The Bretton Woods Institutions

Abstract This chapter provides a theoretically and historically inflected account of the role of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in the development project. After a brief overview of the creation of these institutions at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, the chapter examines their principal activities. These institutions are said to promote the success of the development project, through the application of the ‘state of the art’ in development knowledge and the provision of finance. The chapter describes this (dominant) account of the work of these institutions, as well as some of the main perspectives from which this account is challenged. The chapter concludes that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund play enormously important roles in governing both the development project, and relations between the Global North and the Global South. In many ways, these institutions are custodians of the development orthodoxy.