New Political Economy, Vol. 9, No. 2, June 2004

Introduction: Globalisation,Governance and DevelopmentGRAHAM HARRISON

Whence development?Few disciplines have faced as much turbulence as development studies over thelast 40 years.1 This fact is all the more significant as this period takes up almostthe entire official history of the discipline.2 Studying development is indeed afairly recent endeavour: emerging as an idea in the 1950s and institutionalisingitself in universities and international organisations in the 1960s and 1970s,development set out a basic set of premises that allowed it to work as aseparate area of research, drawing in social scientists from longer-standingdisciplines. The premises were: an interest in the Third World (or itssynonyms), a normative commitment to economic growth and industrialisationin these areas, and an adoption of national frames of analysis.3 These premisesallowed development studies to maintain a core research agenda whilst givingrise to quite distinct and contesting theories or schools. During the 1980s thereemerged a sense that development studies was in abeyance, reaching an impasse,or faced with a death of development as a form of policy practice in concretesituations.4

With this background in mind, it is highly noteworthy that development asa concept has not fallen from view from the 1990s to the present day. Rather,it has undergone a dual transformation: it has gained an increased prominenceand become decentralised into a wider intellectual fieldno longer the provinceof a specific discipline. Development studies no longer owns development, anddevelopment has come to encompass many of the issues and interests of socialscience generally.5 Thus it is not surprising to find that some of the concerns ofinternational political economy (IPE) have necessarily involved reflections on,and contributions to, the meaning of development. This special issue of NewPolitical Economy explores an important aspect of the international politicaleconomy of development: its encounter with two of the most central (if not themost central) terms within international political economy, namely, globalisationand governance.

Development studies has always engaged with many issues that fit squarelywithin international political economy. Development is ultimately a relational

Graham Harrison, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, Elmfield, NorthumberlandRoad, Sheffield S10 2TU, UK

ISSN 1356-3467 print; ISSN 1469-9923 online/04/020155-08 2004 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1356346042000218041

Graham Harrison

concept; it makes no sense unless it is operationalised comparatively or withsome telos in mind, and the latter has necessarily been evoked through inter-national and comparative study. Development studies bequeathed a key vocabu-lary to IPE: world systems, cores and satellites, neo-colonialism, latedevelopment (pace Alexander Gerschenkron), developmental states, and so on.Perhaps Bretts secular The World Economy since the War best demonstrateshow an analysis closely aligned with what is now generally called critical IPEcan make sense of the (mis)fortunes of Third World states during the GoldenAge of capitalism and the effects of the 197173 crisis.6 Much of the literaturethat falls within the rubric of dependency/world systems theory can easily beread as a chapter in a broader lineage of theories of imperialism.7 Lessradically, but equally influential, and more focused on comparative rather thaninternational issues, many analyses within development economics and modern-isation theory sought to identify the key universal economic indices, socialpractices and/or institutions that allowed Third World states (in the famousphrase) to take off on a pathway to wealth and modernity. Most recently,development studies has engaged directly with the concept of globalisation.8

If development studies has something to offer IPE, it is striking that there isnot a better established inter-disciplinary literature; there is no easily identifiableIPE of development genre;9 it is only now in construction;10 and it is importantto ensure that development ex libris from development studies is not ignorantof pre-existing debates and insights from development studies. It is in this veinthat this special issue carries some of the most influential writers withindevelopment studies who are closely focused on globalisation and governanceand concomitantly the question of what IPE can offer for our understanding ofdevelopment.

Globalisation and governanceWhy has development become an increasingly important facet of IPE? Thereis no simple or monocausal answer to this question; rather, a confluence of ideasand events have brought development issues to the fore. The liberalisation ofnational economies throughout the 1980s led to the intensification of inter-national economic interconnections. Although there have been spirited debatesabout the historic novelty and extent of this economic globalisation, all agreethat new forms of international economic relations have emerged11 and that thesehave profound repercussions for the development of states, regions and sub-regions. This awareness emerged early on in the regulation schools analysis ofthe new international division of labour (NIDL).12 The NIDL represented aglobal economy in which certain sectors of manufacturing, following a logic ofcost minimisation under intense price competition, migrated to low-regulationand labour-cheap states. Although the NIDL fell from favour as a populartheoretical framework in the 1990s, research into global commodity chainsmaintained a focus on new forms of global production and the involvement ofpoor states therein.13 These works set a precedent for the growing attention paidto new spatial concepts of economic change that did not mainly rest onframeworks of national decline or growth in the West. Economic globalisation

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opens up a revived interest in relations between different regions and economicsectors in which relations between developed and developing areas gain arenewed salience.

Of course, economic globalisation and its spatial effects do not necessarilymean that all states or societies in the world are becoming more alike or equal.As Wade demonstrates in this issue, neoliberal globalisation has proven to besticky, producing agglomerations of certain economic activities in certain partsof the global economy. It is also the case that sub-Saharan Africa, although notdisconnected or remote from globalisation, has not received an enhanced influxof foreign direct investment, even after sometimes quite bold liberalisation of thenational economy.14 In other words, economic globalisation means differentthings for different parts of the world; there is no clear homogenisation ofeconomic well-being as liberals might imagine and, as a result, issues ofdevelopment and inequality remain central to our understanding of globalisation.

Critical IPE has been keen to analyse globalisation as a political project. Inthis view, globalisation is not the global release of an immanent desire ofindividuals and businesses to truck, barter and exchange;15 it is rather aneoliberal project, based in a conviction that markets manage resources in asuperior way to states, but that public institutions are required to impose andmaintain those markets. This approach has produced a substantial literature,focused on the political economy of liberalisation and more specific topics suchas the Washington Consensus, changing financial architectures, regionalisationand the emergence of so-called competition states. As this literature hasdeveloped, it has become more apparent that neoliberal globalisation has notmerely involved the rolling back of the state and the profusion of a revivedglobal entrepreneurialism or competitive drive; rather, neoliberalism has beenprosecuted, consolidated and maintained through new forms of public action,both national and international. The simple notion that neoliberal globalisationrequires a kind of global rolling back of public authority has far less currencynow than it did in the early 1990s when hyperglobalists16 and business schoolwriters declared the obsolescence of the nation-state.17 In its place, researchershave become interested in new forms of neoliberal regulation, governance ordiscipline.18

The repercussions of this for the IPE of development are very significantindeed. During the 1980s one reason why development as a concept sufferedtribulations was that many established notions of public intervention in theeconomy were profoundly undermined.19 Until that point, development hadcommonly been understood as involving state planning and national develop-ment programmesa kind of Keynesianism for the post-colonial states.20 Thedelegitimation of state action generally rendered development as nothing otherthan the freeing up of the market and, as a result, development lost much ofits identity as a concept distinct from the general desire for market-led growth.In Leyss pithy phrase: by the end of the 1980s, the only development policythat was officially approved was not having one.21 Why talk about development,when we already have economic liberalisation as a general template for allsocieties? The reintroduction of notions of regulation and governance to studiesof globalisation once more raises the issue of public action and the relationship

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between planning and development. In other words, how do new forms of globalgovernance affect the prospects for development in the poorest components ofthe global system? The core of an answer to this grand question requires ananalysis of the international financial institutions (IFIs) which have been ex-tremely active in shaping development agendas in a large number of indebtedstates with small economies or suffering from financial instability.22

In sum, IPE offers two central issues for new understandings of development:first, the impact of globalisation on developing states; second, the governance ofdevelopment possibilities by the IFIs. The contributions to this issue engage withthese two issues.

Towards an IPE of developmentThe central claim of neoliberal globalisation is that economic openness willpromote economic growth. Openness will attract new sources of capital, promoteefficiency, produce sectoral changes in national economies that enhance special-isation and increase access to all that is progressive about globalisationcultur-ally, technologically, socially and politically. If there is a single word that actsas a desideratum to underpin all of these expectations, it is convergence.Furthermore, in the neoliberal framework, economic growth and convergencewill produce a generalised improvement to well-being, not an exacerbated socialdifferentiation. In Nederveen Pieterses words, the rising tide of globaleconomic integration will lift all boats.23 Thus, after 20 years of liberalisation,one would expect to be able to see some positive signs in the indicators ofinequality and poverty. In a speech to one of the annual World Bank confer-ences, James Wolfensohn strikes a sombre note concerning world poverty,noting that there were as many absolute poor in the world in 1999 as there werein 1987.24 This is hardly a resounding justification of the neoliberal project, butit also raises a great challenge to those international institutions at the forefrontof the great neoliberal push of the 1980s and 1990s: how legitimate are WorldBank and IMF neoliberal interventions in poor countries when there is importantevidence that poverty is not falling and inequality is increasing?

Robert Wade takes up this question in order principally to demonstrate howevidence about the relationship between liberalisation and poverty reduction isfar from justifying the global prescriptions of the IFIs.25 In the first place, theevidence is not robust enough to make definitive statements about poverty. TheBanks search for self-assuring certitude is surely partially a public relationsexercise, reflecting a desire to legitimate its role within the global economy.Wade concludes discerningly that the proportion of absolute poor is probablyfalling, but the absolute number of the same is likely to be rising. Wade goes onto look at how the key success stories are not exemplars of economic openness,but are instead suggestive of other policy agendas not favoured by the IFIs. Akey aspect of the reason why liberalisation does not necessarily produceprocesses of economic equalisation is that value-capturing economic activitiesare still spatially embedded and located in certain regions of Europe, Japan andNorth America. In this context, comprehensive liberalisation would work tomaintain poverty and inequality rather than solve these problems.26

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Clearly, Wade deals a body blow to the foundations of the political argu-ment of neoliberal globalisation as developmentally progressive. This raisesthe question of the value of globalisation as a concept to the study of povertyreduction and development. In this respect, the contributions by Paul Cammackand Ben Fine can be read together. Like Wade, Cammack is interested inthe meaning of poverty reduction for the IFIs. While not rejecting the possibilitythat the World Bank might have a genuine desire to reduce poverty, and indeedmight make progress towards attaining this goal, Cammack allocatespoverty reduction to a second-order place in his conceptualisation of theBanks operational imperatives. What matters most for the Bank (and byimplication the IMF and other institutions as well) is the global consolidation ofcapitalist social relations; not just the integration of all countries into circuits ofglobal trade and investment, but the establishment of property, capitalist classes,working classes and impoverished reserve armies. Thus, for Cammack, povertyreduction is symptomatic of a far bolder and deeper neoliberal project than thatassociated with shock therapy, which assumed that the radical removal of stateaction from the economy would produce the desired market-led revivals. Rather,the Bank and others wish to make deep interventions into social relationsin indebted states, which requires a specific role of governments as ownersof neoliberal reform, subjected to the powerful ideational oversight of theBank.

Fine gives a more open-ended rendition of globalisation as a concept withinthe IPE of development than Cammack, producing a genealogy of its emergenceout of the dead-ends of postmodernism and neoliberalism. For Fine, globalisa-tion encapsulates something of an escape from the market fundamentalism ofneoliberalism, although this is not to say that globalisation is unproblematic.Fine identifies and celebrates the trend within globalisation studies towards arenewed interest in the material, but he is also very aware of the intellectualcontestations within this shift. He is particularly concerned with the limits of theways that globalisation is understood within economics. Orthodox economicshas embarked on a new imperialism, not only spreading methodologies ofrational choice to the social sciences, but also employing concepts from otherdisciplines in order to affirm the importance of the non-economic or, perhapsmore accurately, the non-market. This is the realm of information-theoreticeconomics, social institutions and the reintroduction of the state as a develop-mental actor. For Fine, these developments represent a problematic and limitedescape from neoliberal orthodoxies and he ends with a consideration of an olderconcept that might provide a more productive way forward for the IPE ofdevelopment: imperialism.

Alice Sindzingre develops Fines analysis and brings the focus more closelyto the way in which concepts of globalisation and liberalisation have beeninstitutionalised into the operations of the World Bank. The economics imperial-ism identified by Fine not only expands itself into academic disciplines andconcepts, but also pervades the institutional thinking and action of IFIs. Sind-zingre is interested in the ways that academic research has interrelated with theconceptualisation of development by the World Bank. Looking at states, institu-tions and inequality, Sindzingre shows how each of these issues is dealt with by

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a certain set of methodologies of economic study and how these methodologiesare at the heart of World Bank thinking about development. Thus neoclassicaleconomics works as an efficient form of development thinking for the WorldBanka way of operationalising neoliberalism in the name of development.Furthermore, because the ideas of orthodox economics are so strongly taken upby the Bank, these concepts acquire truth as a means to effective policyexecution. Overall, Sindzingre demonstrates that the intellectual contestationsdetailed by Fine have important repercussions for development practice bypowerful institutions such as the World Bank.

The final two contributions consider different aspects of the realisation inspecific regions of the development ideas analysed by Fine and Sindzingre. BenThirkell-White looks at the fortunes of the IMF in elaborating a more politically-interested framework to ensure the stability of reform. Looking at South Koreaand Indonesia, Thirkell-White considers the extent to which the IMF applies anunderstanding of civil society in the sense of either Locke or Montesquieu. Whatemerges clearly from this consideration is the fact that the IMFs foundations asa technocratic institution, in which politics is by-and-large an encumbrance tothe realisation of market clearance, equilibria and Pareto efficiency, sits veryawkwardly with the recent engagement with civil society which must, at somelevel, be an interpretive act.

Underlying the equivocations of the IMF in East Asia after the financial crashis a desire to ensure the stability of reform. The need for stability duringneoliberal reform is at the heart of the renewed desire by the IFIs to makegovernance part of their developmental agendas. This brings our attention to theways in which IFIs interact with specific national institutional forms andhistories, something that Thirkell-White sees as pivotal to understanding thedifferent fortunes of his two case studies. For Paul Mosley, sub-Saharan Africaraises a different formulation of the same concern. The concern with reformstability is as much about constructing the right institutions as understandingwhat institutions currently exist. Here, we return to the currently prominentconcern with poverty reduction, for Mosley is mainly interested in the executionof poverty reduction programmes, collectively known as Poverty ReductionStrategy Papers (PRSPs) in much of Africa. Pro-poor policies, Mosley argues,serve to achieve two goals: in the first place, they realise the good-in-itself ofpoverty reduction. Second, these policies tend to improve state capacity gener-ally: pro-poor policies make states more legitimate, give them a strongerinstitutional presence in rural societies, allow them to manage (and reduce)inequalities more effectively and improve social capital by increasing access toeducation and public information. Thus, for Mosley, there is more Montesquieuthan Locke in pro-poor policy in sub-Saharan Africa: a civil society engagedwith a pro-poor state which might in significant ways be consolidating socialrelations within society with a view to attaining social stability.

Collectively, these articles demonstrate that, however we understand develop-ment in the present day, we have to acknowledge the powerful formativeinfluences of changes within IPE. Economic globalisation and new forms ofglobal governance mean that development is not what it used to be, even if aconcern with development should be as pressing today as it was 20 years ago.

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Notes1. The articles in this special issue originated in the conference: Towards a Political Economy of

Development: Globalisation and Governance, held at the University of Sheffield in July 2001 andsupported by the Political Economy Research Centre (University of Sheffield) and the Centre for the Studyof Globalisation and Regionalisation (University of Warwick).

2. Official here is to recognise that the rise of development studies was not ab initio; rather it relied on adeeper history of Enlightenment thought and colonial practice from 1940 when Britain passed the ColonialDevelopment Act. A detailed and compelling treatment of all of this is Mike Cowen & Robert Shenton,Doctrines of Development (Routledge, 1996).

3. Mark Berger, The Nation-State and the Challenge of Global Capitalism, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 22,No. 6 (2001), pp. 889908; and Mark Berger, The Rise and Demise of National Development and theOrigins of Post-Cold War Capitalism, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2(2001), pp. 21134.

4. Inter alia: Frans Schuurman (ed.), Beyond the Impasse: New Directions in Development Theory (Zed,1996); and David Booth, Marxism and Development Sociology: Interpreting the Impasse, WorldDevelopment, Vol. 13, No. 7 (1985), pp. 76187.

5. Apart from IPE, development has gained new prominence in cultural studies (especially post-structuralversions) through the methodology of deconstruction, and political theory through considerations ofinequality and justice at a global scale, especially in the work of Thomas Pogge.

6. Edward A. Brett, The World Economy since the War: The Politics of Uneven Development (Macmillan,1985).

7. This is how Brewer understands dependency theory. See Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperial-ism: A Critical Survey (Routledge, 1980).

8. Frans Schuurman (ed.), Globalisation and Development Studies (Sage, 2001); Philip McMichael, Develop-ment and Social Change: A Global Perspective (Pine Forge Press, 2000); and Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalisa-tion and the Postcolonial World: Towards a New Political Economy of Development (Palgrave, 1997).

9. Development studies has not established a strong track record in analysing the global and systemicprocesses that have been the central provenance of IPE. See Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Global Inequality:Bringing Politics Back In, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 6 (2002), p. 1034.

10. A key statement on the prospects for the construction of an IPE of development is Anthony Payne, TheGlobal Politics of Development: Towards a New Agenda, Progress in Development Studies, Vol. 1, No.1 (2001), pp. 519.

11. Between the mid 1980s and the mid 1990s, world foreign direct investment increased at an annual rateof 28% and global trade by 14%. Gavin Kitching, Seeking Social Justice Through Globalisation (PennState Press, 2001), p. 87.

12. Freidrich Frobel et al., The New International Division of Labour (Cambridge University Press, 1980).13. Gary Gereffi & Miguel Korzeniewicz (eds), Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Praeger, 1994).14. Sub-Saharan Africa underwent 241 Structural Adjustment Programmes in 36 countries between 1980 and

1989. See Francis Owusu, Pragmatism and the Gradual Shift from Dependency to Neoliberalism: TheWorld Bank, African Leaders, and Development Policy in Africa, World Development, Vol. 31, No. 10(2003), p. 1659.

15. See Greenspans paraphrased words in the Wade article. Another key spokesperson in the globalmanagement of the economy, former Secretary General of the World Trade Organization, Michael Moore,made a similar point: Globalisation is not an ideology but economic evolution, in Philip McMichael,Sleepless in Seattle: What is the WTO about?, Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 7, No.3 (2000), p. 472. Both Greenspan and Moore wish to portray global liberalisation as the realisation of animmanent human nature. See also David Williams, Constructing the Economic Space: The World Bankand the Making of Homo Oeconomicus, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 28, No. 1(1999), pp. 7999; and John Brohman, Economism and Critical Silences in Development Studies: ATheoretical Critique of Neoliberalism, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1995), pp. 297314.

16. A phrase employed in David Held et al., Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Polity,1999).

17. Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation-State: The Rise of Regional Economies (Free Press, 1995); andThomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Harper Collins, 1999).

18. Stephen Gill, Globalisation, Market Civilisation, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism, Millennium: Journal of

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International Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1995), pp. 399423; Ronen Palan & Jason Abbott, State Strategiesin the Global Political Economy (Pinter 1999); and Rita Abrahamsen, Disciplining Democracy: Develop-ment Discourse and Good Government in Africa (Zed, 2000).

19. An impressive analysis of this is Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and InstitutionalChange in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

20. Colin Leys, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory (James Currey, 1996), p. 6.21. Colin Leys, The Crisis in Development Theory , New Political Economy, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1996), p. 42.22. Robert Wade, What Strategies are Viable for Developing Countries Today? The World Trade Organiza-

tion and the Shrinking of Development Space , Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 10, No.4 (2003), pp. 62145.

23. Nederveen Pieterse, Global Inequality, p. 1027.24. James Wolfensohn, opening speech, in Joseph Stiglitz & Pierre-Alain Muet (eds), Governance, Equity, and

Global Markets (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. xxvii.25. On the same issue, and broadly in keeping with Wade, see the special issue of Journal of International

Development, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2004).26. Despite the statistical problems, it is clear that global inequality has increased during the neoliberal age,

as many UNDP Human Development Reports demonstrate.

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