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AbstractThis article develops the concept of "interorganizational pathologies" as an extension of Michael N. Barnett and Martha Finnemore's work on bureaucratic pathologies. Adopting an open system perspective, I argue that dysfunctional interactions may arise between international organizations (IOs) even when their cooperation is fairly institutionalized. To advance this line of reasoning, I examine interactions between the International Monetary Fund (IMF or Fund) and the World Bank (or Bank). Evidence from more than ninety stakeholder interviews indicates that the interactions have been marked by what Barnett and Finnemore call "insulation." In particular, two opposing types of interorganizational insulation have been common in the context of Fund–Bank relations: (1) groupthink, or sustained intellectual decoupling by the two IOs from the outside world; and (2) silence, or (temporary) communicative disruption between them. This finding is partly puzzling because while we may expect IMF–World Bank interactions to produce groupthink given the organizations' highly similar worldviews, we would expect them to prevent silence given established protocols for continuous cross-organizational information sharing. The analysis sheds fresh light on the promises and pitfalls of cogovernance by IOs as key players in regime complexes and transnational networks.

AbstractThis article adopts a diachronic view to compare patterns of institutional evolution of cooperation between the International Monetary Fund (IMF or Fund) and the World Bank (or Bank) before and after the global financial crisis. While the rules for Fund‐Bank cooperation had typically been tightened in response to crisis episodes, on balance they were loosened in the wake of the global financial crisis. Building on over 90 semi‐structured expert interviews and relevant official documentation, I argue that this new trend was grounded in changed imaginaries of cooperation among IMF and World Bank officials. Whereas they had tended to envisage integrative futures in key areas of operational overlap before the crisis, alternative visions of more fragmented joint futures came to prevail after it. This difference manifested itself in a profound shift in official discourses about, as well as interviewee accounts of, the function of the Financial Sector Assessment Programme (FSAP) and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). The analysis foregrounds the reflexivity of relationships between international organisations (IOs), especially the ability of IO staff involved in cooperative activities to (re)construct imaginaries that can foster or foreclose inter‐organisational change.

This article adopts a diachronic view to compare patterns of institutional evolution of cooperation between the International Monetary Fund (IMF or Fund) and the World Bank (or Bank) before and after the global financial crisis. While the rules for Fund-Bank cooperation had typically been tightened in response to crisis episodes, on balance they were loosened in the wake of the global financial crisis. Building on over 90 semi-structured expert interviews and relevant official documentation, I argue that this new trend was grounded in changed imaginaries of cooperation among IMF and World Bank officials. Whereas they had tended to envisage integrative futures in key areas of operational overlap before the crisis, alternative visions of more fragmented joint futures came to prevail after it. This difference manifested itself in a profound shift in official discourses about, as well as interviewee accounts of, the function of the Financial Sector Assessment Programme (FSAP) and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). The analysis foregrounds the reflexivity of relationships between international organisations (IOs), especially the ability of IO staff involved in cooperative activities to (re)construct imaginaries that can foster or foreclose inter-organisational change.

Political scientists have long been interested in the rationale behind giving official development assistance (ODA). With a few notable exceptions, scholars have neglected the impact of governing parties of differ-ent provenience on a donor country's foreign aid policy. In order to address this shortcoming, this paper focuses on the change of government from conservative ('right') to social democratic ('left') parties in Sweden (1994) and the United Kingdom (1997). The results contradict and qualify much of the conven-tional wisdom on the allegedly more benign foreign aid policy of social democratic parties. The paper reveals instead that the Swedish and British foreign aid policies of the 1990s share an interesting pattern: Social democrats tend to display a rhetoric that is more attuned to the idea of solidarity than the conserva-tive foreign aid agenda, but in neither case does this tendency translate into a higher degree of solidarity as measured by five quantitative measures. On the contrary, conservative ODA actions speak louder than their words suggest, expressing at least as much, if not more, solidarity than their social democratic rivals.

Many contemporary efforts to govern global challenges are driven by combinations of numbers and futures. This special section proposes the novel concept of 'quantified futures' as a way of grasping this widespread entanglement. Because existing scholarship has largely treated quantification and futurisation as discrete governing technologies, their intersections have remained undertheorised and underexplored. In this introductory article, we discuss similarities between quantification and futurisation to build an integrated analytical framework that outlines how quantified futures operate across transnational policy domains by shaping the salience, scope and urgency of global challenges and their solutions. The special section at large cautions against overly optimistic expectations regarding the capacity of quantified futures to tackle global challenges. Rather, it underscores the need to enquire into the mutually reinforcing effects between, on the one hand, the growing use of quantified futures and, on the other hand, the increase and diversification of global challenges.

Much contemporary economic policy analysis deploys demographic projections. To explore their macroeconomic significance, this article draws on documentary evidence from two case studies: (1) the World Bank's Human Capital Index and (2) European Union models of population ageing within debt sustainability analysis. Combining constructivist and Foucauldian insights, we develop a threefold argument about the constitutive effects of quantified demographic futures on macroeconomic policy analysis. First, the World Bank's and the European Union's respective demographic futures mobilise urgency for contingent policy choices with reference to expected future 'gaps'. Second, they build credibility for contested bodies of expertise on the basis of long-term population forecasts. Third, they delineate agency such that the effects of structural inter-dependencies between economies are rendered as national-level policy risks. These findings demonstrate how quantified demographic futures circumscribe national policy space, mediate the politics of macroeconomic ideas and contribute to the depoliticisation of economic policymaking.