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2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

3. Theorizing Post-Washington Consensus LIDC Reform

Author : Mark Hibben

Published in: Poor States, Power and the Politics of IMF Reform

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

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Abstract

This chapter first formally reviews IMF literature and summarizes the variables that it has identified as influencing contemporary IMF policy choices. Chapter 3 then develops how three theoretical frameworks explain IMF LIDC change. Rationalist inspired approaches draw from PA modeling and focus primarily on how the dynamics that exist between powerful states and the IMF management and staff produce conditions within the institution that facilitate or undermine policy reform. Constructivist approaches focus on how changing economic ideas, notions of legitimacy, and shifting development norms influence policy choices in the IMF. Historical structural approaches drawing from Gramscian theory conceptualize IMF LIDC reform as being interrelated with global structural changes and crisis points in the contemporary globalizing social order.

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1. I draw on this typology of IMF literature from Erica Gould (2006: 5–13).

2. See also Steinwand and Stone (2008).

3. Nielson and Tierney (2003: 243–4), for example, argue that realist frameworks simply ignore IOs or argue that they are best thought of as direct extensions of powerful state preferences in the international system. PA proponents are also critical of neoliberal institutional understandings of state agency. Though they see IOs as important actors in lowering transaction costs and producing internal cohesion between states, neoliberal institutionalists historically have conceptualized IOs as reactive and unable to produce policy independent and outside the will of member states.

4. Contracts in this context are defined as ‘self-enforcing agreements that define the terms of the relationship between the two parties’. See Hawkins et al. (2006: 7).

5. This model is drawn from Nielson and Tierney’s conception of the PA relationship between the USA and World Bank. The authors also note that divided power between legislative and executive branches also occurs in France during periods of cohabitation. See Nielson and Tierney (2003: 255).

6. As outlined by Jeffrey Checkel, there is an epistemological division between ‘conventional’ and ‘interpretive’ constructivists. Conventional IR constructivists, including Alexander Wendt, John Ruggie, Peter Katzenstein, and Martha Finnemore, are epistemological positivists. While the world is socially constructed, observers can systematically study this subjective reality and uncover causal patterns. Interpretive constructivists, including Ted Hopf and Thomas Bankoff, reject positivist assumptions about how best to study a socially constructed world. Rather than focusing on how norms and ideas cause changes in the international system, interpretive constructivists instead study how particular identities and norms are formed in the first instance. Checkel describes this as answering ‘how possible’ questions. See Checkel (2007: 58).

7. Author interview with Fund staff member from the African department, Washington, DC, September 2011.

8. Author interview with Fund staff member from APD, Washington, DC, September 2011.

9. Gramsci, leader of the Italian Communist Party from 1921 to 1927, was imprisoned under Mussolini’s regime from 1929 to 1935. Cox and neo-Gramscians draw extensively from his writings.

10. Mark Rupert (1995: 443) describes an historic bloc as follows: ‘In understanding Gramsci, it is essential to grasp that a historic bloc is more than a simple alliance of classes or class factions: it encompasses both objective and subjective aspects of a particular social formation uniting in historically specific ways political, cultural, and economic factors into a complex, politically contestable, and dynamic ensemble of social relations.’

11. Gramsci (1971: 262–3) defines the state follows: ‘For it should be noted that the general notion of state includes elements which need to be referred back to the notion of civil society (in the sense that one might say that state = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armor of coercion).’

12. Gramsci, studying late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century state forms in Western capitalist societies, argued that the political power of ruling classes was reinforced primarily through multiple institutions and relationships in civil society, rather than through direct control and the use of coercive state strategies. Described as hegemony, this form of class rule occurs when consensual forms of power between dominant and subordinate groups, rather than overt or direct coercion via the state, are primary. For further discussion of Gramscian conceptions of hegemony, see Adamson (1980: 169–79) and Thomas (1994: 143–64).

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Title: Theorizing Post-Washington Consensus LIDC Reform
Author: Mark Hibben
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Book: Poor States, Power and the Politics of IMF Reform
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57749-8

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-57750-4

Copyright Year: 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57750-4_3

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