Articles by Jacqueline Best
Economy and Society, 2022
How do central bankers cope with the uncomfortable fact that there are significant limits to thei... more How do central bankers cope with the uncomfortable fact that there are significant limits to their expertise without losing authority? Drawing on Steve Rayner's concept of 'uncomfortable knowledge', this paper undertakes a historical examination of the early years of Paul Volcker's role at the head of the Federal Reserve, and then traces the ways in which the uncomfortable fact of ignorance has been dealt with in the years since then: from the reflexive and experimental approach of the 1980s, through the dismissal and displacement of the Great Moderation, to the exceptionalism and new experimentalism of the post-2008 era. In each of these eras, I argue that central banks face a visibility dilemma: their expertise must be visible enough to demonstrate their mastery but not so conspicuous that the often ad hoc and uncertain nature of their craft generates political pushback about their role and authority.
Review of International Political Economy, 2021
Which blind spots shape scholarship in International Political Economy (IPE)? That question anima... more Which blind spots shape scholarship in International Political Economy (IPE)? That question animates the contributions to a double special issue-one in the Review of International Political Economy, and a companion one in New Political Economy. The global financial crisis had seemed to vindicate broad-ranging IPE perspectives at the expense of narrow economics theories. Yet the tumultuous decade since then has confronted IPE scholars with rapidly-shifting global dynamics, many of which had remained underappreciated. We use the Blind Spots moniker in an attempt to push the topics covered here higher up the scholarly agenda-issues that range from institutionalized racism and misogyny to the rise of big tech, intensifying corporate power, expertise-dynamics in global governance, assetization, and climate change. Gendered and racial inequalities as blind spots have a particular charge. There has been a self-reinforcing correspondence between topics that have counted as important, people to whom they matter personally, and the latter's ability to build careers on them. In that sense, our mission is not only to highlight collective blind spots that may dull IPE's capacity to theorize the current moment. It is also a normative one-a form of disciplinary housekeeping to help correct both intellectual and professional entrenched biases.
Review of International Political Economy, 2021
We might be tempted to view the recent efforts by political leaders to cultivate certain convenie... more We might be tempted to view the recent efforts by political leaders to cultivate certain convenient forms of economic ignorance as characteristic of a novel 'post-truth' age. This article suggests instead that we take this troubling trend as an invitation to examine the role of ignorance more generally in political economic thinking and practice. Whereas many scholars have treated uncertainty and other unknowns as external challenges that can be resolved through expertise and learning, this article instead endogenizes ignorance, treating it as a key tool in the development of policy knowledge. Drawing on archival material from the early Reagan and Thatcher years, this article examines a moment when many of the contemporary assumptions about economic ignorance and strategies for coping with it were first developed and tried out. I introduce a typology of the practical role of ignorance in economic policymaking, ranging from wishful thinking, to confusion, fudging, denial and puzzling. Mapping the space between learning and lying, this article contends that ignorance plays two very different roles in the trajectory of many economic policies, allowing policymakers to discount the political effects of their economic actions while also opening up the possibility of genuine reflexivity about the limits of expertise.
New Political Economy, 2021
Contemporary political economy is predicated on widely shared ideas and assumptions, some explici... more Contemporary political economy is predicated on widely shared ideas and assumptions, some explicit but many implicit, about the past. Our aim in this Special Issue is to draw attention to, and to assess critically, these historical assumptions. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a political economy that is more attentive to the analytic assumptions on which it is premised, more aware of the potential oversights, biases, and omissions they contain, and more reflexive about the potential costs of these blind spots. This is an Introduction to one of two Special Issues that are being published simultaneously by New Political Economy and Review of International Political Economy reflecting on blind spots in international political economy. Together, these Special Issues seek to identify the key blind spots in the field and to make sense of how many scholars missed or misconstrued important dynamics that define contemporary capitalism and the other systems and sources of social inequality that characterise our present. This particular Special Issue pursues this goal by looking backwards, to the history of political economy and at the ways in which we have come to tell that history, in order to understand how we got to the present moment.
Review of International Studies, 2020
While the last few decades of political economic history give the impression that the logic of ne... more While the last few decades of political economic history give the impression that the logic of neoliberalism is inexorable, this article argues that once we look further backwards and dig into recently declassified archives documenting the early days of neoliberal theory and practice, we find a messier picture. Economic policymakers in Thatcher and Reagan's administrations in the early 1980s did not set out to 'fail forwards' by generating a crisis that would enable a statist kind of neoliberalism. The key ideas that they drew on and the policies that they used to put them into practice sought to transform the economy indirectly, through a set of performative policy devices that they believed would generate a dramatic shift in people's inflationary expectations, lowering inflation without provoking a major recession. Archival records make it clear that these efforts were not only a failure, but also one that policymakers were acutely aware of at the time. By examining these quiet failures in economic policy, we can better understand how these governments simultaneously failed in their early efforts to introduce neoliberal economics and yet ultimately succeeded in transforming their economies in important respects-and in legit-imising those transformations by narrating failure as a kind of inevitable success. Introduction The obituaries for Paul Volcker, chairman of the United States' Federal Reserve between 1979 and 1987, who died in December of last year, have been powerful and even moving-yet in one important respect they have almost all been misleading in defining his legacy. The New York Times obituary neatly demonstrates this contradiction: it notes correctly that Volcker's fierce advocacy for central bank independence has had a lasting impact to this day, and also points out how committed, even relentless, he was in seeking to tame inflation by applying a kind of shock therapy to the American economy that produced painful interest rates over 20 per cent in the early 1980s. Yet while the obituary notes that Volcker's initial declaration of 'war on inflation' involved shifting to monetarism, it never mentions that this strategy was a failure and was ultimately dropped in 1982, well before inflation began to shift decisively downwards. Instead, the Times glosses over this failure, and in doing so reinforces a widespread narrative that sees economic policy in the early 1980s under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as a decisive and successful shift away from 'the postwar era' and towards a new, neoliberal approach to monetary and fiscal policy. 1
New Political Economy, 2020
In recent years, central banks have continued to preach inflation-targeting even as they have pur... more In recent years, central banks have continued to preach inflation-targeting even as they have pursued a wide range of unorthodox inflation-management policies. As the disconnect between discourse and practice grows, there is a growing risk of a serious credibility gap. This paper seeks to shed some light on these dilemmas by looking backwards, focusing on the 'Great Inflation' in Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s and the successive failures of Labour's incomes-policy and the Conservatives' monetarist experiment. These historical experiences suggest that for inflation policy to work it needs to be both understood as and made credible-which means that key actors need to not only learn that this is how the inflation game works, but also put into place a whole range of supporting practices that reflect and reproduce this conviction. In spite of the many claims by economists and central bankers to the contrary, quantitative targets do not in fact anchor inflationary expectations-social practices instead play that crucial anchoring role. At the same time, these cases both underline the particular dilemmas associated with a reliance on hard quantitative targets in times of social instability-lessons that do not bode well for our present moment.
Finance and Society, 2018
How exactly did the neoliberal imaginary that Konings describes gain so much traction? Was its sp... more How exactly did the neoliberal imaginary that Konings describes gain so much traction? Was its speculative temporality smoothly translated into practice from the writings of Hayek and others as he suggests, or was its production a messier, more contested, and more contingent affair? In this brief commentary, I go back to one of the key historical moments that he examines, the Volcker shock of 1979-82, and examine some of the more mundane political and technical struggles that defined the early Reagan Administration’s efforts to put the neoliberal speculative logic into practice. By revealing the often-flawed material efforts that go into producing speculative temporalities, I argue that such struggles might allow us to arrive at a less teleological account of the resilience of neoliberalism.
International Political Sociology, 2018
Abstract What do border guards and central bankers have in common? Both operate, on a day-today b... more Abstract What do border guards and central bankers have in common? Both operate, on a day-today basis, in political spaces exempt from many of the norms of liberal democratic politics, and yet have the power to define and constrain them. In order to understand the role of such routine suspensions in the norms of liberal politics, we need to move beyond analyses that focus narrowly on security exceptionalism or emergency-management and pay attention to the practices of technocratic exceptionalism. Drawing on Foucault's lectures on biopolitics, I examine the ways in which economic theory and practice has sought to resolve some of the central tensions in liberalism by protecting the market from too much democracy—a kind of exceptionalism exemplified by the doctrine of central bank independence. (Note: This is a pre-publication version of an article published in the journal International Political Sociology.)
Global governance is increasingly about measuring, ranking and scoring. Focusing on the case of i... more Global governance is increasingly about measuring, ranking and scoring. Focusing on the case of international development, this paper suggests that we can learn a great deal about the recent changes in global dynamics by examining the rise of measurement-driven governance. This article engages with the recent scholarship on " new governance, " particularly the emerging literature on more experimentalist forms of governance. This study finds some evidence of a more experimentalist kind of governance in international development, but suggests that the specific technologies of measurement and accountability through which these new structures of decision-making are being facilitated are far from politically neutral. They are instead sources of considerable power that, in many instances, reinforce existing asymmetries and undermine the deliberative potential of these governance practices.
In an era in which scholars have become increasingly skeptical about the concept of exceptionalis... more In an era in which scholars have become increasingly skeptical about the concept of exceptionalism, this article argues that instead of rejecting it, we should rework it: moving beyond seeing it primarily as a security practice by recognizing the crucial role of political economic exceptionalism. Drawing on Foucault's later lectures on security, population and biopolitics, this article suggests that we can understand exceptionalist moves in both security and economic contexts as efforts to manage and secure a population. Focusing on three key moments in the production of exceptional politics— defining the limit of normal politics, suspending the norm, and putting the exception into practice—I examine the parallels, intersections and tensions between political economic and security exceptionalism, using this framework to make sense of the 2008 global financial crisis. Taking seriously Foucault's insights into the political economic character of liberal government holds out the promise of providing scholars in both the fields of critical security studies and cultural political economy with a richer understanding of the complex dynamics of exceptionalist politics—a promise that is particularly valuable at the present political juncture. These are interesting times for scholars of exceptionalism. Just a few months ago, before the recent wave of right-wing election results, it seemed that we were living in a post-exceptionalist moment: a decade and a half after 9-11, many scholars and Glezos for asking some tough and helpful questions, as well as William Walters and Regan Burles for their comments on earlier versions of this article, and the four anonymous reviewers who commented to this article. I would also like to thank Benoit Metlej for his excellent research assistance.
There has been little discussion of central bank accountability in recent decades because monetar... more There has been little discussion of central bank accountability in recent decades because monetary policy has been seen as an essentially technical problem. Yet, during the 2008 financial crisis and the economic dislocations that ensued, central banks gained considerably in authority—bailing out failing institutions, using unorthodox monetary tools, and wading into sovereign debt crises. At the same time, the financial crisis and the slow recovery that has followed have revealed just how uncertain and volatile the global economy can be—a situation that poses new dilemmas for monetary policy. This paper looks at the existing model of central bank accountability and finds it wanting in this new, more uncertain environment. Because the principle of central bank independence involves a very narrow set of objectives—generally focused on an inflation target—and very few opportunities for sanction, the main mechanism for accountability is that provided by the publication of information about the bank’s deliberations and activities. In an era of increased economic uncertainty, when central bankers themselves admit that simple rules and models are no longer adequate, a narrow, transparency-based form of accountability is not sufficient. In this paper, I suggest that we need a thicker, more robust form of accountability that fosters more deliberation and debate, ensures that central banks are answerable to their publics, and broadens the standards by which they are judged.
What happens if we look at events like the 2007-2008 financial crisis not just as crises but also... more What happens if we look at events like the 2007-2008 financial crisis not just as crises but also as failures? This shift is a productive one, opening up new ways of understanding the debates and policy responses that followed the recent crisis. For this was not just a crisis: it was also a spectacular failure. Moreover, it was a contested failure: the kind of failure that made key actors question the metrics through which they measured success and failure. Through a comparative analysis of recent failures in international development and international finance, this paper argues that looking at these crises as contested failures provides us with a better understanding of the epistemic underpinnings of certain crises and the politics of the responses to them. Focusing on failure also allows us to see that policymakers have become more preoccupied with the possibility of failure in the aftermath of these crises—and that they have become increasingly cautious in response. This paper concludes by exploring the implications of the increasing prevalence of " fail-safe " approaches to policy, a cautious approach to policymaking that may in fact increase the odds of future failures. International relations scholars love a good crisis. The 2007-08 global financial crisis was no exception, producing a great wealth of analyses along with a renaissance in social theories of crisis. But what if we were to shift the focus of our analysis slightly, and look at these moments not just as crises but also as failures? I will suggest in this paper that this shift is potentially very productive, as it opens up new ways of understanding the debates and policy responses that followed the recent crisis. For this was not just a crisis: it was also a spectacular failure. Moreover, it was the kind of failure that made key actors
Millennium, Jan 2015
This short article provides a response to Matthias Kranke’s review in this journal (vol. 42, no. ... more This short article provides a response to Matthias Kranke’s review in this journal (vol. 42, no. 3) of our book Cultural Political Economy. Although we recognise the good intentions behind Kranke’s attempt to bring our book into ongoing ‘trans-Atlantic’ debates about the definition of International Political Economy (IPE) as a field, the very effort to define what IPE ‘is’ and ‘is not’ is precisely the kind of reifying move that our volume was trying to avoid. Our project is principally an ontological one: we try to make sense of what political economy would look like if we took seriously the role of culture. This allows us to cut through the epistemological debates that have historically defined IR and the methodological ones that have recently dominated IPE.
International Political Sociology, 2013
International Political Sociology, 2013
Actor network theory, actor-network-theory, material semiotics, the sociology of translation… The... more Actor network theory, actor-network-theory, material semiotics, the sociology of translation… The precise name of the domain in question is not itself entirely stable. And rightly so. In the ANT scheme of things society is far less stable, representation and governance considerably more disputed, and order quite a bit more precarious than most other frameworks would allow. Flux and impermanence are minor and tangled threads running throughout the history of the western political imaginary: from Heraclitus and Lucretius to Nietzsche and Deleuze. No other research framework has married this minor current with empirical inquiry in a manner that is as thorough, practical and relentlessly materialist as ANT. Bringing the Heraclitean worldview down to earth: this is one of its foremost accomplishments.
Economy and Society
We live in a world in which ever-greater arenas of social life are shaped by standardization and ... more We live in a world in which ever-greater arenas of social life are shaped by standardization and bureaucratic rationalization, as the pursuit of ‘measurable results’ sweeps everything from universities to hospitals to international organizations. Yet intuitively we understand that much of our collective and individual existence escapes these efforts of rationalization. How then do we develop a conception of the social world that appreciates both the powerful drive towards rationalization and the things that escape or overflow? This article seeks to answer this riddle by examining the central role of ambiguity in social life in general – and in organizational practice in particular. The concept of ambiguity is implicit in much social theory. Yet, over time, as theories become established, much of their openness to tension and ambiguity tends to be closed off. This article seeks to recapture some of that messiness, to shift the focus of attention slightly and to look at what slips out, does not fit or gets lost in translation. Drawing on the examples of two international organizations – the IMF and the World Bank – I explore the ways in which bureaucracies seek not only to contain ambiguity through various forms of quantification and standardization, but also to foster it.
Third World Quarterly, 2013
The existence of global poverty poses a dilemma for liberal economic governance. Its persistence ... more The existence of global poverty poses a dilemma for liberal economic governance. Its persistence is an irritant to expert assertions that things will get better soon, making it necessary to develop new theories about the causes and nature of poverty and new strategies for managing and reducing it. This paper examines the most recent shift in how the World Bank and other organisations conceptualise and manage poverty, by beginning to view it through the lenses of social risk and vulnerability. The paper examines the evolution in how the Bank has historically sought to contend with the problem of poverty, and then considers the various expert debates and bureaucratic negotiations that shaped how this new conception of poverty as risk and vulnerability came to be institutionalised. Finally, I consider the implications of this shift for how the problem of poverty is governed, suggesting that it involves a much more dynamic ontology of poverty and requires the use of a more proactive set of techniques. While this more active intervention requires a more present and engaged state than was evident in the structural adjustment era, its role nonetheless remains constrained by the liberal preoccupation with limiting governmental power.
International Studies Quarterly, 2012
How do international organizations deal with the persistent challenge of uncertainty? The most in... more How do international organizations deal with the persistent challenge of uncertainty? The most intuitive answer is through regulation. Yet, rules are not always the best solution in times of uncertainty or in dealing with complex and diverse problems. More ambiguous policies that leave room for interpretation, can often be more functional for an international organization (IO); moreover, ambiguities can also be a source of power—and are therefore often a subject of conflict among institutional actors. Focusing on the case of International Monetary Fund conditionality policy, this article provides several key insights into IO practices. It provides an account of the different forms that ambiguity can take in international organizations and develops an explanation for why institutional ambiguities appear and persist. Looking inside the IO black box, the study examines how interests, institutional culture, and legitimacy concerns shape actors’ support for ambiguity, and how these preferences combine with broader structural factors to produce a predisposition toward institutional ambiguity. Finally, this article points toward certain implications of organizations’ tendency toward ambiguity, suggesting that this may play an important role in enabling institutional expansion.
International Political Sociology, 2008
In this paper, I argue that critical international theory could benefit from a broader and deeper... more In this paper, I argue that critical international theory could benefit from a broader and deeper conception of the limits of knowledge—that what is needed is more attention to the role of ambiguity in contemporary politics. While not challenging the usefulness of the more prevalent concepts of uncertainty and risk used by scholars applying the frameworks of global governmentality and world risk society, this essay proposes that we understand risk and uncertainty as two specific categories of indeterminacy that have come to preoccupy contemporary neoliberal thinkers and policy-makers, and hence their critics, but which nonetheless tend to downplay the interpretive dimensions of the limits of knowledge. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, as well as the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, I develop an analysis of the role of ambiguity in global governance—as an object of global governance, a tool to be exploited by it, and a limit to its operation. Concluding with the case of international financial governance, this essay suggests that not only will a focus on ambiguity shed light on the historical evolution of global finance, but it also provides us with some clues to the sources of the current subprime financial crisis.
Uploads
Articles by Jacqueline Best
Jacqueline Best argues that the 1990s changes in IMF, World Bank and donor policies, towards what some have called the 'Post-Washington Consensus,' were driven by an erosion of expert authority and an increasing preoccupation with policy failure. Failures such as the Asian financial crisis and the decades of despair in sub-Saharan Africa led these institutions to develop governance strategies designed to avoid failure: fostering country ownership, developing global standards, managing risk and vulnerability and measuring results. In contrast to the structural adjustment era when policymakers were confident in their solutions, this is an era of provisional governance, in which key actors are aware of the possibility of failure even as they seek to inoculate themselves against it. Best considers the implications of this shift, asking if it is a positive change and whether it is sustainable.
This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Books Online and via Knowledge Unlatched.
The global political economy is inescapably cultural. Whether we talk about the economic dimensions of the “war on terror”, the sub-prime crisis and its aftermath, or the ways in which new information technology has altered practices of production and consumption, it has become increasingly clear that these processes cannot be fully captured by the hyper-rational analysis of economists or the slogans of class conflict. This book argues that culture is a concept that can be used to develop more subtle and fruitful analyses of the dynamics and problems of the global political economy.
Rediscovering the unacknowledged role of culture in the writings of classical political economists, the contributors to this volume reveal its central place in the historical evolution of post-war capitalism, exploring its continued role in contemporary economic processes that range from the commercialization of security practices to the development of ethical tourism. The book shows that culture plays a role in both constituting different forms of economic life and in shaping the diverse ways that capitalism has developed historically – from its earliest moments to its most recent challenges.
Many international relations scholars argue that private authority and private actors are playing increasingly prominent roles in global governance. This book focuses on the other side of the equation: the transformation of the public dimension of governance in the era of globalization. It analyses that transformation, advancing two major claims: first, that the public is beginning to play a more significant role in global governance, and, second, that it takes a rather different form than has traditionally been understood in international relations theory. The authors suggest that unless we transcend conventional wisdom about the public as a distinct sphere, separate from the private domain, we cannot understand the dynamics and consequences of its apparent return. Using examples drawn from international political economy, international security and environmental governance, they argue that ‘the public’ should be conceptualized as a collection of culturally-specific social practices.
This is a novel argument in an area much discussed by economists and political scientists. Their debate has focused on uncertainty as a technical problem and transparency as the solution. Although such policies are presented as technical, Best demonstrates that they are also political, have cultural consequences, and may prove counterproductive. Rather than assume that transparency is the ultimate goal, Best argues, we must recognize that ambiguity is pervasive, substantive, and potentially constructive. To read this book is to comprehend more deeply the ways in which politics is fundamental to economic theory and practice and to understand why the economy requires political leadership in order to flourish.