The politics of collaborative global governance : organisational positioning in IMF-World Bank collaboration.

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Abstract

This thesis studies the collaborative activities of two of the most prominent international organisations of the contemporary era, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Drawing on ninety-five interviews with organisational officials and other policy actors, as well as an analysis of key documents, I argue that competing normative expectations, especially from their membership, induce the Bretton Woods institutions to collaborate where necessary and remain distinctive as much as possible. However, regular collaboration tends to make organisations more similar to each other. The IMF and the World Bank resolve this challenge to their procedural legitimacy by employing symbolic actions as signals of distinctiveness while continuing inter-organisational collaboration. Symbolic reforms (and, sometimes, less costly alternatives) allow them to claim policy niches for the purpose of organisational differentiation. I develop this argument in case studies of IMF- World Bank collaboration in three areas: (1) crisis lending, (2) financial sector surveillance and (3) concessional lending and debt relief. Through the analysis of the collaborative activities between two influential international organisations, the research in this thesis contributes novel insights into the cultural underpinnings of the Bretton Woods institutions. The analysis extends constructivist accounts of international organisations by suggesting that contemporary notions of their agency are rooted in shared norms about what these organisations should do or should not do.

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