Abstract
In her engaging and interesting book, Sarah Babb provides a compelling account of the politics behind the multilateral development banks (MDBs) like the World Bank. Babb seeks to understand how Washington politics shaped the MDBs over the post-Second World War era. She concentrates attention of the period since the 1970s and highlights the interplay between and influences of the executive and legislative branches of the US government. In the process, she weaves together the roles of the leaders, researchers and bureaucrats at the MDBs, think tanks, academics, civil society, and other countries. The reader gets a complex and rich narrative on an important set of global institutions. As a result, the book makes significant contributions to literatures on international political economy, global institutions, organizational and institutional theory, political sociology and other fields.
The preface and introduction lay out the thesis of the book, introduce the foci of her account, and make a case for why scholars should be interested in the MDBs. The first chapter describes and explains the MDBs and how they work, as well as previews her view that the US is an activist shareholder. Chapter two narrates the ‘congressional revolt’ of the late 1970s when the US became a more vocal critic, reformer and reluctant donor for the MDBs. Chapter three focuses on the Reagan era. Chapter four explains the evolution of policy-based conditional lending, and the MDB’s attempts to reform the policies of developing countries. Chapters five and six study the emergence, evolution and decline of the Washington Consensus. Chapter seven introduces the impact of civil society. Chapter eight discusses the second Bush administration and concludes. In a nutshell, Babb’s argument is that the MDBs are resource-dependent organizations that rely on the reluctant support of shareholders. In order to demonstrate this argument, she explains how congressional and executive US politics and politicians shaped the Bank. She shows how experts and policy programs fed into those congressional and executive US politics. Further, she shows how the MDBs straddle both policy and academic fields and thus feed back into scholarship. Thus, ‘behind the development banks’, she identifies the key forces and actors that have the most influence on the policies of the MDBs.
In addition to offering an intriguing argument, Babb provides a fine model of historical sociology. Her archival research methods are both rigorous and not overly showy. The book effectively keeps the narrative and argument front and center while documenting and drawing upon a wide variety of sources. Babb exhibits admirable impartiality in weighing different pieces of evidence and considering alternative explanations. In the process of building her arguments, the book offers insightful accounts of several of the key questions and events in the recent history of the MDBs. For example, Babb offers an informative story about the rise and fall of the Washington Consensus. She deftly illustrates why and how structural adjustment and policy-based conditional lending became a key strategy beginning in the 1980s. The book thoughtfully handles the controversies between Stiglitz and Summers and the World Bank and the IMF in the late 1990s. She also traces the recent rise of concerns with equity, poverty, governance and institutions at the World Bank. Among her contributions to the literature on international institutions, this reader found her account of the reciprocal relationship between academic and MDB research to be novel and previously underappreciated.
Though this is an excellent book, there is room for some friendly critique. First, this reader felt that the book was a bit too cautious in making general theoretical arguments that could be extended beyond the case of the MDBs. Babb provides a clear example of resource dependency, and other organizational and political theories. But, the book does not go terribly far in offering revisions or challenges towards building such theories. Most of the text keeps the theory somewhat in the background as it devotes more attention to the case-specific historical narrative. Second, given her argument of resource dependency, this reader felt her account could have given a more thorough consideration to the political power of business. Babb appears reluctant to incorporate Marxian critiques of international institutions (or even some realist explanations). At the same time, her evidence does not seem to contradict such critiques. After all, it seems reasonable to suggest that the policy programs pushed by advocacy organizations like the Heritage Foundation have roots in the interests and ideologies of economic elites, corporations, and capitalists. Given how important these policy programs were in her account of congressional influence on the MDBs, it seems reasonable to ask why and how business power plays such a role. Perhaps it is also reasonable to discuss how the rise of neoliberal policy programs at the MDBs coincided with the rise of business power in advocacy organizations and other spheres of politics. While her emphasis on the organizational processes driving the MDBs is certainly reasonable, it also seems clear that business has a lot more power than labor, civil society, and developing countries. This reader wondered if the book would have been even stronger if it had engaged and even responded to such alternative accounts.
These criticisms should be taken in the context of what is otherwise an outstanding contribution. The book is readable and interesting and would work well in both upper-level undergraduate and graduate classes. The book would be a good fit for classes on globalization, political sociology, political economy, organizations and institutions. In addition, the book would be valuable for academics, political actors, journalists, and bureaucrats populating the transnational sphere of policy and intellectual debate around the MDBs. The book would also be a good starting point for graduate students interested in learning about global/transnational institutions. Finally, the book is certainly worthy of the attention of a variety of scholars working in related areas of sociology, political science, economics, and public policy. Moreover, general sociological audiences can learn much from this book and can see an example of excellent historical and political sociology.