Global Institutions and Development: Framing the World? Edited by Morten Boas, Desmond McNeill. New York: Routledge, 2004. 253 pp., $124.95 cloth (ISBN: 0-415-31289-2), $36.95 paper (ISBN 0-415-31290-6). John Maynard Keynes has often been quoted as observing that the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. This assertion was reiterated by Peter Hall (1989:14), who noted that it is ideas, in the form of economic theories and the policies developed from them, that have enabled “national leaders to chart a course through turbulent economic times, and ideas about what is efficient, expedient, and just that motivate the movement from one line of policy to another.”Hall (1989:9–10) also observed that ideas may have a “persuasiveness, and hence a political dynamism, of their own, and it forces us to ask which ideational qualities make for persuasiveness and which detract from it.” These observations go a long way to confirm the view that the reductionist proposition of materialists, that ideas are part of the superstructure rather than the base of political economy, is no longer tenable. More recently, attention to the paradigmatic importance of ideational factors in determining policy has come to the fore in international relations. Attention has been drawn in particular to the increased role of epistemic communities—expert-based groups referred to by Burhkart Holzner and John Marx (1979) as knowledge-oriented communities that are mostly composed of academics, journalists, and policy analysts associated with think tanks, research centers, and policy institutes (see also Hall 1989; Goldstein and Keohane 1993; Woods 1995; Bokhari 2002:15). Following Peter Haas (1992, 1994), Kamran Bokhari (2002:15) sees epistemic communities as groups that recognize a certain authentication criterion and adhere to a set of conventions of conduct, which they deem indispensable, in order to warrant the accuracy of their inferences. Daniel Drezner (2001:63) sees …