How Neoliberalism Comes to Town: Policy Convergence, (Under)Development, and Jordanian Economics under King Abdullah

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-197
Author(s):  
Colin Powers
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Development Strategies ◽  
International Financial Institutions ◽  
Local Agency ◽  
Policy Convergence

Abstract This article explores the development strategies articulated and implemented in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan during the tenure of King Abdullah ii. It begins by establishing the consistency with which national planners have adopted ideas, recommendations, and ideological scripts initially authored by the international financial institutions (ifis). Having documented the endurance of Jordan’s “policy convergence”, it explains this outcome as a dialectical function of foreign interference and local agency. Demonstrating how the lines between the national, international, and transnational blur in constituting the contemporary Jordanian political economy, this case study in actually existing neoliberalism will provide a unique look at the actors, interests, ideas and processes at the heart of the country’s enduring underdevelopment.

Indigenous Rights, Resistance, and the Law: Lessons from a Guatemalan Mine

2008 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 91-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda M. Fulmer ◽  
Angelina Snodgrass Godoy ◽  
Philip Neff
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Social Responsibility ◽  
International Law ◽  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Indigenous Rights ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
International Financial Institutions ◽  
Extractive Industry ◽  
Corporate Social

AbstractUsing a case study of a controversial mine in an indigenous area of Guatemala, this article explores the transnational dynamics of development and regulation of large-scale extractive industry projects in the developing world. It examines the roles played in the Marlin mine dispute by national law, international law, international financial institutions, and corporate social responsibility. It concludes that these legal regimes have a role in protecting human rights but have not addressed the fundamental questions of democratic governance raised by this case.

How Transnational Environmental Advocacy Networks Socialize International Financial Institutions: A Case Study of the International Finance Corporation

2005 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 95-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Park
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
International Finance ◽  
Financial Institutions ◽  
World Bank Group ◽  
Transnational Advocacy ◽  
International Financial Institutions ◽  
Advocacy Networks ◽  
International Finance Corporation ◽  
Transnational Advocacy Networks

Environmental organizations, characterized here as transnational advocacy networks, use various strategies to “green” international financial institutions (IFIs). This article goes beyond analyzing network strategies to examine how transnational advocacy networks reconstitute the identity of IFIs. This, it is argued, results from processes of socialization: social influence, persuasion and coercion by lobbying. A case study of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), as a member of the World Bank Group, is used to analyze how an IFI internalized sustainable development norms. The IFC finances private enterprise in developing countries by providing venture capital for private projects. Transnational advocacy networks socialized the IFC through influencing its projects, policies and institutions via direct and indirect interactions to the point where the organization now sees itself as a sustainable development financier. This article applies constructivist insights to the greening process in order to demonstrate how socialization can reshape an IFI's identity.

Time and crisis: framing success and failure in Romania’s post-communist transformations

2007 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
LILIANA POP
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
International Financial Institutions ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Global Political Economy ◽  
Structural Dimensions ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the complex interplay between domestic systemic transformations in post-communist Europe and the reintegration of these countries in the global political economy, through a study of the relationship between successive Romanian governments and the international financial institutions in the 1990s. Conceptually, it seeks to overcome the dichotomies of realist and rationalist approaches to international relations by deploying fields, habitus and practices conceptual framework inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The article captures both the symbolic and material-structural dimensions of the interaction between domestic field-creation and the reproduction of global economic and political fields. It suggests that practices aimed at the reproduction of power hierarchies are also modulated by symbolic requirements, to save face and to avoid whenever possible open conflict, related to the logic of honour.

Global Capitalism and the Neoliberal Privatization of Energy Reserves: A Mexico Case Study

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 103-115
Author(s):  
Marcelo del Castillo-Mussot ◽  
Jorge A. Montemayor-Aldrete ◽  
Jeb Sprague-Silgado ◽  
Alfredo de la Lama Garcia
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Drastic Change ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Energy Reserves ◽  
Legal Basis ◽  
International Financial Institutions ◽  
Hydrocarbon Reserves

Abstract In 2013 state officials operating through the three federal government branches of Mexico mutilated the country’s constitution, privatizing upwards of seventy-five percent of the country’s hydrocarbon reserves. This article suggests that this neoliberal strategy, carried out by transnationally oriented elites operating through state apparatuses in Mexico (and promoted by officials in Washington and within the International Financial Institutions), is meant to benefit transnational capital. Such drastic change to Mexico’s legal order, we argue, in fact violated the country’s constitution and symbolized a break with the country’s earlier model of development. The federal government’s anti-constitutional behavior, specifically its violation of Article 136 of the constitution, provides a legal basis for dismissing top officials from their posts and moving toward a constitutional assembly.

The Troika’s conditionalities during the Greek financial crisis of 2010–2014: the Washington Consensus is alive, well, and here to stay

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
John Marangos
Keyword(s):  
Financial Crisis ◽  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Tax Policy ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
Washington Consensus ◽  
Tax Revenue ◽  
International Financial Institutions ◽  
The World ◽  
The Global Financial Crisis

There is a widespread perception around the world that the Washington Consensus is dead. In contrast to the world tide prior to the global financial crisis of 2008, this paper aims to demonstrate that the conditionalities inspired by the Washington Consensus and imposed by the international financial institutions are still pertinent. Using as a case study the Greek financial crisis of 2010–2014, it is verified that the Troika’s austerity imposed conditionalities that neatly fit within the Washington Consensus framework. However, consistent with the neoclassical framework, the Washington Consensus recommends the reduction in taxes, whereas the Troika’s austerity conditionalities entail an increase in taxes. It appears that a striking paradox is present, in that the neoclassical tax conditionality policy is sacrificed in the name of increased tax revenue. This allegedly perplexing tax policy and blatant conflict, which appears to controvert the very essence of the neoclassical ideological framework of the Washington Consensus and the IMF, will be further explored.

scholarly journals “We Cannot Please Everyone”: Contentions over Adjustment in EPRDF Ethiopia (1991–2018)

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (S29) ◽  
pp. 69-91
Author(s):  
Mehdi Labzaé ◽  
Sabine Planel
Keyword(s):  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Developmental State ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
State Control ◽  
International Financial Institutions ◽  
Agricultural Policies ◽  
Tight Control ◽  
Open Expression

AbstractThis article looks at how rural inhabitants navigated state power under a regime led by a former socialist party that negotiated its conversion to a market economy while keeping tight control on the whole society. In that regard, it addresses adjustment in a very specific context, by analysing a distinctive chronology, raising the ruling party's ability to negotiate with the international financial institutions, and considering popular reactions from a rural point of view. The regime led by the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) managed to delay measures of structural adjustment during the 1990s and 2000s while deepening structures of state control it partly inherited from the former military junta. Brutal structural adjustment plans were refused, while international financial institutions were kept away from the Ethiopian government's policy mix, by way of elaborate ideological and institutional arrangements. The EPRDF coined its own version of the “developmental state” and renewed state control of the economy while deepening its articulation to global markets. Under the EPRDF, all sectors of society and especially peasantries were closely monitored and mobilized in the name of development. But although the open expression of dissent remained rare, peasants resorted to many strategies to cope with political control and to some extent divert it. By taking agricultural policies as a case study, the article describes peasant practices and questions differences between resistance, false compliance, and diversion, underlining how blurred such labels can actually be.

A Matter of Life and Debt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Webber
Keyword(s):  
Financial Institutions ◽  
Debt Relief ◽  
National Accounts ◽  
International Financial Institutions ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Poor Countries ◽  
Economic Framework ◽  
Heavily Indebted Poor Countries ◽  
The International Monetary Fund

The first of these case study chapters in chapter 5 draws parallels between the economic framework designed by Treasury officials at home and ‘the new international economic architecture’ that Gordon Brown was keen to pursue abroad. This would provide the basis for a new approach to debt relief to reform the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative. The new Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative would be conditional upon recipient countries meeting their obligations towards this new economic architecture, designed by Brown and based upon the principles of the ‘post-Washington Consensus’. This approach however, ran counter to many within civil society who viewed the issue of debt relief in ‘moral’ rather than simply ‘economic’ terms. In meeting with these different faith groups, NGOs and other debt activists, Brown certainly appeared sympathetic to such claims but the biblical language of forgiveness, justice and redemption that he used in speaking to these audiences differed from when he spoke in altogether more punitive terms to the international financial institutions. Here Brown spoke of the need for greater stability, demanded that indebted countries recognise their financial obligations, and urged greater surveillance by the International Monetary Fund of these countries national accounts.

Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment

2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
North East ◽  
The Social ◽  
Romantic Movement ◽  
Scottish History

Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) made several iconoclastic interventions in the field of Scottish history. These earned him a notoriety in Scottish circles which, while not undeserved, has led to the reductive dismissal of Trevor-Roper's ideas, particularly his controversial interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, as the product of Scotophobia. In their indignation Scottish historians have missed the wider issues which prompted Trevor-Roper's investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history. Notably, Trevor-Roper used the example of Scotland to challenge Weberian-inspired notions of Puritan progressivism, arguing instead that the Arminian culture of north-east Scotland had played a disproportionate role in the rise of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, working on the assumption that the essence of Enlightenment was its assault on clerical bigotry, Trevor-Roper sought the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Jacobitism, the counter-cultural alternative to post-1690 Scotland's Calvinist Kirk establishment. Though easily misconstrued as a dogmatic conservative, Trevor-Roper flirted with Marxisant sociology, not least in his account of the social underpinnings of the Scottish Enlightenment. Trevor-Roper argued that it was the rapidity of eighteenth-century Scotland's social and economic transformation which had produced in one generation a remarkable body of political economy conceptualising social change, and in the next a romantic movement whose powers of nostalgic enchantment were felt across the breadth of Europe.

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