Abstract
AbstractGiven long‐standing criticism of global economic institutions by rising powers, it is puzzling that these same governments supported the transfer of substantial resources and responsibilities to the IMF and the World Bank during recent reform negotiations. We argue rising powers’ support for international organization (IO) empowerment is linked to their concerns regarding an IO's flexibility. We introduce two types of flexibility as being most relevant for rising powers. These include governance flexibility – the extent to which rising powers may participate in IO decision‐making – and issue flexibility – the extent to which rising power preferences are incorporated into IO policies and programs. We illustrate our argument by examining the preferences of the BIC states (Brazil, India and China) towards IMF and World Bank reforms between 2008 and 2012. Drawing on archival material with over 50 statements from BIC representatives, we find, first, that there were clear links between Bank and Fund governance flexibility and the BICs’ support for empowerment of these IOs, but that this was not true for issue flexibility. Second, we find evidence indicating the strategies of individual BIC governments differ within these IOs, suggesting a need to undertake more differentiated studies of rising powers’ IO activities.
Highlights
Given long-standing criticism of global economic institutions by rising powers, it is puzzling that these same governments supported the transfer of substantial resources and responsibilities to the IMF and the World Bank during recent reform negotiations
Whereas the BICs directly link their support for IO empowerment (IOE) to improvements in governance flexibility, we find only limited evidence that the BICs try to bargain for improvements in issue flexibility in exchange for their IOE support
How does international organization (IO) flexibility affect new powers’ willingness to support IOE? We posit that rising powers view IOE as a means of addressing concerns related to two types of IO flexibility: member state representation in IO decision-making procedures and the inclusion of issues which are relevant for rising powers into IO programs and policies
Summary
Much of rising powers’ dissatisfaction with existing IOs arises from the lack of flexibility these institutions have shown in adapting to the changing global economic context. A large literature has developed on how rising powers use their growing material resources to create new formal and informal institutions (Chin, 2014; Cooper, 2017; Serrano, 2018) – including the New Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the BRICS grouping These decisions are at least partly motivated by a desire to pressure existing IOs to speed up ongoing reforms (Lesage et al, 2015). The initial study by Koremenos et al (2001) on the institutional design of international institutions was followed by a rich literature examining diverse flexibility instruments, for example, membership rules and voting procedures or short and long-term flexibility (Baccini et al, 2015; Koremenos and Nau, 2010) These flexibility instruments represent the variety of formal and informal means available to states to adapt IO rules and procedures in light of changing global power distribution. In contrast to other studies which have so far used additive indexes to measure different levels of empowerment (Graham, 2017; Heldt and Schmidtke, 2017), this piece examines the nexus empowerment-flexibility to study the conditions under which BICs are more likely to support IOE.
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