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Why International Organizations Will Continue to Fail Their Development Goals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2005

Alastair Smith
Alastair Smith
Affiliation:
New York University (alastair.smith@nyu.edu)
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Extract

Although International Organizations (IOs) have the ability to promote economic and political development throughout the world, political imperatives ensure that they will fail to meet their potential. This essay is a response to the editor's kind request to speculate as to the role of IOs over the next decade. Although my arguments apply broadly, here I consider development, and so I focus on organizations such as the World Bank and IMF. Over the coming decades these organizations will fail in their attempts to alleviate poverty. On a more positive note, political science is rapidly advancing our understanding of the pathologies of IOs. Unfortunately, the failure of IOs to alleviate poverty is, I believe, a politically stable circumstance: intellectual advances will not translate into better-performing IOs. I focus on a specific set of theoretical arguments as to why IOs fail to promote development, concluding that we should anticipate more of the same rather than the radical reforms that are necessary if IOs are to achieve their stated goals.Alastair Smith is professor of politics at New York University (alastair.smith@nyu.edu).

Type
SYMPOSIUM: TEN YEARS FROM NOW
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , September 2005 , pp. 565 - 567
Copyright
© 2005 American Political Science Association

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