Overview

This book project argues that expert authority—its decline, rise and transformation—is a central force underpinning recent changes in the governance of the financing of development. Tracing the erosion of the structural adjustment era and the emergence of new governance strategies at the IMF and World Bank, the book seeks to understand why this erosion in expert authority occurred, how the new emerging practices seek to re-establish that authority, and what the implications of this shift are—for the international financial institutions and for global governance more generally.

The core of the book examines four broad trends in policy that most key development financing organizations have participated in over the past decade and a half: strategies of standardization, ownership, risk management and results measurement. The actors driving these new governance strategies not only seek to re-establish the grounds of expert authority, but also appeal increasingly to a different kind of authority: a more popular form, based on the inclusion of more stakeholders, the participation of more actors, and the consent of a wider public.

Yet there exist serious tensions between the pursuit of expert and popular authority, producing resistance within the organizations themselves. These tensions in turn have helped foster the creation of new, more provisional forms of expertise and types of governance practice—acting indirectly on a more complex set of objects, anticipating an uncertain future, all the while hedging their bets against the unknown. Thus, expertise itself has become more contested and fragile—a change that is having profound effects on how things are governed globally.

This book project is still very much a work in progress, although it is nearing completion. I have included below an overview of the book's contents, and have made available a draft of the introduction.

Table of contents

Ch. 1 Introduction

Ch. 2 How to Study the How of Governance: Meso-level Analysis

Ch. 3 What Came Before: The Structural Adjustment Era

Ch. 4 The Erosion of Expert Authority

Ch. 5 Standardization

Ch. 6 Ownership

Ch. 7 Risk and Vulnerability

Ch. 8 Results Measurement

Ch. 9 Conclusion: The Rise of Provisional Governance?