Antje Vetterlein

Owning development : creating policy norms in the IMF and the World Bank

Part I. Introduction: 1. Owning development: creating policy norms in the IMF and the World Bank Susan Park and Antje Vetterlein Part II. Norm Emergence: 2. Internal or external norm champions: the IMF and multilateral debt relief Bessma Momani 3. From three to five: the World Banks pension reform policy norm Veronika Wodsak and Martin Koch 4. The strategic social construction of the World Banks gender and development policy norm Catherine Weaver Part III. Norm Stabilization: 5. Lacking ownership: the IMF and its engagement with social development as a policy norm Antje Vetterlein 6. Stabilizing global monetary norms: the IMF and current account convertibility Andre Broome 7. Bitter pills to swallow: legitimacy gaps and social recognition of the IMF tax policy norm in East Asia Leonard Seabrooke Part IV. Norm Subsiding: 8. The IMF and capital account liberalization: a case of failed norm institutionalization Ralf J. Leiteritz and Manuela Moschella 9. The World Banks global safeguard policy norm? Susan Park 10. The new public management policy norm on the ground: a comparative analysis of the World Banks experience in Chile and Argentina Martin Lardone Part V. Conclusion: 11. Do policy norms reconstitute global development? Susan Park and Antje Vetterlein.

Seeing Like the World Bank on Poverty

This article investigates the way in which the World Bank constructs knowledge on poverty by identifying analytic institutions inside the organisation where ideas are developed, ‘anti-poverty advocates’ that populate these institutions and the strategies they employ to foster their agenda. By doing so, the article challenges two common critiques against the organisation. First, the Bank is often seen as an instrument of powerful industrialised countries to impose Western norms on developing countries; second, the Bank has contributed to worsening the situation in developing countries through the policies adopted. I argue that both assumptions are overstated. First, an in-depth analysis of the organisations operational and organisational level shows a high level of internal advocacy that provides evidence that the Bank as a bureaucracy independently shapes global politics. Second, comparing the discursive level with developments on the policy and operational level reveals that the poverty or social agenda has grown incrementally from the late 1960s even in times when neoliberalism dominated world politics and economy. The article goes beyond such an organisational analysis in critically assessing how the Bank, by making developing countries ‘legible’, has provided standardised responses that ignore local social knowledge with the consequence of crude and self-defeating interventions.

International organizations and organizational fields: explaining policy change in the IMF

The purpose of this paper is to account for varieties of organizational change. In particular, we contend that in order to explain change in international organizations (IOs) we cannot simply dichotomize between change and the lack thereof. Rather, change is best conceptualized as made up of two dimensions: speed and scope. The combination of the two dimensions leads to a taxonomy with four distinct types of policy change. The paper evaluates the emergence of different types of change by focusing on the relationship between IOs and their fields. Specifically, the position of the organization in the field helps to account for the speed of change (slow vs. rapid), whereas the openness of the organization to the inputs coming from the field helps to explain the scope of change (incremental vs. radical). We illustrate our argument by comparing the changes in the International Monetary Fund’s policies in the areas of financial sector surveillance and poverty reduction.

Paradigm maintenance: The IMF and social policies after the financial crisis

Hermann C and Mahnkopf B (2010) Still a future for the European Social Model? Global Labour Journal 1(3): 314–330. Lehndorff S (ed.) (2014) Divisive Integration. The Triumph of Failed Ideas Revisited. Brussels: ETUI. OECD (2014) Society at a Glance 2014. Paris: OECD. Stuckler D and Basu S (2013) The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills. London: Allen Lane. Tazannatos Z and Monogious Y (2013) Public sector adjustment amidst structural adjustment in Greece: Subordinate, spasmodic and sporadic. In: Vaughan-Whitehead D (ed.) Public Sector Shock. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 259–299. Vaughan-Whitehead D (ed.) (2013) Public Sector Shock: The Impact of Policy Retrenchment in Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Responsibility is More than Accountability: From Regulatory Towards Negotiated Governance

ABSTRACT This paper critically assesses the notion of responsibility and argues that by adopting a broader understanding as going beyond accountability will shift our focus from regulatory to negotiated governance. Negotiated governance emphasizes the origin of rules and regulations and their contestation over the focus on compliance and enforcement. In order to elaborate this argument, I use the case of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The paper takes departure in the governance literature. Reviewing that scholarship, I develop a typology of responsibility to first substantiate the papers claim that responsibility is more than accountability. In a second step, I derive a taxonomy of CSR practices that are loosely associated with different meanings of responsibility. The taxonomy highlights two specific problems that the literature focusing on accountability leaves unanswered, these are the moral underpinnings of CSR and how companies take on moral agency and come to prioritize and justify their choices and the expectational context in which that happens, that is the respective community of responsibility. Taking ‘responsibility’ in the meaning of the word seriously as a normative and relational concept shifts our attention to the contested nature of what CSR means and the way how it is negotiated in such communities.

Regulatory governance: rules, resistance and responsibility

ABSTRACT Regulatory governance frameworks have become essential building blocks of world society. From supply chains to the regimes surrounding international organizations, extensive governance frameworks have emerged which structure and channel a variety of social exchanges, including economic, political, legal and cultural, on a global scale. Against this background, this special issue sets out to explore the multifaceted meaning, potential and impact as well as the social praxis of regulatory governance. Under the notions rules, resistance and responsibility the special issue pins out three overall dimensions of regulation and governance thereby providing a theoretical and conceptual framework for grasping the phenomenon of regulatory governance. This is combined with extensive case studies on a number of regulatory governance settings ranging from the World Bank to agricultural reforms carried by the International Transitional Administrations (ITAs) in Kosovo and Iraq as well as global supply chains and their impact on the garment industry in Bangladesh.

Organisationspersönlichkeit und die Bedingungen von Politikwandel in internationalen Organisationen

Wie kann man die Variation von Politikwandel in internationalen Organisationen (IOs) erklären? Auf der einen Seite erklären Prinzipal-Agent (PA) Modelle Politikwandel in IOs zum Beispiel mit dem Grad der Unabhängigkeit, die eine Organisation von ihren Mitgliedsstaaten besitzt oder mit dem Ausmaß an Homogenität mitgliedsstaatlicher Präferenzen, die in politische Praxis übersetzt werden sollen. Auf der anderen Seite räumen Konstruktivisten den IOs eine größere Autonomie ein und argumentieren zum Beispiel, dass die Kultur einer Organisation Einfluss darauf hat, welche politischen Entscheidungen die Organisation trifft (vgl. Barnett u. Finnemore 2004). Wandel wird gemäß dieser Sichtweise im wesentlichen durch sogenannte Normentrepreneure (Finnemore u. Sikkink 1998; Sunstein 1996) initiiert, die Ideen in den politischen Entscheidungsprozess strategisch einbringen, um Wendepunkte (“turning points”) zu kreieren. Dieser, zugegebenermaßen etwas vereinfachten, Klassifikation vorliegender Erklärungsansätze folgend, teilt sich ein Großteil der aktuellen IO Literatur theoretisch in das altbekannte Interessen-versus-Ideen Spektrum (für eine ausführliche Diskussion, vgl. Bauer et al. in diesem Sonderheft). Die wichtigste konzeptionelle Innovation konstruktivistischer Erklärungsansätze zum Verhalten von IOs, nicht zuletzt um genau diese dichotome Sichtweise zu umgehen, ist das Konzept der Organisationskultur. Organisationskultur wird verstanden als

Book Review: Arbeitslosigkeit und soziale Sicherung in Südkorea im Kontext der Globalisierung

This book tries to show that even while under strong globalization pressure, South Korea developed a social-security system that was mainly directed at absorbing the enormous unemployment and poverty caused by the Asian crisis in 1997. The book’s thesis is thus that the development of social policy cannot be seen as affected merely by economic factors, but rather it must be considered in its whole national context of the interplay of political interests. This conclusion makes this book a valuable contribution to the literature on globalization. After a short introduction to South Korea as a developing country, focusing on its social policy development, the book is organized into two main parts: the first part is a theoretical argumentation about globalization as such, the Asian crisis, the merits of economic reforms and the positions of the political actors within this area of conflict between globalization, unemployment and the need for structural transformation; the second part addresses the case-study of South Korea. The centre of attention is economic globalization and the book argues that international capital relies on social and political stability which is only feasible through a strong state. However, ‘Segyehwa’, the national development strategy in South Korea initiated in 1995, while aimed at economic growth and social policy, led at first to a much too fast economic modernization with all its negative social effects and no political measures until the negative consequences became unbearable, in particular when a labour-law reform was opposed in a general strike. The author then describes the Asian crisis which followed rather differently than is common. He argues that internal and external factors together brought the country finally into this crisis with disastrous effects, while the consequences of the crisis were marked by the involvement of the IMF. The author argues that the contract with the IMF, focused on internal problems, made South Korea comply with fundamental reforms of its economic system that were not necessarily appropriate. Thus, the country moved away from a state-controlled, interventionist economy towards a market-oriented and open, or ordoliberal, system. However, even though the reforms in the public sector, financial market, the corporate sector and the labour market followed the usual requirements of the IMF, there were also programmes to avoid unemployment and cushion the main social consequences of the reform. Moreover, social dialogue was initiated between state, labour and employers, discussing in particular new redundancy legislation. This law was finally adopted in 1998, but the trade unions negotiated at least the concession of providing more financial resources for the expected and subsequent mass unemployment. The second part of the book is a rich single case-study about the conditions of the South Korean labour market since 1987 and labourmarket and social-policy measures. Empirical evidence provided suggests that the South Korean labour market is not at all inflexible as evaluated by the IMF. The subsequent chapter is a detailed description of labour-market policies as well as other social policies in South Korea between 1998 and 2000. In 1999, the government changed the direction of its policy towards a more Keynesian economic policy, extending the budget deficit in order to increase domestic demand. A so-called productive social policy was initiated, aimed at activating and stimulating work (workfare), and thus combining collective solidarity with self-help. Consequently, a whole catalogue of measures against unemployment was introduced, mixing active policies of maintaining jobs as well as creating new jobs, and provision of employment, education and social care. Unemployment insurance was extended and subsidies were given to prevent layoffs. All these measures were adopted as short-term actions to decrease the high unemployment 440 Book reviews

Ohne Vollbeschäftigung: Arbeitswelt, Gesellschaft und Sozialpolitik

Wir verstehen unter dem Begriff Vollbeschaftigung mehr als den Umstand, dass alle, die einer Erwerbsarbeit nachgehen wollen und sollen, auch tatsachlich einen Arbeitsplatz besitzen oder finden konnen. Tatsachlich soll ein okonomisches und gesellschaftliches Modell bezeichnet werden, das wir mit dem prazisierenden Begriff der tradierten Vollbeschaftigungsgesellschaft versehen haben. Wenn wir im folgenden in einem kursorischen Uberblick empirisch nachzeichnen wollen, welche rechtlichen, okonomischen und gesellschaftlichen Veranderungen in den vergangenen knapp dreisig Jahren stattgefunden haben, reicht es deshalb auch nicht, sich auf die Schilderung der Entwicklung der Arbeitslosigkeit zu beschranken. Diese besitzt zwar einen herausragenden Stellenwert, ist aber fur die Gewerkschaften bei weitem nicht die einzige hochrelevante Veranderung der letzten Jahrzehnte. Zudem haben sich im Laufe der auf Dauer gestellten Beschaftigungsprobleme die Arbeitsmarktstrukturen, die gesellschaftliche Partizipation am Arbeitsmarkt, die Beschaftigungsverhaltnisse, die Arbeitszeiten, die Stellung der Kollektivvertragsparteien, die rechtliche Regulierung des Arbeitsmarktes, die soziale Sicherung der Beschaftigten und Arbeitslosen und vieles mehr verandert. Alle diese Entwicklungen lassen sich im Rahmen eines kurzen Abrisses nicht darstellen. Das verlangt auf der einen Seite, sich auf die zentralen Veranderungen der Vergangenheit zu konzentrieren. Auf der anderen Seite erfordert jedoch das Anliegen, einigermasen sicher erfassen zu wollen, wie sich die Rahmenbedingungen gewerkschaftlichen Handelns in der Vergangenheit verandert haben, etwas weiter auszuholen.

Auf dem Weg zu Vollbeschäftigung? Das Bündnis für Arbeit

Um das Bundnis fur Arbeit steht es nicht gut. Es ist zwar nicht offiziell gescheitert. Aber Arbeitgeber und Arbeitnehmer liegen insbesondere in der zentralen Frage der Lohnentwicklung weiter denn je auseinander. Die Positionen sind nicht neu, scheinen sich aber verhartet zu haben. Die Gewerkschaften sehen die Lohnzuruckhaltung der Arbeitnehmer in der Vergangenheit als wenig erfolgreich an, da die Arbeitgeber die Beschaftigung im Gegenzug und trotz einer guten konjunkturellen Lage kaum ausgeweitet hatten. Nun mussten die Arbeitnehmer an den Unternehmensgewinnen der Vergangenheit mittels hoherer Lohnsteigerungen beteiligt werden. Die Arbeitgeber hingegen bewerten die weitere Lohnzuruckhaltung als einziges Mittel, das gegenwartige konjunkturelle Tief einigermasen unbeschadet zu uberstehen. Die hohen Lohnforderungen der Gewerkschaften seien erstens Gift fur die konjunkturelle Erholung und wirkten sich zudem negativ auf den Arbeitsmarkt aus. Ein Kompromiss zwischen den Arbeitsmarktparteien scheint in weite Ferne geruckt zu sein.