Jacqueline Best
Biographic Data
| ID | 3731387 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jacqueline Best |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jacqueline |
| FAMILY NAME | Best |
| SIGNATURE | BEST J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Ottawa |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5235-2057 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 594 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Endogenizing the limits of ideas: A ‘how-to’ guide to understanding ignorance and failure in ideational political economy
Failure-proof or failure-prone? The paradoxes of global biodiversity institutions
The number of global environmental institutions has increased dramatically over the past decade. Yet environmental governance is widely seen as failing. Focusing on biodiversity politics, we argue that many key governance institutions, particularly those advancing market solutions, are themselves deeply implicated in this persistent failure. Drawing on the sociology of expertise, we show how two recently established institutions – the European Bu…
The fragility of depoliticization: Revisiting the history of Central bank inflation-management
Climate change governance by central banks in an era of interlocking crises
In this article, we survey the literature on central bank action on climate change, focusing particularly on how the combined crises of COVID-19, inflation, and Ukraine have affected this action. We argue that the current situation is a critical juncture in which recent crises have created a highly indeterminate situation regarding what central banks might do regarding climate change. To date, some central banks have used these crises as opportun…
Central banks’ knowledge controversies
In the last few years, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Canada have all initiated policy reviews to reassess monetary policy tools and ideas that were no longer working in a changing global economy. In this paper, I argue that the debates that shaped these reviews can best be understood as ‘knowledge controversies’ in which some of the foundational metrics that monetary policies rely on themselves became the subject …
How to be an expert in confusing times: Lessons from the Office of Budget Responsibility
Uncomfortable knowledge in central banking: Economic expertise confronts the visibility dilemma
How do central bankers cope with the uncomfortable fact that there are significant limits to their expertise without losing authority? Drawing on Steve Rayner's concept of 'uncomfortable knowledge', this paper undertakes a historical examination of the early years of Paul Volcker's role at the head of the Federal Reserve, and then traces the ways in which the uncomfortable fact of ignorance has been dealt with in the years since then: from the re…
Varieties of ignorance in neoliberal policy: Or the possibilities and perils of wishful economic thinking
We might be tempted to view the recent efforts by political leaders to cultivate certain convenient forms of economic ignorance as characteristic of a novel ‘post-truth’ age. This article suggests instead that we take this troubling trend as an invitation to examine the role of ignorance more generally in political economic thinking and practice. Whereas many scholars have treated uncertainty and other unknowns as external challenges that can be …
Seeing and Not-seeing Like a Political Economist: The Historicity of Contemporary Political Economy and its Blind Spots
Contemporary political economy is predicated on widely shared ideas and assumptions, some explicit but many implicit, about the past. Our aim in this Special Issue is to draw attention to, and to assess critically, these historical assumptions. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a political economy that is more attentive to the analytic assumptions on which it is premised, more aware of the potential oversights, biases, and omissions they cont…
Blind spots in IPE: Marginalized perspectives and neglected trends in contemporary capitalism
Which blind spots shape scholarship in International Political Economy (IPE)? That question animates the contributions to a double special issue—one in the Review of International Political Economy, and a companion one in New Political Economy. The global financial crisis had seemed to vindicate broad-ranging IPE perspectives at the expense of narrow economics theories. Yet the tumultuous decade since then has confronted IPE scholars with rapidly…
The quiet failures of early neoliberalism: From rational expectations to Keynesianism in reverse
While the last few decades of political economic history give the impression that the logic of neoliberalism is inexorable, this article argues that once we look further backwards and dig into recently declassified archives documenting the early days of neoliberal theory and practice, we find a messier picture. Economic policymakers in Thatcher and Reagan's administrations in the early 1980s did not set out to ‘fail forwards’ by generating a cris…
The Limits of Transparency: Ambiguity and the History of International Finance
A decade of crises has reminded us of the fragility of the international financial system. Conventional wisdom holds that uncertainty is the basic problem of financial governance, and attempts to contain ambiguity have dominated recent financial reform efforts. Jacqueline Best, however, contends that ambiguity can play a valuable role in international political and economic stability. The stability of the postwar era depended, Best suggests, on a…
Economic Wishful Thinking and the Democratic Crisis
Politicians proved unwilling to do the hard work of challenging vested interests and convincing electorates of the need for more profound reforms in the aftermath of the crisis
Recovering the mundane practices of economic time
How exactly did the neoliberal imaginary that Konings describes gain so much traction? Was its speculative temporality smoothly translated into practice from the writings of Hayek and others as he suggests, or was its production a messier, more contested, and more contingent affair? In this brief commentary, I go back to one of the key historical moments that he examines, the Volcker shock of 1979-82, and examine some of the more mundane politica…
The Inflation Game: Targets, Practices and the Social Production of Monetary Credibility
In recent years, central banks have continued to preach inflation targeting even as they have pursued a wide range of unorthodox inflation-management policies. As the disconnect between discourse and practice grows, there is a growing risk of a serious credibility gap. This article seeks to shed some light on these dilemmas by looking backwards, focusing on the 'Great Inflation' in Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s and the successive failures …
Technocratic Exceptionalism: Monetary Policy and the Fear of Democracy
What do border guards and central bankers have in common? Both operate, on a day-to-day basis, in political spaces exempt from many of the norms of liberal democratic politics and yet have the power to define and constrain them. In order to understand the role of such routine suspensions in the norms of liberal politics, we need to move beyond analyses that focus narrowly on security exceptionalism or emergency-management and pay attention to the…
International Political Economy meets the unexpected: Brexit, Trump and global populism
Security, economy, population: The political economic logic of liberal exceptionalism
In an era in which scholars have become increasingly skeptical about the concept of exceptionalism, this article argues that instead of rejecting it, we should rework it: moving beyond seeing it primarily as a security practice by recognizing the crucial role of political economic exceptionalism. Drawing on Foucault’s later lectures on security, population, and biopolitics, this article suggests that we can understand exceptionalist moves in both…
The Rise of Measurement-driven Governance: The Case of International Development
Global governance is increasingly about measuring, ranking, and scoring. Focusing on the case of international development, this article suggests that we can learn a great deal about the recent changes in global dynamics by examining the rise of measurement-driven governance. The article engages with the recent scholarship on new governance, particularly the emerging literature on more experimentalist forms of governance. This study finds some ev…
Rethinking Central Bank Accountability in Uncertain Times
There has been little discussion of central bank accountability in recent decades because monetary policy has been seen as an essentially technical problem. Yet, during the 2008 financial crisis and the economic dislocations that ensued, central banks gained considerably in authority—bailing out failing institutions, using unorthodox monetary tools, and wading into sovereign debt crises. At the same time, the financial crisis and the slow recover…
When Crises Are Failures: Contested Metrics in International Finance and Development
What happens if we look at events like the 2007-2008 financial crisis not just as crises but also as failures? This shift is a productive one, opening up new ways of understanding the debates and policy responses that followed the recent crisis. For this was not just a crisis: it was also a spectacular failure. Moreover, it was a contested failure: the kind of failure that made key actors question the metrics through which they measured success a…
Bringing Power Back In: The IMF’s Constructivist Strategy in Critical Perspective
Governing Failure - Provisional Expertise and the Transformation of Global Development Finance
Jacqueline Best argues that the changes in International Monetary Fund, World Bank and donor policies in the 1990s, towards what some have called the 'Post-Washington Consensus,' were driven by an erosion of expert authority and an increasing preoccupation with policy failure. Failures such as the Asian financial crisis and the decades of despair in sub-Saharan Africa led these institutions to develop governance strategies designed to avoid failu…
The Return of the Public in Global Governance
Many international relations scholars argue that private authority and private actors are playing increasingly prominent roles in global governance. This book focuses on the other side of the equation: the transformation of the public dimension of governance in the era of globalization. It analyses that transformation, advancing two major claims: first, that the public is beginning to play a more significant role in global governance, and, second…
Towards a Cultural Political Economy – Not a Cultural IPE
This short article provides a response to Matthias Kranke’s review in this journal (vol. 42, no. 3) of our book Cultural Political Economy. Although we recognise the good intentions behind Kranke’s attempt to bring our book into ongoing ‘trans-Atlantic’ debates about the definition of International Political Economy (IPE) as a field, the very effort to define what IPE ‘is’ and ‘is not’ is precisely the kind of reifying move that our volume was tr…
The Limits of Transparency: Ambiguity and the History of International Finance
A decade of crises has reminded us of the fragility of the international financial system. Conventional wisdom holds that uncertainty is the basic problem of financial governance, and attempts to contain ambiguity have dominated recent financial reform efforts. Jacqueline Best, however, contends that ambiguity can play a valuable role in international political and economic stability. The stability of the postwar era depended, Best suggests, on a…
Bureaucratic ambiguity
We live in a world in which ever-greater arenas of social life are shaped by standardization and bureaucratic rationalization, as the pursuit of 'measurable results' sweeps everything from universities to hospitals to international organizations. Yet intuitively we understand that much of our collective and individual existence escapes these efforts of rationalization. How then do we develop a conception of the social world that appreciates both …
Ambiguity and Uncertainty in International Organizations: A History of Debating IMF Conditionality1
How do international organizations deal with the persistent challenge of uncertainty? The most intuitive answer is through regulation. Yet, rules are not always the best solution in times of uncertainty or in dealing with complex and diverse problems. More ambiguous policies that leave room for interpretation, can often be more functional for an international organization (IO); moreover, ambiguities can also be a source of power—and are therefore…
Ambiguity, Uncertainty, and Risk: Rethinking Indeterminacy1
In this paper, I argue that critical international theory could benefit from a broader and deeper conception of the limits of knowledge—that what is needed is more attention to the role of ambiguity in contemporary politics. While not challenging the usefulness of the more prevalent concepts of uncertainty and risk used by scholars applying the frameworks of global governmentality and world risk society, this essay proposes that we understand ris…
Blind spots in IPE: Marginalized perspectives and neglected trends in contemporary capitalism
Which blind spots shape scholarship in International Political Economy (IPE)? That question animates the contributions to a double special issue—one in the Review of International Political Economy, and a companion one in New Political Economy. The global financial crisis had seemed to vindicate broad-ranging IPE perspectives at the expense of narrow economics theories. Yet the tumultuous decade since then has confronted IPE scholars with rapidly…
Uncomfortable knowledge in central banking: Economic expertise confronts the visibility dilemma
How do central bankers cope with the uncomfortable fact that there are significant limits to their expertise without losing authority? Drawing on Steve Rayner's concept of 'uncomfortable knowledge', this paper undertakes a historical examination of the early years of Paul Volcker's role at the head of the Federal Reserve, and then traces the ways in which the uncomfortable fact of ignorance has been dealt with in the years since then: from the re…
Seeing and Not-seeing Like a Political Economist: The Historicity of Contemporary Political Economy and its Blind Spots
Contemporary political economy is predicated on widely shared ideas and assumptions, some explicit but many implicit, about the past. Our aim in this Special Issue is to draw attention to, and to assess critically, these historical assumptions. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a political economy that is more attentive to the analytic assumptions on which it is premised, more aware of the potential oversights, biases, and omissions they cont…
Why the Economy is Often the Exception to Politics as Usual
Many political theorists have turned to the dramatic political events of the post-9/11 world - terrorism, war, and the erosion of civil liberties - for insight into our changing sense of the political. Yet few have examined the economic dimensions of these events or sought to learn what they might tell us about the changing nature of political community today. This article seeks to fill this gap by drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Georg…
The Inflation Game: Targets, Practices and the Social Production of Monetary Credibility
In recent years, central banks have continued to preach inflation targeting even as they have pursued a wide range of unorthodox inflation-management policies. As the disconnect between discourse and practice grows, there is a growing risk of a serious credibility gap. This article seeks to shed some light on these dilemmas by looking backwards, focusing on the 'Great Inflation' in Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s and the successive failures …
Actor-Network Theory' and International Relationality: Lost (and Found) in Translation
Like any multiplicity, “actor-network theory” is many things: an influential current within the sociology of science and technology; a relational and anti-essentialist form of materialism; an insistence that notions of agency not be confined to human subjects but embrace objects, devices, and other non-human entities; and much else besides. Actor-network theory was initially developed as a way of making sense of the social life of the laboratory …
The Limits of Financial Risk Management: Or What we Didn't Learn from the Asian Crisis
In retrospect, the Asian financial crisis was the canary in the coal mine that global leaders failed to recognise. While both the Asian crisis and the current one were the product of excessive leverage, moral hazard and poor risk management, the lessons drawn from each appear to be rather different: the Asian crisis was largely seen as the fault of Asian governments, while the current crisis has been primarily blamed on market actors. Does this m…
Legitimacy dilemmas: The IMF's pursuit of country ownership
There can be little doubt that the International Monetary Fund is currently facing a serious challenge to its legitimacy. Such criticisms echo similar debates that have surrounded other international organisations, including the World Bank, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. As these different institutions seek to respond to this challenge, the Fund's efforts to respond to its critics provide a number of interesting lessons and …
Micro- or macro-moralities? Economic discourses and policy possibilities∗
This paper highlights the ethical implications of the distinction between micro- and macroeconomics, arguing that the methodological emphasis on establishing microfoundations has hardened into a liberal-individualist normative bias. We first argue that the key difference between micro- and macroeconomics is less any ostensible concern for small- or large-scale processes than a value-laden emphasis on the priority of private or public interests. W…
From the Top–Down: The New Financial Architecture and the Re-embedding of Global Finance
After decades of touting the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a neutral, expertise-based institution, Fund representatives have recently adopted a surprisingly normative tone in their policy statements. IMF staff and leaders have begun to talk about the value of 'good financial citizenship', 'civility' and the goal of 'civilising globalisation'. This new institutional vocabulary appears most commonly in the context of calls for a new financia…
Varieties of ignorance in neoliberal policy: Or the possibilities and perils of wishful economic thinking
We might be tempted to view the recent efforts by political leaders to cultivate certain convenient forms of economic ignorance as characteristic of a novel ‘post-truth’ age. This article suggests instead that we take this troubling trend as an invitation to examine the role of ignorance more generally in political economic thinking and practice. Whereas many scholars have treated uncertainty and other unknowns as external challenges that can be …
Redefining Poverty as Risk and Vulnerability: Shifting strategies of liberal economic governance
The existence of global poverty poses a dilemma for liberal economic governance. Its persistence is an irritant to expert assertions that things will get better soon, making it necessary to develop new theories about the causes and nature of poverty and new strategies for managing and reducing it. This paper examines the most recent shift in how the World Bank and other organisations conceptualise and manage poverty, by beginning to view it throu…
Security, economy, population: The political economic logic of liberal exceptionalism
In an era in which scholars have become increasingly skeptical about the concept of exceptionalism, this article argues that instead of rejecting it, we should rework it: moving beyond seeing it primarily as a security practice by recognizing the crucial role of political economic exceptionalism. Drawing on Foucault’s later lectures on security, population, and biopolitics, this article suggests that we can understand exceptionalist moves in both…
Rethinking Central Bank Accountability in Uncertain Times
There has been little discussion of central bank accountability in recent decades because monetary policy has been seen as an essentially technical problem. Yet, during the 2008 financial crisis and the economic dislocations that ensued, central banks gained considerably in authority—bailing out failing institutions, using unorthodox monetary tools, and wading into sovereign debt crises. At the same time, the financial crisis and the slow recover…
Technocratic Exceptionalism: Monetary Policy and the Fear of Democracy
What do border guards and central bankers have in common? Both operate, on a day-to-day basis, in political spaces exempt from many of the norms of liberal democratic politics and yet have the power to define and constrain them. In order to understand the role of such routine suspensions in the norms of liberal politics, we need to move beyond analyses that focus narrowly on security exceptionalism or emergency-management and pay attention to the…
When Crises Are Failures: Contested Metrics in International Finance and Development
What happens if we look at events like the 2007-2008 financial crisis not just as crises but also as failures? This shift is a productive one, opening up new ways of understanding the debates and policy responses that followed the recent crisis. For this was not just a crisis: it was also a spectacular failure. Moreover, it was a contested failure: the kind of failure that made key actors question the metrics through which they measured success a…
Translating the Sociology of Translation
Actor-network theory, material semiotics, the sociology of translation... The precise name of the domain in question is not itself entirely stable, and rightly so. In the ANT scheme of things, society is far less stable, representation and governance considerably more disputed, and order quite a bit more precarious, than most other frameworks would allow. Flux and impermanence are minor and tangled threads running throughout the history of the We…
The quiet failures of early neoliberalism: From rational expectations to Keynesianism in reverse
While the last few decades of political economic history give the impression that the logic of neoliberalism is inexorable, this article argues that once we look further backwards and dig into recently declassified archives documenting the early days of neoliberal theory and practice, we find a messier picture. Economic policymakers in Thatcher and Reagan's administrations in the early 1980s did not set out to ‘fail forwards’ by generating a cris…
The Rise of Measurement-driven Governance: The Case of International Development
Global governance is increasingly about measuring, ranking, and scoring. Focusing on the case of international development, this article suggests that we can learn a great deal about the recent changes in global dynamics by examining the rise of measurement-driven governance. The article engages with the recent scholarship on new governance, particularly the emerging literature on more experimentalist forms of governance. This study finds some ev…
Hollowing out Keynesian norms: How the search for a technical fix undermined the Bretton Woods regime
After a decade of financial crises, international economic leaders have begun to talk about the need for reform. Yet, while they speak in dramatic terms of a ‘new financial architecture’, in practice, they seem more interested in more limited renovations to the international monetary system. Arguing that ‘A lack of reliable data . . . was critical to [recent] crises’, the International Monetary Fund has, for example, emphasised the importance of …
Central banks’ knowledge controversies
In the last few years, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Canada have all initiated policy reviews to reassess monetary policy tools and ideas that were no longer working in a changing global economy. In this paper, I argue that the debates that shaped these reviews can best be understood as ‘knowledge controversies’ in which some of the foundational metrics that monetary policies rely on themselves became the subject …
From the Top–Down: The New Financial Architecture and the Re-embedding of Global Finance
After decades of touting the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a neutral, expertise-based institution, Fund representatives have recently adopted a surprisingly normative tone in their policy statements. IMF staff and leaders have begun to talk about the value of 'good financial citizenship', 'civility' and the goal of 'civilising globalisation'. This new institutional vocabulary appears most commonly in the context of calls for a new financia…
Hollowing out Keynesian norms: How the search for a technical fix undermined the Bretton Woods regime
After a decade of financial crises, international economic leaders have begun to talk about the need for reform. Yet, while they speak in dramatic terms of a ‘new financial architecture’, in practice, they seem more interested in more limited renovations to the international monetary system. Arguing that ‘A lack of reliable data . . . was critical to [recent] crises’, the International Monetary Fund has, for example, emphasised the importance of …
Co-opting cosmopolitanism? The International Monetary Fund's new global ethics
In recent years, International Monetary Fund (IMF) leaders have eschewed their traditional emphasis on technical discourse and have drawn on a number of liberal moral arguments to justify their policies. While this shift is encouraging in some respects, the financial reforms that the Fund has been proposing appear to reinforce rather than to reduce their efforts to universalise neo-liberal polices. Moreover, there are tensions between Fund leader…
Micro- or macro-moralities? Economic discourses and policy possibilities∗
This paper highlights the ethical implications of the distinction between micro- and macroeconomics, arguing that the methodological emphasis on establishing microfoundations has hardened into a liberal-individualist normative bias. We first argue that the key difference between micro- and macroeconomics is less any ostensible concern for small- or large-scale processes than a value-laden emphasis on the priority of private or public interests. W…
Legitimacy dilemmas: The IMF's pursuit of country ownership
There can be little doubt that the International Monetary Fund is currently facing a serious challenge to its legitimacy. Such criticisms echo similar debates that have surrounded other international organisations, including the World Bank, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. As these different institutions seek to respond to this challenge, the Fund's efforts to respond to its critics provide a number of interesting lessons and …
Why the Economy is Often the Exception to Politics as Usual
Many political theorists have turned to the dramatic political events of the post-9/11 world - terrorism, war, and the erosion of civil liberties - for insight into our changing sense of the political. Yet few have examined the economic dimensions of these events or sought to learn what they might tell us about the changing nature of political community today. This article seeks to fill this gap by drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Georg…
Ambiguity, Uncertainty, and Risk: Rethinking Indeterminacy1
In this paper, I argue that critical international theory could benefit from a broader and deeper conception of the limits of knowledge—that what is needed is more attention to the role of ambiguity in contemporary politics. While not challenging the usefulness of the more prevalent concepts of uncertainty and risk used by scholars applying the frameworks of global governmentality and world risk society, this essay proposes that we understand ris…
Regulating Capital: Setting Standards for the International Financial System – By David Andrew Singer
How to Make a Bubble: Toward a Cultural Political Economy of the Financial Crisis
The news coverage of the financial crisis has presented us with two kinds of stories. The first typically features conservatively tailored financial experts who explain the mysteries of credit default swaps and structured investment vehicles. The second starts with a long panning shot of row upon row of unsold houses, and then focuses in for a close-up of a desperate homeowner who has had to give his dream home back to the bank. The first of thes…
Cultural Political Economy
This text examines the multitude of ways in which the political, the cultural and the economic interconnect and intersect and provides case studies focusing on finance, tourism, contemporary business discourse, the 'war on terror' and migration.
The Limits of Financial Risk Management: Or What we Didn't Learn from the Asian Crisis
In retrospect, the Asian financial crisis was the canary in the coal mine that global leaders failed to recognise. While both the Asian crisis and the current one were the product of excessive leverage, moral hazard and poor risk management, the lessons drawn from each appear to be rather different: the Asian crisis was largely seen as the fault of Asian governments, while the current crisis has been primarily blamed on market actors. Does this m…
Ambiguity and Uncertainty in International Organizations: A History of Debating IMF Conditionality1
How do international organizations deal with the persistent challenge of uncertainty? The most intuitive answer is through regulation. Yet, rules are not always the best solution in times of uncertainty or in dealing with complex and diverse problems. More ambiguous policies that leave room for interpretation, can often be more functional for an international organization (IO); moreover, ambiguities can also be a source of power—and are therefore…
Bureaucratic ambiguity
We live in a world in which ever-greater arenas of social life are shaped by standardization and bureaucratic rationalization, as the pursuit of 'measurable results' sweeps everything from universities to hospitals to international organizations. Yet intuitively we understand that much of our collective and individual existence escapes these efforts of rationalization. How then do we develop a conception of the social world that appreciates both …
Redefining Poverty as Risk and Vulnerability: Shifting strategies of liberal economic governance
The existence of global poverty poses a dilemma for liberal economic governance. Its persistence is an irritant to expert assertions that things will get better soon, making it necessary to develop new theories about the causes and nature of poverty and new strategies for managing and reducing it. This paper examines the most recent shift in how the World Bank and other organisations conceptualise and manage poverty, by beginning to view it throu…
Translating the Sociology of Translation
Actor-network theory, material semiotics, the sociology of translation... The precise name of the domain in question is not itself entirely stable, and rightly so. In the ANT scheme of things, society is far less stable, representation and governance considerably more disputed, and order quite a bit more precarious, than most other frameworks would allow. Flux and impermanence are minor and tangled threads running throughout the history of the We…
Actor-Network Theory' and International Relationality: Lost (and Found) in Translation
Like any multiplicity, “actor-network theory” is many things: an influential current within the sociology of science and technology; a relational and anti-essentialist form of materialism; an insistence that notions of agency not be confined to human subjects but embrace objects, devices, and other non-human entities; and much else besides. Actor-network theory was initially developed as a way of making sense of the social life of the laboratory …
Governing Failure - Provisional Expertise and the Transformation of Global Development Finance
Jacqueline Best argues that the changes in International Monetary Fund, World Bank and donor policies in the 1990s, towards what some have called the 'Post-Washington Consensus,' were driven by an erosion of expert authority and an increasing preoccupation with policy failure. Failures such as the Asian financial crisis and the decades of despair in sub-Saharan Africa led these institutions to develop governance strategies designed to avoid failu…
The Return of the Public in Global Governance
Many international relations scholars argue that private authority and private actors are playing increasingly prominent roles in global governance. This book focuses on the other side of the equation: the transformation of the public dimension of governance in the era of globalization. It analyses that transformation, advancing two major claims: first, that the public is beginning to play a more significant role in global governance, and, second…
Towards a Cultural Political Economy – Not a Cultural IPE
This short article provides a response to Matthias Kranke’s review in this journal (vol. 42, no. 3) of our book Cultural Political Economy. Although we recognise the good intentions behind Kranke’s attempt to bring our book into ongoing ‘trans-Atlantic’ debates about the definition of International Political Economy (IPE) as a field, the very effort to define what IPE ‘is’ and ‘is not’ is precisely the kind of reifying move that our volume was tr…
Bringing Power Back In: The IMF’s Constructivist Strategy in Critical Perspective
Rethinking Central Bank Accountability in Uncertain Times
There has been little discussion of central bank accountability in recent decades because monetary policy has been seen as an essentially technical problem. Yet, during the 2008 financial crisis and the economic dislocations that ensued, central banks gained considerably in authority—bailing out failing institutions, using unorthodox monetary tools, and wading into sovereign debt crises. At the same time, the financial crisis and the slow recover…
When Crises Are Failures: Contested Metrics in International Finance and Development
What happens if we look at events like the 2007-2008 financial crisis not just as crises but also as failures? This shift is a productive one, opening up new ways of understanding the debates and policy responses that followed the recent crisis. For this was not just a crisis: it was also a spectacular failure. Moreover, it was a contested failure: the kind of failure that made key actors question the metrics through which they measured success a…
International Political Economy meets the unexpected: Brexit, Trump and global populism
Security, economy, population: The political economic logic of liberal exceptionalism
In an era in which scholars have become increasingly skeptical about the concept of exceptionalism, this article argues that instead of rejecting it, we should rework it: moving beyond seeing it primarily as a security practice by recognizing the crucial role of political economic exceptionalism. Drawing on Foucault’s later lectures on security, population, and biopolitics, this article suggests that we can understand exceptionalist moves in both…
The Rise of Measurement-driven Governance: The Case of International Development
Global governance is increasingly about measuring, ranking, and scoring. Focusing on the case of international development, this article suggests that we can learn a great deal about the recent changes in global dynamics by examining the rise of measurement-driven governance. The article engages with the recent scholarship on new governance, particularly the emerging literature on more experimentalist forms of governance. This study finds some ev…
Economics (30 works) · Political science (30 works) · Politics (28 works) · Law (27 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Political economy (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (11 works) · Law and economics (9 works) · Corporate governance (8 works)