Collaboration, cooperation, coordination: a history of the Bretton Woods twins’ efforts to work together 

Abstract

Why and how international organizations (IOs) collaborate, cooperate and coordinate (the 3Cs) are important but understudied issues in international political economy today. The three terms are rarely defined in the IR literature or by the IOs themselves and are often used interchangeably. However, the differences matter in terms of when, how and why staff of different IOs are expected to work together, and whether and how such efforts contribute to IO performance. This article develops the concepts of the 3Cs, drawing from work in the public administration, management and organizational design fields. It illustrates ways in which the differences matter by examining the history of efforts by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to work together. The two Bretton Woods siblings were explicitly designed to be complementary partners at the apex of the post-World War II global economic order. I argue that formal collaboration efforts between the Fund and the Bank took place through at least 25 attempts by the two institutions to define how to work together, and may be categorized into four different, sometimes overlapping approaches, from basic information sharing to fully engaged joint initiatives. What they have called ‘collaboration’ is in fact a range of engagement. Efforts by the Fund and Bank to work more closely together have been an ongoing struggle, driven by unavoidable institutional overlap, which intensified at times of systemic change and external shock. This case is important to the study of how IOs work together, given these institutions have a unique relationship and may be seen as a most-likely case of successful collaboration.

Keywords:

• IMF
• World Bank
• collaboration
• cooperation
• coordination

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgments

An early version of this article was published as an IMF Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) Working Paper, BP/20-01/02. That paper, in turn, was the product of a year spent at the IEO under a Council on Foreign Relations’ International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars. I wish to thank the Council for underwriting the invaluable fellowship, and my former IEO colleagues for their insights and support throughout the year. The article also benefited from valuable feedback from Orfeo Fioretos, Randall Henning, Miles Kahler, Mark Pollack and the editors and reviewers of Review of International Political Economy. For research support, thanks to Twinkle Loungani, Sumaya Tabbah and Hannah Fialkoff.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See also Abrams (2020).

2 There were also disagreements between the two organizations elsewhere; for example, a proposed structural adjustment loan for Brazil’s power sector, with the Fund’s deputy managing director criticizing the Bank for agreeing to weak fiscal targets, and the Bank senior vice president for operations replying with indignance; and in Turkey, where the Bank made a 1988 loan in opposition to the Fund’s advice (Kapur et al., 1997).

3 The Bank had just been reorganized in 1987, and the new senior vice president for operations and the vice president for Latin America felt the Bank should be more independent of the Fund. Bank President Conable was persuaded to ignore the long-standing rule that a Fund agreement was necessary for a Bank adjustment loan. This was reinstated after the Argentine debacle (Kapur et al., 1997).

4 February 2013 statement by leaders of IMF, African Development Bank, EBRD, IADB and World Bank Group. See IMF Annual Report (2013).

5 See, for example, IMFC Communiqué (2012).

6 Senior US Treasury official, personal communication, January 28, 2022.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tamar Gutner

Tamar Gutner is an associate professor at the School of International Service, American University. Her research focuses on the design, performance, and effectiveness of international organizations, particularly international financial institutions, and how they respond to global and regional governance challenges.