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What imperatives do the World Bank and the IMF abide by?
Are they compatible with the primacy and pre-eminence of human life and human beings?
Are the Bretton Woods institutions any different from any high street banks or financial institutions? Ultimately, whom are their respective boards accountable to?
It has even been alleged that, despite their explicit and official mandate, the Bretton Woods institutions have been development-unfriendly from the very beginnings (Helleiner, 2015; Romero, Perera, Brunswijck and Saldanha, 2019; Cepeda, 2021).
Simultaneously, ‘the 1997 South East Asian financial crisis demonstrated, many of the Bretton Woods policies were even counterproductive for development and considerably increased the social cost for vulnerable sectors of societies in affected countries’
(Cepeda, 2021).
The discord between loan conditionality and development objectives is rooted in the IMF and World Bank’s governance structure permitting dominant shareholders to utilize conditionality as a means of furthering their own global economic and political agendas, says Wolff (2013:106).
For instance, at the height of the South East Asian financial crisis, it became apparent that the Bretton Woods institutions’ ‘objective was not to rescue the Thai population but impose a neoliberal agenda and guarantee foreign creditors’ payment, including the World Bank and the IMF themselves’. (Cepeda, 2021) or (Romero, 2020; Toussaint, 2020b)
Masters and Chatzky (2019) and Cepeda (2021) respectively called the World Bank the preeminent international institution for economic development and poverty reduction ; with the board of governors, mostly made up of senior finance or development officials from member countries ; and a development funder . Wolff (2013:133) termed the IMF the ‘gatekeeper’ for development assistance . [Emphasis added]
It could therefore be argued that what has hallmarks of secrecy and obscurantism (alleged or substantiated); especially in relation to their development projects and activities and their great intellectual arrogance (Lopes, 2012:72) are ways for the Bretton Woods institutions - the self-styled thought-leaders of international development (Romero et al., 2019) - to occult their deficiencies, ambiguities, contradictions, duplicity, cognitive dissonance, incongruities, hypocrisy, incoherencies, weaknesses, mixed and conflicting messages and methods, failures and inability to effectively keep their promise(s); let alone, pursue and achieve their own founding mandate, vision and mission.
