Toward a Pluripolar Global Financial Architecture? The Bretton Woods Institutions and the New Landscape of Developmental Finance

Abstract

I advance three claims in the paper. First, the Asian and especially the global financial crisis occasioned discontinuities and continuities that are imparting incoherence to the global financial governance architecture and developmental finance. Second, the emergent incoherence is productive of development rather than debilitating. Third, productive incoherence can be understood most fully within a “Hirschmanian mindset,” that is, an understanding of social and regime change informed by Albert O. Hirschman’s key theoretical and epistemic commitments.