Seeing Like an International Organization

This book investigates the analytic institutions, the thinking departments, within the most prominent international organizations for global economic governance. The editors provide a framework for understanding how analytic institutions are important in framing what is possible in policies and the contributors apply this framework across a range of cases, including the IMF, the World Bank, the BIS, the OECD, and the WTO.

This book was published as a special issue of New Political Economy.

This book contributes to the study of International Organizations (IOs) by providing a sharp focus on how IOs’ "analytic institutions" interact with states over key policy issues. Analytic institutions include the areas, departments, committees, adjudicatory bodies, and others housed by or linked to IOs that develop the cognitive framework for identifying, understanding, and solving policy problems. Analytic institutions make the state "legible" to IOs and are the key means for how IOs "see" their member states, shaping how international political and economic problems are understood. This book investigates why seeing like an IO matters through cases on leading organizations for global economic governance, including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, and the World Trade Organization. The contributors demonstrate the benefits of studying IOs "from the inside-out" to enrich our understanding of why issues in the international political economy are governed the way they are.

This book was published as a special issue of New Political Economy.