Consensus Era Research Articles

State versus Market Debate and Shaping of the Gender Empowerment Agenda

This article argues that during the neoliberal and post-Washington consensus era, a broader development debate around state versus market has led to the dominance of instrumental articulation of the gender empowerment agenda. Although scholarship around empowerment has evolved, in the works of the development agencies and broader development discourse, constrained by the overarching debate around state versus market, gender empowerment has been robbed of its transformative potential. The present study frames the empowerment debate around three parameters: (a) narrow versus broad, (b) individual agency versus intersectionality and (c) instrumental versus intrinsic justification for empowerment. Finally, future avenues of research are identified, especially how NGOs, transnational advocacy networks (TANs) and civil society organisations (CSOs) can effectively challenge the current corporate agenda or paradigm.

Assessing the Development–Foreign Policy Nexus of the Asian Rising Powers: South Korea, China, Japan and Indonesia

AbstractThis article adopts a holistic view of the theoretical and empirical interconnection between the development and foreign policies of four Asian rising powers: South Korea (hereafter Korea), Japan, Indonesia and China during three consecutive periods; the Washington Consensus (WC) era (1980–1990), the Post‐Washington Consensus (PWC) era (1990–2008) and the Hybrid/Mix (H/M) era (2008–onwards). This study aims to elucidate and compare the level of coherence between the development agenda and foreign policy tools of these four Asian rising powers. First, the article provides an overview of the existing literature on the developmental state and developmental foreign policy. Second, it presents a development‐foreign policy nexus (DFN) framework that takes into account five layers: (1) economics; (2) diplomacy; (3) security and peace; (4) civil society; and (5) state‐market, and their related lines of action and instruments. The last part applies this DFN framework to our selected cases and provides comparative insights based on our newly created DFN Index scores, calculated separately for the four countries in each of the eras under review. In the final analysis, the results of our DFN Index and comparative case studies indicate that since the 1980s, in the selected four countries development has almost become subordinated to foreign policy and this coherence has continued to increase since the end of the 1990s.

Are growth diagnostics biased against the poor? Evidence from the Millennium Challenge Corporation

AbstractMotivationThe growth diagnostics methodology was developed to encourage context‐specific problem‐solving and priority‐setting as a substitute for the universal prescriptions that characterized the Washington Consensus era. While growth diagnostics have been praised and become popular in development planning, little is known about what they do in practice.PurposeThe Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a new aid agency, adopted growth diagnostics in 2007 to guide decision‐making for bilateral development assistance after forging nearly 20 agreements informed by existing Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. This study examines how the MCC’s adoption of growth diagnostics affected its development investments.Approach and methodsThe study used a mixed‐methods approach with primary and secondary data and an interrupted time‐series research design that compares MCC agreements designed with and without growth diagnostics.FindingsThe study found that growth diagnostics helped move the MCC’s investment portfolio away from multi‐sector integrated rural development programmes aimed at high‐poverty regions towards programmes in fewer sectors concentrated in urban areas with large policy and institutional reform components reminiscent of earlier structural adjustment programmes. The article explains how features of the growth diagnostic methodology largely contributed to these changes.Policy implicationsDevelopment planners committed to using diagnostics should employ inclusive growth diagnostics, which modify the original diagnostic in ways that identify and target constraints to achieve pro‐poor growth.

The post-neoliberal South American development

This study addressed the triangular relations between Latin America, Beijing and Washington in the last 15 years using a process tracing technique on the economic and political models of the region. It specifically focused on the South American development during the post-Washington Consensus era, as well as the expanding influence of China over this region. The aim of this paper was to transmit the idea that the failure of neoliberalism in the 90s together with the expansionism of China have shaped the contemporary political and economic arena among the countries of South America. This work could help to understand the historical process of the construction of develop paradigms on the region and its impact on the society.

Evolving concepts in prognostic scoring of chronic GvHD.

Chronic GvHD (cGvHD) remains one of the most complex and challenging complications after allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation. Emerging knowledge about the clinical manifestations and associated organ involvement of cGvHD has led to the establishment of prognostic parameters for post-transplant survival among affected allograft recipients. Studies employing the pre-National Institutes of Health (NIH) consensus data on cGvHD incidence and its risks have led to development of the CIBMTR's cGvHD risk stratification, which serves as the most refined and validated prognostic tool for estimating survival of patients with cGvHD. However, cGvHD global severity scoring has recently evolved as a powerful prognostic tool for patient survival in the post-NIH consensus era. Current use of the substantially redefined NIH criteria of cGvHD diagnosis and measurements of its severity makes it challenging to interpret prognostic scoring systems generated in the pre-NIH era. Some of the pre-NIH prognostic parameters, however, appear to retain their significance in predicting survival independently from the NIH global severity score. Thus, future analyses of prospective cohorts of patients with cGvHD defined by NIH consensus criteria will be critical in reconciling and integrating various prognostic scoring systems of cGvHD.

The BRIC Nations and the Anatomy of Economic Development: The Core Tenets of Rule of Law

Abstract The past decade has witnessed a revival in interest in the relationship between rule of law and economic development. Disenchantment with the universal model that emerged from the Washington Consensus era led to a shift in focus to a more pluralist approach in which policy prescriptions became tailored to each country’s socio-political context. The authors suggest that the pendulum may have swung to the other extreme, and that the newly ascendant pluralist approach may overemphasize pluralism at the expense of core rule of law principles. This paper examines the rule of law building efforts pursued by the BRIC countries to shed light on their strikingly different processes of economic transition. The authors argue that formal, informal, and transitional institutions have played distinct roles in these divergent economic development narratives. While informal and transitional institutions have facilitated growth during initial and intermediate phases of development, a degree of formalization across some institutions is critical to support the long-term development of a market economy. The authors set out the core tenets approach, an exploratory concept that emphasizes a malleable set of fundamental rule of law principles which exist alongside transition institutions to build trust in formal institutions as an economy advances.

Nostalgia narratives? Pejorative attitudes to welfare in historical perspective: survey evidence from Beveridge to the British Social Attitudes Survey

Jensen and Tyler (2015) have powerfully argued that 'anti-welfare commonsense', fuelled by negative political and media discourse stressing welfare dependency and deception, has buttressed support for social security reform in recent years. Along with many other academics they point to the hardening of public attitudes towards welfare state provision and how notions of the 'deserving' and 'undeserving poor' have been reintroduced into popular debates. We identify four distinct threads within this scholarship. First, there is an argument that public attitudes have shifted from an earlier post-war welfare imaginary and settlement to an anti-welfare consensus. Second, this hardening includes a growing prevalence of 'othering'. The third thread is the broadening of this moral and disciplinary gaze to include groups, such as disabled people, who until recently were not subject to the same amount of stigma as other types of benefit recipients. Fourth, is the impact of pejorative welfare discourses on the self-identity and attitudes of disadvantaged groups. While a growing body of evidence makes it increasingly difficult to argue against suggestions that there is a hostile body of anti-welfare sentiment in the UK, what is often implicit in the analysis of pejorative contemporary attitudes to welfare is the view that there was once a 'golden age' of the welfare state when public support was more fully behind a strong set of social security benefits provided as a social right of citizenship. Whether this was the case is a moot point however. Few studies have tried to piece together the attitudes to welfare of the general public during the consensus era. We attempt to undertake such a task here, drawing on ad hoc attitudes surveys and polling data in particular. Specifically, we focus on how notions of the 'deserving' and 'undeserving poor' play out in this data, pointing to some key continuities found in contemporary and historical public attitudes to welfare.

El desarrollo desigual como una característica intencional y estructural de la geografía y la dinámica del capitalismo

The present text is an intertextual analysis of Neil Smith’s affirmation wherein he states the uneven development as the main characteristic of the geography of capitalism. The main goal is to effectively validate Smith’s affirmation by contrasting his hypothesis with the authors and theories in political economy that offer relevant arguments to the discussion. A brief historic framework is drawn to account for the history of the geography of capitalism underlying four main periods: the agrarian capitalism, the 19th century, Keynesian Consensus and neoliberal era. Some of the most important authors in the theories of uneven and combined development are used to draw a line tracking the inequalities intentionally created from the dispossession, to the modernization and neoliberal practice of capital accumulation fostered by increasing inequalities in the context of uneven development.

Development in a Multi-Polar World: The Post-2015 Agenda

This annual review highlights some of the new areas of concern for the development community and new areas of research. Part I discusses the global financial crisis, its causes, developing country responses and the implications for development going forward. Part II considers the growing literature on middle-income countries. Part III looks briefly at low-income countries, whether the recent increase in growth in Africa is sustainable, and the literature on post-conflict reconstruction. Part IV examines the proliferation of new models for the post Washington Consensus, post Beijing Consensus era. Part V presents some critiques of development models and the development field more generally. Part VI summarizes the ongoing efforts to come up with a Post-2015 development agenda. Part VII considers the changing role of international financial institutions.

Back to Basics: The Great Recession and the Narrowing of IMF Policy Advice

This article contributes to the literature on the dynamics of change and continuity in the International Monetary Fund's (IMF's) policy paradigm. The IMF embarked on a process of “streamlining conditionality” during the 2000s, but many observers have argued that the IMF's policy paradigm from the 1990s remains intact. This article examines whether the scope of the IMF's policy advice to borrowers during the Great Recession narrowed in comparison to its advice to borrowers during the heyday of the Washington consensus in the 1980s and 1990s. The article uses qualitative content analysis to establish the frequency of a series of policy dialogue indicators in four sample sets of countries requesting IMF stand‐by arrangements over three decades. The evidence suggests that contemporary IMF policy advice to borrowers continues to stress the importance of fiscal consolidation, with reduced emphasis on promoting the structural economic reforms associated with the Washington consensus era.

Labor repertoires, neoliberal regimes and US hegemony: what ‘deviant’ Italy tells us of OECD unions’ paths to power

This paper notes the tendency of ‘social movement unionism’ scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic to focus on and prescribe the citizen repertoire as the single most important repertoire of labor for challenging neoliberal globalization. Consistent with liberal conceptions of civil society and theories of participatory democracy, it implicitly dismisses political unionism as a path to labor’s revitalization. It also assumes epochal change and confines neoliberalism to the post-Washington Consensus era. Deviant case analysis of Italian labor’s use oftworepertoires (the citizen and the labor repertoire) and of its two regimes of capitalism (in succession, a post-WWII neoliberal regime and a post-1970 corporatist regime) over the course of the ‘American Century’ gives pause to both these contentions. This study relates labor’s citizen repertoire to the era of US hegemony that promotes changes in party-government that tend to reproduce the image of the archetypically neoliberal American polity: a polity that is devoid of ‘labor’ as a recognized category of the political community, is low in social rights, and, relatedly, is devoid of a party of labor. In this neoliberal political order, labor is perennially locked into the category of ‘citizen’ and reliant on the citizen repertoire. By contrast, the survival of parties of labor in non-US polities during the post-war wave of neoliberalism permitted union movements a routeawayfrom labor-decategorizing orders – political unionism. Now, in the post-Washington Consensus wave of neoliberal regime change, that route is more onerous owing to Third Way changes in parties of labor. The major challenge for labor movements that have experienced regime change to a neoliberal polity is in directing their efforts and even their new citizen repertoire to the task of recapturing parties of labor or to creating new ones – or risk long-term US-style labor decategorization.

Organizational culture and public sector reforms in a post–Washington consensus era: Lessons from Ghana’s good reformers

Reforming Africa’s public sector has been on the agenda of African governments and their development partners for decades and yet the problem persists. This failure can be attributed to two related factors: solutions to the ‘African public sector problem’ have been dictated by external interests, and the policies have ignored the experiences of organizations within those countries. This article contributes to the search for effective reform policies by making the case for inclusion of the experiences of organizations within each country. Using the concept of organizational culture as a framework, I propose an approach based on the following claims: In every country there are some public organizations that perform relatively well, given their constraints; there is the need to understand why and how there are poor and good performing organizations within the same country; and information from such analysis should form the basis of public sector reform policies. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated with a study of Ghana.

ONCE MORE BEYOND CONSENSUS: THE “TRANSNATIONAL TURN” AND AMERICAN LIBERAL NATIONALISM

“It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies,” Richard Hofstadter famously wrote, “but to be one.” Defining that “American ideology” or “American creed” obsessed scholars of the consensus era, who celebrated (and occasionally lamented) Americans’ allegiance to a limited liberal vocabulary of rights, freedoms, and markets. The cultural transformations begun in the 1960s seemed to question the very idea of a unitary culture or creed, but some historians responded by exploring alternative ideological founding myths to the liberal consensus. Over the ensuing decades scholars mounted formidable efforts to support republicanism or millennial Christianity as challengers, but liberalism proved a resilient foe. And it seemed to have contemporary history on its side: during the Reagan revolution of the century's final decades the classic liberal combination of scaled-down government and free markets carried the day as Americans’ ideal if not their reality. The Lockean liberal tradition that Louis Hartz described a half-century earlier still appeared the only game in town, although scholars continued to argue over its terms, history, and boundaries.

Transnational discourse coalitions and monetary policy: Argentina and the limited powers of the ‘Washington Consensus’

Why, in the era of neoliberalism, Argentinean monetary policymakers rejected the kind of flexible monetary exchange rates recommended by the ‘Washington Consensus’ remains a puzzle. The literature has mainly contrasted external and internal factors of influence and constraints to explain the country's peculiar road to neoliberalism. In this paper, discourse coalition theory is developed further to more fully capture the transnational configuration of the transnational discourse coalition behind the policy mix chosen under President Menem. In the course of deconstructing the Washington Consensus alliance and reconstructing the particular agents and agencies behind the currency board, apparently contradictory positions turn out to constitute a specific combination of neoliberal agents and agencies that are firmly embedded in the larger universe of the hegemonic discourse coalition of the Washington Consensus era, which has to be considered more heterogeneous than has been recognized by most observers.

Institutions and Productive Development Programs in Latin America and the Caribbean: Methodological Approach and Preliminary Results

In the post-Washington Consensus era, there has been renewed discussion of the role of the State in encouraging productivity. This has led to a debate about the role of institutions and programs that form the basis for state interventions to enhance productivity. These interventions, in many instances, take the form of business development services, support for innovation, export promotion, and other programs that target specific sectors and activities. In general, these interventions are called Productive Development Programs (PDPs). Today, governments in Latin America and the Caribbean devote a great deal of resources to PDPs, supporting firms through official agencies and private intermediaries. Despite their economic justification, there is still no well-defined methodology for assessing their performance or for categorizing PDPs according to their type, size, target market, and delivery mechanisms. This document aims to contribute to the development of a tool to analyze PDPs. The methodology for mapping and measuring of institutional performance (MIDI, from its acronym in Spanish) constitutes an effort to quantify and measure the organizational aspects that contribute to a better balance between the costs and benefits of PDPs. The objective of the MIDI is to measure the quality of the programs and the institutions that are behind them and assess their ability to achieve their stated goals. It is in this vein that the MIDI establishes metrics to analyze how these organizational arrangements are planned, implemented, and monitored. The MIDI is based on a questionnaire that allows for benchmarking and comparative analysis at the level of countries and regions within countries. The methodology has been piloted with field surveys in four countries in Latin America and the Caribbean based on an initial questionnaire. From this pilot phase, performance metrics have been developed for the institutions and programs studied, certain common elements have been identified, and some preliminary conclusions drawn—both for improving the methodology and for suggesting new ways to analyze PDPs. The MIDI identifies characteristics of an organizational and comparative nature. At the same time, it allows the formulation of ordinal metrics and the identification of policy recommendations based on variables that are both objective and qualitative. In particular, the MIDI offers guidelines for comparing similar PDPs and the institutions that offer them by measuring their strengths and weaknesses, identifying best practices for dissemination and wider application, and providing a method for mapping programs by type, beneficiary, cost, and other variables. This technical note is divided into the following sections. Section 1 gives a general introduction to what PDPs offer and, in addition, describes the theoretical foundations for their different dimensions and implications for * This technical note is based on a methodological proposal prepared by Gonzalo Rivas and Roberto DeGroote. The company ACE and Dr. Jesus Esteban helped to carry out field tests in Latin America and the Caribbean and contributed to improving the methodology. The authors are grateful to Alessandro Maffioli, Carlo Pietrobelli, Joan Prats, Gonzalo Rivas, and Jesus Esteban for their comments on the first draft.

New Alternatives for the Post Washington Consensus Era

New Alternatives for the Post Washington Consensus Era

A Global Knowledge Bank? The World Bank and Bottom-Up Efforts to Reinforce Neoliberal Development Perspectives in the Post-Washington Consensus Era

In the late 1990s, in reaction to growing protests against its insistence on the universal applicability of market-oriented development programs (the ‘Washington Consensus’), the World Bank reinvented itself as a ‘global knowledge bank’. The Bank has gone to considerable effort to improve and decentralize its knowledge management, aiming to increase sensitivity and responsiveness. Critical scholars argue that the Bank continues to be run by small bureaucratic-technocratic circles, which work to retain and increase top-down control over the process of development. Assessments of the new knowledge strategy in general are mixed. Some scholars praise a ‘post-Washington Consensus’ enhancing development opportunities due to better knowledge management and increasing pluralism. Others maintain that the new strategy is likely to enhance the overload and ineffectiveness of the World Bank, which already suffers from too many conflicting goals. A third line of argument holds that the new strategy is likely to be effective, but as a way to ensure the reinforcement of disciplinary neoliberalism rather than as a way to improve the prospects for development as such. In the light of such contradictory claims, this paper links an analysis of the World Bank to a closer examination of the de-centralized civil society networks which have been promoted by the World Bank and others. Considerable neoliberal efforts come to light, which are crucial to understand better the way in which the ‘global knowledge bank’ is central to reinforcing and augmenting neoliberal hegemony. En los últimos años de 1990, el Banco Mundial se reinventó a sí mismo como un ‘banco global de conocimiento’, como una reacción a las crecientes protestas contra su insistencia en la aplicación universal de programas de desarrollo orientados al mercado (‘Consenso de Washington’). El Banco se ha esforzado considerablemente para mejorar y descentralizar el manejo del conocimiento con el fin de incrementar sensibilidad y receptividad. Al mismo tiempo, los académicos críticos sostienen que el Banco continúa siendo manejado por círculos pequeños de tecnócratas burocráticos que trabajan para retener y aumentar el control de arriba hacia abajo sobre el proceso del desarrollo. Las evaluaciones de la nueva estrategia del conocimiento en general son variadas. Algunos académicos elogian las oportunidades mejoradas de desarrollo del ‘consenso post-Washington’ debido a un mejor manejo del conocimiento y aumento de pluralismo. Otros mantienen que lo más probable es que la nueva estrategia realce el sobrecargo e ineficacia de un Banco Mundial, que ya sufre de muchos objetivos finales conflictivos. El tercer argumento sostiene que probablemente la nueva estrategia sea eficaz, pero eficaz como una manera de asegurar el refuerzo del neoliberalismo disciplinario en vez de mejorar la posibilidad de desarrollo como tal. A la luz de tales afirmaciones contradictorias, este artículo enlaza un análisis del Banco Mundial con un análisis de las redes descentralizadas de sociedades civiles, que han sido promovidas por el Banco Mundial y otros. En particular, los esfuerzos neoliberales considerables salen a la luz, los cuales son cruciales para entender mejor de qué manera el ‘conocimiento global del banco’ es esencial para reforzar y ampliar la hegemonía neoliberal.

From the Washington to the Post-Washington Consensus: The influence of international agendas on education policy and practice in Malawi

Education is receiving ever-increasing priority in the post-Washington consensus era, which views education as both a means to and end of development. However, justification for the attention given to education continues to be centrally focused on the notion of human capital. By consequence, marketisation and privatisation of education are becoming increasingly significant. With the World Bank and WTO joining forces to create a vision for a 'global education industry', emphasis is placed on free trade in educational goods and services. The paper examines critically the implications of this international education agenda for developing countries, focusing on the experience of Malawi.

Community Participation in School Policy and Practice in Malawi: Balancing local knowledge, national policies and international agency priorities

Community participation has become increasingly formalised in international and national educational policy-making in recent years. The concept has, however, been interpreted in particular ways in the context of the post-Washington consensus, with implications for the success of its implementation. Drawing on research in Malawi, the article explores the extent to which publicly-stated policy commitments towards community participation are realised in practice. In particular, it finds that the main motivation for 'participation' is extractive rather than a genuine attempt to encourage local ownership and accountability. Furthermore, marketisation of com munity participation is evident, signifying the entrenchment of individual responsibility for meeting social needs which was previously associated with advocacy for user fees during the Washington consensus era.

Paradigms of American Politics: Beyond the One, the Two, and the Many

In social studies, Louis Hartz observed eighteen years ago, we still live in the shadow of the Progressive era.1 The book in which he wrote these words played a major and, in some respects, decisive role in dissipating that shadow and moving the study of society into the bright, warm, soothing sunlight of the consensus era. For a decade thereafter, the dominant image of society among scholars and intellectuals was that formulated and expressed in the works of Boorstin, Hofstadter, Parsons, Potter, Bell, Lipset, Hartz himself, and many others. The consensus theory was the product of a new scholarly concern with what was different about society and, indeed, American civilization. The consensus theory marked not only a rejection of the earlier progressive paradigm of politics. It also differed from, although it was not entirely incompatible with, the pluralistic model which, from the early decades of the century, had been the most popular paradigmatic child of the political science profession. The progressive theory stressed class conflict; the pluralist model stressed the competition among a multi-