is illustrated by the string of financial crises in both the developed and developing world in the 1980s and * The authors wish to express their gratitude to the reviewers of this special issue.
Regulatory governance involves the use of heterogeneous mechanisms to extract welfare gains from market-based processes. While often viewed as a depoliticization mechanism, here, we explore a distinctly political manifestation of regulatory governance. Our study focuses on the governance of affordable housing in England, specifically on local authorities' use of 'Section 106 0 (S106) powers to compel private developers to include affordable housing in new developments. We show that, following the financial crisis, the governance of affordable housing shifted from a partisan to a valence issue. As the crisis increased the issue salience of affordable housing, left-wing authorities' hitherto higher tendency to intervene was eroded in the midst of a broad-based increase in S106 deployment. In addition to extending insights into the political economy of regulatory state intervention, our findings shed valuable light on the undersupply of affordable housing in England.
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