Demands for institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) to democratize decision-making, increase transparency, and rebalance governance toward interests of Global South countries began almost as soon as these institutions came into being. Yet more than 80 years after the Bretton Woods Conference, which laid the foundations for the global economic governance system we know today, these institutions remain stubborn to reform and heavily biased toward Global North power and policies.

What are the barriers that facilitate institutional resistance to reform? Which reform policies are most important to Global South countries? What are the risks and opportunities for advancing a reform agenda in a drastically shifting geopolitical landscape? The second webinar of our Histories and Futures of Global Governance initiative took place on Friday, April 18, from 1:00-2:30pm ET with speakers Andrés Arauz, Anush Kapadia, Robert Wade, and Christy Thornton.

Speakers:

Andrés Arauz is an Ecuadorian economist. He was the subject of the 2024 film The Ecuadorian Candidate, which followed his campaign for President of Ecuador in the 2021 election. Before that he was Minister of Knowledge and Human Talent from 2015-2017 and Minister of Culture in 2017. He has also been a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. His expertise is in money and technology, government procurement, development planning macroeconomics, illicit financial flows, and finance. He obtained his Ph.D. in Financial Economics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Anush Kapadia is Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Bombay. He works on the political economy of money, banking and financial systems. His most recent work is A Political Theory of Money (Cambridge, 2023). He is also the PI on the New Political Economy Initiative, a project that aims to broaden social science approaches to studying the economy.

Robert Wade is a New Zealander, whose research career started with field-work in Pitcairn Island (South Pacific), continued in Central Italy, then South Korea, then Taiwan, then inside the World Bank on the World Bank. The invisible thread of his career has been the question of how the opportunities for material prosperity available to most westerners of his generation could also be available to most of the world’s population. He has worked at the Institute of Delopment Studies at Sussex University, the World Bank, Princeton, MIT and Brown, before joining the London School of Economics, where he is Professor of Global Political Economy. His book Governing the Market (Princeton, 1990) received the Best Book in Political Economy award from the American Political Science Association, and he won the Leontief Prize in Economics in 2008.

Christy Thornton is the Co-Director of the History & Political Economy Project. She is associate professor of history at New York University. She is the author of Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy (University of California, 2021), and is currently at work on a new research project, “To Reckon with the Riot: Global Economic Governance and Social Protest.”