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Jacqueline Best argues that the changes in International Monetary Fund, World Bank and donor policies in the 1990s, towards what some have called the "Post-Washington Consensus", were driven by an erosion of expert authority and an increasing preoccupation with policy failure. Failures such as the Asian financial crisis and the decades of despair in sub-Saharan Africa led these institutions to develop governance strategies designed to avoid failure: fostering country ownership, developing global standards, managing risk and vulnerability and measuring results. In contrast to the structural adjustment era when policymakers were confident that they had all the answers, the author argues that we are now in an era of provisional governance, in which key actors are aware of the possibility of failure even as they seek to inoculate themselves against it. This book considers the implications of this shift, asking if it is a positive change and whether it is sustainable. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.

Jacqueline Best argues that the changes in International Monetary Fund, World Bank and donor policies in the 1990s, towards what some have called the 'Post-Washington Consensus,' were driven by an erosion of expert authority and an increasing preoccupation with policy failure. Failures such as the Asian financial crisis and the decades of despair in sub-Saharan Africa led these institutions to develop governance strategies designed to avoid failure: fostering country ownership, developing global standards, managing risk and vulnerability and measuring results. In contrast to the structural adjustment era when policymakers were confident that they had all the answers, the author argues that we are now in an era of provisional governance, in which key actors are aware of the possibility of failure even as they seek to inoculate themselves against it. This book considers the implications of this shift, asking if it is a positive change and whether it is sustainable. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.

AbstractWhile the last few decades of political economic history give the impression that the logic of neoliberalism is inexorable, this article argues that once we look further backwards and dig into recently declassified archives documenting the early days of neoliberal theory and practice, we find a messier picture. Economic policymakers in Thatcher and Reagan's administrations in the early 1980s did not set out to 'fail forwards' by generating a crisis that would enable a statist kind of neoliberalism. The key ideas that they drew on and the policies that they used to put them into practice sought to transform the economy indirectly, through a set of performative policy devices that they believed would generate a dramatic shift in people's inflationary expectations, lowering inflation without provoking a major recession. Archival records make it clear that these efforts were not only a failure, but also one that policymakers were acutely aware of at the time. By examining these quiet failures in economic policy, we can better understand how these governments simultaneously failed in their early efforts to introduce neoliberal economics and yet ultimately succeeded in transforming their economies in important respects – and in legitimising those transformations by narrating failure as a kind of inevitable success.

Politicians proved unwilling to do the hard work of challenging vested interests and convincing electorates of the need for more profound reforms in the aftermath of the crisis.

How exactly did the neoliberal imaginary that Konings describes gain so much traction? Was its speculative temporality smoothly translated into practice from the writings of Hayek and others as he suggests, or was its production a messier, more contested, and more contingent affair? In this brief commentary, I go back to one of the key historical moments that he examines, the Volcker shock of 1979-82, and examine some of the more mundane political and technical struggles that defined the early Reagan Administration's efforts to put the neoliberal speculative logic into practice. By revealing the often-flawed material efforts that go into producing speculative temporalities, I argue that such struggles might allow us to arrive at a less teleological account of the resilience of neoliberalism.

Leaders of liberal democracies heavily invested in theories that economic decision-making could be walled off from the impure world of politics. The global financial crisis proved them wrong.

How exactly did the neoliberal imaginary that Konings describes gain so much
traction? Was its speculative temporality smoothly translated into practice from
the writings of Hayek and others as he suggests, or was its production a
messier, more contested, and more contingent affair? In this brief commentary, I
go back to one of the key historical moments that he examines, the Volcker shock
of 1979-82, and examine some of the more mundane political and technical
struggles that defined the early Reagan Administration's efforts to put the
neoliberal speculative logic into practice. By revealing the often-flawed
material efforts that go into producing speculative temporalities, I argue that
such struggles might allow us to arrive at a less teleological account of the
resilience of neoliberalism.

In an era in which scholars have become increasingly skeptical about the concept of exceptionalism, this article argues that instead of rejecting it, we should rework it: moving beyond seeing it primarily as a security practice by recognizing the crucial role of political economic exceptionalism. Drawing on Foucault's later lectures on security, population, and biopolitics, this article suggests that we can understand exceptionalist moves in both security and economic contexts as efforts to manage and secure a population. Focusing on three key moments in the production of exceptional politics – defining the limit of normal politics, suspending the norm, and putting the exception into practice – I examine the parallels, intersections, and tensions between political economic and security exceptionalism, using the concept of economic exceptionalism to make sense of the 2008 global financial crisis. Taking seriously Foucault's insights into the political economic character of liberal government holds out the promise of providing scholars in the fields of both critical security studies and cultural political economy with a richer understanding of the complex dynamics of exceptionalist politics – a promise that is particularly valuable at the present political juncture.