International Organizations and Economic Governance

Global economic governance refers to efforts to organize, structure, and regulate economic interactions. In substantive terms, economic governance deals with a host of policy challenges, including the definition of basic property rights, efforts at monetary and fiscal cooperation, ando concerns for the “macroprudential regulation” of financial markets. The Global Financial Crisis has demonstrated not only the importance of macroeconomic and regulatory cooperation, but also the role of crises in redefining the purposes of economic governance itself. Debates in the fields of international relations (IR) and international political economy (IPE) over global economic governance have revolved around strategic interactions, social psychological forces, and the post-crisis emergence of new agents and international organizations. In applied IPE settings, these debates more explicitly pertain to the systemic importance of hegemonic power, multilateral interactions, or intersubjective interpretations. These views intersect with neorealist, neoliberal, and constructivist assumptions regarding systemic interactions. Over the 1990s, IR and IPE scholars would increasingly seek to move beyond both the structural materialism associated with hegemonic stability theory and the structural idealism associated with “first-generation” Wendtian constructivism. Future research should focus on broader questions of whether the Global Financial Crisis will spark renewed theoretical creativity and contribute to an enhanced policy relevance, or whether IR and IPE will continue to work to mask the role of power in limiting such possibilities.