Paradigm and nexus: neoclassical economics and the growth imperative in the World Bank, 1948–2000

Abstract

The story of post-Second World War international political economy is often told as a series of paradigm shifts: from Keynesianism to neoliberalism to the post-Washington Consensus. This article argues that the paradigm story struggles to explain both continuity and change in postwar development policy in the World Bank. First, throughout the postwar era, the Bank remained oriented to neoclassical growth. Second, despite the continued focus on growth, the Bank agenda also changed in incremental ways that did not amount to a paradigm shift. This article builds on previous critiques of the paradigm concept to propose the concept of a ‘policy nexus’. I use this theoretical approach to argue that postwar Bank policy was structured by a series of nexuses constituted by shifting configurations of actors, knowledge, anchoring devices, institutional rules and political imperatives. I theorize the formation, reproduction and reconfiguration of nexuses by articulating the complementarities and tensions that stabilize and destabilize them.

Keywords:

• Relationalism
• policy paradigms
• paradigm change
• discursive institutionalism
• neoclassical economics
• World Bank
• nexus
• processualism
• configurational theory

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Alex Wendt, Alex Thompson, Ted Hopf, Michael Neblo, Sonja Amadae, Jason Keiber, Austin Carson, Erin Graham, Nicholas Jabko, Tamar Gutner, Angus Burgin and Michael Hur for comments that improved the article. I would also like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers at Review of International Political Economy. I am grateful to Ian Gustafson who provided research assistance for the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Bentley B. Allan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of *Scientific Cosmology and International Orders* (Cambridge, 2018) as well as articles in International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and European Journal of International Relations.

Notes

1 The advent of growth is discussed in accounts of the 1945 settlement, but rarely thereafter. See Ikenberry (1992) and Maier (1987). For a history of growth as an idea, see Mitchell (2005).

2 On relational configurations, see Katznelson (1997); Tilly (2005, pp. 75–85); In IR, see Jackson and Nexon (1999); Goddard (2009).

3 I think of these terms in italics, following Tilly (2005, p. 28), as processes: bundles of mechanisms.

4 For applications of practice theory to international political economy, see Schmidt (2015); Carstensen and Schmidt (2016). Daigneault (2014) hints at the importance of ‘material’ manifestations, but does not elaborate.

5 I borrow the term ‘nexus’ and the logic underlying the argument from Whitehead (1978). I prefer the term ‘nexus’ to network because network has often been used to simply denote node-link groupings. By contrast, I want to highlight the relational constitution of the elements of a nexus — that all the elements are part of all the other elements. As Whitehead (1978, p. 24) puts it, ‘a nexus is a set of actual entities in the unity of the relatedness constituted by their prehensions of each other, or…constituted by their objectifications in each other’.

6 On fields in International Relations theory, see also Adler-Nissen (2008); Berling (2012); Nexon and Neumann (2018); Sending (2015).

7 Best (2014, pp. 31, 41) also notes the importance of ‘profound ontological and epistemological assumptions’ in structuring governance styles. See also, Allan (2018, pp. 36–37).

8 On yoking, see Abbott 1995; Goddard 2009, 268.

9 Consistent with Mitchell (2005), ‘economic growth’ does not appear regularly in the Bank until the mid-1950s. See Konkel (2014, p. 280); Alacevich (2009, pp. 40–41).

10 While Rosenstein-Rodan himself was marginalized in the Bank after 1950, his theory of development remained important. See Chwieroth (2008, pp. 496–500).

11 I began by making a database of all first authors with two or more publications in the World Bank online archives (documents.worldbank.org). I then recorded where they obtained their Ph.D., using the Worldcat and Proquest dissertation databases or by locating their CV online.

12 Chwieroth bases his conclusions both on the secondary literature and a study of economic publications. Chwieroth identifies the top 15 departments between 1963 and 1980 by their rate of publication in the top economics journal, American Economic Review. Chwieroth’s rationale is that “during this period the AER was primarily publishing articles that employ neoclassical assumptions and models.” Thus, scholars who published in the AER most likely came from neoclassical schools.

13 For a response from the basic needs camp, see Hicks (1979).

14 Notably, the focus on neoclassical ideas allows us to see that the major shift in Bank policy goals toward neoliberalism came earlier than Sharma (2013, 2017), Best (2014), and others have identified.

15 Emphasis original.