Ilene Grabel (University of Denver, USA)

XXI IDP Industrial Development and Policy Lecture.

When Things Don’t Fall Apart: Global Financial Governance and Developmental Finance in an Age of Productive Incoherence by Ilene Grabel (The MIT Press, 2017). Winner of the 2018 British International Studies Association International Political Economy Group Book Prize and the 2019 International Studies Association International Political Economy Section Best Book Award. In When things Don’t Fall Apart, Ilene Grabel makes a simple but controversial claim, based on the work of the eminent social scientist Albert O. Hirschman. Grabel argues that as concerns global financial governance and development finance we are now in a period that she calls productive incoherence. Unlike the Keynesian period of the middle 20th century and the neoliberal period that followed, the current conjuncture lacks an overarching theoretical framework to guide financial governance. In its absence, Grabel maps the proliferation of institutional innovation at the national, regional, and transregional levels. These experiments are grounded in a spirit of Hirschmanian pragmatism rather than Keynesian or neoclassical dogmatism. They are ad hoc, often limited in scope, and even inconsistent with each other. They are in that sense incoherent. The book’s novel normative claim is that this incoherence is productive. It is allowing for new institutional and policy innovations that are contributing to a pluripolar financial governance architecture that is more robust and offers greater opportunities for problem solving and experimentation than the coherent architecture it is displacing. Grabel substantiates these claims with empirically-rich case studies that explore the effects of recent crises on established and new networks of financial governance (such as the G-20); transformations within the IMF; institutional innovations in liquidity support and project finance from the national to the transregional levels; and the “rebranding” of capital controls. Grabel acknowledges, however, that the incoherent transformations underway also pose grave risks. She considers these risks in the concluding chapter of the book.

Speaker Biography: Ilene Grabel is Professor of International Finance and co-director of the graduate program in Global Finance, Trade, and Economic Integration at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver (USA). She is presently serving as a standing member of the Intergovernmental Expert Group on Financing for Development at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Grabel has worked as a consultant to the International Poverty Centre for Inclusive Growth of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), UNCTAD/G-24, United Nations University/World Institute for Development Economics Research, and UNDP’s Human Development Report Office. Grabel has also been a consultant to Action Aid, to the coalition “New Rules for Global Finance,” was an Expert Advisor to the Third World Network project on capital controls and free trade agreements; is a member of the Task Force on Regulating Global Capital Flows for Long-Run Development (of the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-range Future, Boston University), has been a member since 2013 of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Group of the Progressive Alliance of the European Parliament, and since 1987 has been a staff economist with the Center for Popular Economics. She served as a co-editor of the Review of International Political Economy from 2013-2017. (Find the full biography here: https://www.soas.ac.uk/economics/events/08may2019-when-things-dont-fall-apart-global-financial-governance-and-developmental-finance-in-an-ag.html)

Speaker: Ilene Grabel (University of Denver, USA), Antonio Andreoni (SOAS)

Released by: SOAS Economics Podcasts