How did the Washington consensus move within the IMF? Fragmented change from the 1980s to the aftermath of the 2008 crisis

Kaya, Ayse; Reay, Mike

doi:10.1080/09692290.2018.1511447

Cited by 37 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…Consequently, analysis of discourse provides part of the story: it is the ‘missing link’ between ideas about the appropriate course of action and the actions themselves, whether manifested, planned, or contemplated (Schmidt 2008 , 2011 ). Employing such methods has yielded important advances in our understanding of states’ decisions to alter their foreign policies (Schmidt 2017 ) or our knowledge of how ideas change over time within organizations like the European Union, the World Bank or the IMF (Carta and Morin 2016 ; Kaya and Reay 2019 ; Moretti and Pestre 2015 ). Notwithstanding these contributions, discourse analysis tends to either focus on dyadic issues (e.g., what preferences a country’s leadership expresses vis-à-vis a particular issue) or on the textual output of specific organizations.…”

Section: Discursive Legitimation In World Politics: the Unga As A Strmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legitimacy challenges to the liberal world order: Evidence from United Nations speeches, 1970–2018

Kentikelenis

Voeten

2020

Rev Int Organ

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The liberal international economic order has been facing high-profile legitimacy challenges in recent years. This article puts these challenges in historical context through a systematic analysis of rhetorical challenges towards both the order per se and specific global economic institutions. Drawing on Albert Hirschman’s classic typology of exit, voice and loyalty, we coded leaders’ speeches in the General Debate at the UN General Assembly between 1970 and 2018 as articulating intentions to abandon elements of the order, challenges or calls for reform, unequivocal support, or factual mentions of cooperation. Surprisingly, we find that explicit criticisms towards the liberal order are at an all-time low and that exit threats remain rare. An analysis of the historical evolution of criticisms to global economic institutions reveals a move away from the Cold War insider-outsider conflict towards insider contestation. For example, we find that as countries’ economies become more open, their leaders expressed more support for global economic institutions during the Cold War but less support since. Finally, we demonstrate consistency between the public policy positions leaders announce in UNGA General Debate speeches and their government positions on consequential reform debates on debt relief.

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Section: Discursive Legitimation In World Politics: the Unga As A Strmentioning

confidence: 99%

Legitimacy challenges to the liberal world order: Evidence from United Nations speeches, 1970–2018

Kentikelenis

Voeten

2020

Rev Int Organ

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“…However, at desk level and in operational terms, the IMF's mind-set, intellectual culture and organizational characteristics mean it is harder to give life to these insights. We question how 'organised' any hypocrisy is, finding varied dynamics and voices in play within a differentiated institution (Chwieroth, 2010;Clift, 2018;Kaya & Reay, 2019). For all this internal diversity, some overarching institutional characteristics curtail the IMF's egalitarian inclinations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The IMF, tackling inequality, and post-neoliberal ‘reglobalization’: the paradoxes of political legitimation within economistic parameters

Clift

Robles

2020

Globalizations

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In a quest for political legitimacy and traction since the global financial crisis and the Arab Spring, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has become much more engaged in tackling inequality through its surveillance and other operations. This article analyses the depth and strength of this egalitarian commitment to reorient Fund actions. Notwithstanding shifts in high-level IMF rhetoric, we find that rigidity in the IMF's mind-set and priorities is a major roadblock to substantive transformation. In a fine-grained analysis of Fund surveillance we investigate the conceptualization and operationalization of inequality and social protection as 'macro-critical' issues (essential for growth and stability). We argue that the IMF's political legitimation operates within restrictive economistic parameters that flow from its technocratic compulsions. This paradoxically exacerbates the Fund's legitimacy problems. We explore the Fund's efforts to address the rhetoric-practice gap, but find that the kinds of economists they hire, and the mind-set their models reflect, limit its capacity for tackling inequality.

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“…The embedding of particular knowledge and normative structures is critical to how structural power favors particular organizations and states over others, as many current investigations of structural power make clear (Fichtner et al, 2017;Henriksen & Seabrooke, 2020;Winecoff, 2015). Policy change need not only be through clear paradigm shifts but also through more everyday and diffuse forms of policy engagement (Kaya & Reay, 2019). To analyze how these systems work, we need to move beyond conceptions of structural power as simply a property of institutional design or a post-hoc determinant of bargaining outcomes, to investigate how governance tools are enacted.…”

Section: Enactmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recursive recognition in the international political economy

Broome

Seabrooke

2020

Review of International Political Economy

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How are the tools that govern the world economy legitimated? Here we discuss how governance tools-such as policy scripts, templates, and benchmarks-are developed to contain particular types of knowledge. Such tools contain blueprints of how the world economy should work. Understanding how they are produced and legitimated is important if we are to comprehend how they replicate particular bodies of knowledge, policy languages, and norms. We suggest that 'recursive recognition' is an important trend in the international political economy, where different types of organizations legitimate particular governance tools; especially ones producing common metrics. For example: a private foundation releases a study on best practices in policy area X, which is then referred to as best practice by an intergovernmental organization, an NGO, a firm, and a global professional service firm. Investigating the extent of this phenomenon requires addressing two blind spots. The first blind spot is conceptual in the reification of agency and authority based on organizational types. The second blind spot is empirical in identifying how pervasive recursive recognition has become, and how it affirms the reproduction of power asymmetries.

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How did the Washington consensus move within the IMF? Fragmented change from the 1980s to the aftermath of the 2008 crisis

Cited by 37 publications

References 59 publications

Legitimacy challenges to the liberal world order: Evidence from United Nations speeches, 1970–2018

Legitimacy challenges to the liberal world order: Evidence from United Nations speeches, 1970–2018

The IMF, tackling inequality, and post-neoliberal ‘reglobalization’: the paradoxes of political legitimation within economistic parameters

Recursive recognition in the international political economy

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