What Came Before

Abstract

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and various donor organizations have introduced a multitude of new policies over the past decade and a half. There is a significant difference, however, between identifying a list of policy changes, and defining them as a series of new governance strategies and as a shift in the overall style of global governance. Since these claims are central to this book, it is necessary to spend some time establishing how these new governances strategies differ from their predecessors. As I discussed in the last chapter, governance strategies are ways of defining and managing particular kinds of problems. Institutional actors often develop new strategies in the context of debates about perceived failures, such as World Bank President Robert McNamara's claims of the failure of trickle-down development in the late 1960s, mainstream Bank economists' assertions of the failure of McNamara's targeted poverty reduction efforts in the early 1980s, or more recent arguments from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and economists about the failure of orthodox aid efforts in the 1990s. While these contested failures have things in common – they are all partly defined as failures of expertise – the kinds of responses developed have varied considerably. All govern-ance strategies are thus designed at one level to resolve some of the dilemmas of expert authority. At the same time, each also seeks to respond to a particular problem or challenge. Each of the strategies I examine in this book both defines and seeks to respond to a certain problem of governance. Fostering country ownership is one way of addressing domestic politics and variation between local contexts. Developing global standards is a means of defining and applying a set of universal principles, which international organizations (IOs) can draw on to justify their actions. Efforts to manage risk and vulnerability are a new way of grappling with the perennial challenge of responding to the unknowns of global governance. Results measurement , finally, is one more approach to the institutional imperative to measure and evaluate policy practices.