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This book analyses the World Bank’s provision of technical assistance from 1946 to the present day. It argues that the relational dynamics between technical assistance provider and recipient affects the legitimacy of policy norms travelling from the ‘international’ to the ‘domestic’. Beginning from the constructivist position that ‘development’ is a social construct, the author contends that successful policy movement via technical assistance depends on the recipient’s perception of the validity of policy reforms, with perception being influenced by the way those ideas and practices are presented, packaged, and transferred. In advancing this argument, Bazbauers analyses four pillars of World Bank technical assistance: technical assistance components (advisory services incorporated within lending operations), stand-alone technical assistance projects (projects designed to solely deliver technical assistance), survey missions (activities involved in measuring the development status of developing countries), and training institutes (the courses of the Economic Development Institute and World Bank Institute).
This book explores the evolution of the 30 functioning multilateral development banks (MDBs). MDBs have their roots in the growing system of international finance and multilateral cooperation, with the first recognisable MDB being proposed by Latin America in financial cooperation with the US in the late 1930s. That Inter-American Bank did not eventuate but was a precursor to the World Bank being negotiated at Bretton Woods in 1944. Since then, a complex network of regional, sub-regional, and specialised development banks has progressively emerged across the globe, including two significant recent entrants established by China and the BRICS. MDBs arrange loans, credits, and guarantees for in...
This edited book provides a contemporary, critical and thought-provoking analysis of the internal and external threats to Western multilateral development finance in the twenty-first century. It draws on the expertise of scholars with a range of backgrounds providing a critical exploration of the neoliberal multilateral development aid. The contributions focus on how Western institutions have historically dominated development aid, and juxtapose this hegemony with the recent challenges from right-wing populist and the Beijing Consensus ideologies and practices. This book argues that the rise of right-wing populism has brought internal challenges to traditional powers within the multilateral ...
This book is the first to exclusively consider the foreign policy tendencies of African states in international institutions. As an edited volume offering empirically based perspectives from a variety of scholars, this project disabuses the notion that Africa should be considered a "niche" interest in the field of foreign policy analysis. It asserts that the actions of the continent's states collectively serve as an important heuristic by which to interrogate and understand the foreign policies of other global states, and are not simply "anomalously" extant entities whose actions should be studied only insofar as they deviate from predictions based on the experiences of Western or other non-African states.
By defining international communities of practice (CoPs) as domains of knowledge, this book investigates the adoption of new international practices via collective learning—that is, the redefinition of what is acceptable and feasible. Explaining how inclusive practices at the World Bank became institutionalized, it shows that while changes in presidents can influence practices of international organizations, shifts in collective thinking are even more important to understand world ordering. Collective learning happens at the boundaries between CoPs when practitioners interact with others inside or outside the formal walls of an organization—through processes of boundary encounters, bound...
This book aims to bring together a series of analyses on international development assistance in the BRICS, the group of countries that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The BRICS states comprise approximately 3 billion people (~40% of the World’s population) and in terms of GDP account for 16.8 trillion dollars (~22% of the World’s economy). Over the last decade the loose coalition has evolved to become a formal partnership on both economic and political fronts. The first formal meeting of the then-four BRIC countries took place in 2006 during the United Nations General Assembly. This was followed in 2009 by the first summit of BRICS' heads of state, an event which has been convened annually ever since. On 3-5 September 2017, the ninth BRICS Summit was hosted in Xiamen, China. This book, an anthology of scholars based in BRICS countries, provides invaluable insights into the emerging global south coalition, and will be of interest to scholars, employees of NGOs, and China watchers.
Poverty as Subsistence explores the "propertizing" land reform policy that the World Bank advocated throughout the transitioning countries of Eurasia, expecting poverty reduction to result from distributing property titles over agricultural land to local (rural) populations. China's early 1980s land reform offered support for this expectation, but while the spread of propertizing reform to post-communist Eurasia created numerous "subsistence" smallholders, it failed to stimulate entrepreneurship or market-based production among the rural poor. Varga argues that the World Bank advocated a simplified version of China's land reform that ignored a key element of successful reforms: the smallholders' immediate environment, the structure of actors and institutions determining whether smallholders survive and grow in their communities. With concrete insights from analysis of the land reform program throughout post-communist Eurasia and multisited fieldwork in Romania and Ukraine, this book details how and why land reform led to subsistence and the mechanisms underpinning informal commercialization.
This book engages comprehensively with the dynamics of the transitional justice process in Tunisia and its mechanisms, elaborating lessons for transitional justice practice globally. Grounded in new empirical material as well as a broader awareness of transitional justice, this book provides a thorough assessment of transitional justice in Tunisia. Beyond an overview of the process, it critically engages with key questions such as the extent to which the process articulated global contemporary practice, such as liberal state-building and narrow conceptions of justice as civil-political rights, and to which it generated novel approaches at odds with the mainstream that can inform global pract...
This volume addresses the relationship between law and neoliberalism. Assembling work from established and emerging legal scholars, political theorists, philosophers, historians, and sociologists from around the world – including the Americas, Australia, Europe, and the United Kingdom – it addresses the conceptual, legal, and political relationships between liberal legality and neoliberal economics. More specifically, the book analyses the role that legality plays in the dominant economic force of our time, offering both a legal corrective to scholarship in economics and political economy that has paid insufficient attention to legal ideas, and, at the same time, a political economic corrective to legal scholarship that has only recently turned to theorizing neoliberalism. It will be of enormous interest to those working at the intersection of law and politics in our neoliberal age.
The challenge of teaching international studies is to help you think coherently about the multiple causes and effects of global problems. In International Studies: Global Forces, Interactions, and Tensions, award-winning scholars Scott Straus and Barry Driscoll give you a clear framework that pinpoints how key factors—forces, interactions, and tensions—contribute to world events, with both global and local consequences. The authors first show you how to look for common patterns in global issues by introducing four world-shaping forces: global markets, shifting centers of power, information and communications technologies, and global governance. They systematically trace how these forces ...