International economic institutions are central in the debate on global justice, both in the academic debate and in the popular political discourse. For a long time the well-known and powerful Bretton Woods institutions in particular have been the targets of “the global justice movement”. Protestors and NGOs accuse these organizations of many things, among them, for crating and maintaining global distributive injustice. However, it is far from clear what duties and obligations of justice international institutions have, on what grounds such duties are assigned to them, and how success and failure in fulfilling these duties relate to institutional legitimacy. There are off course big differences on this issue stemming from disagreement on the proper scope of principles of justice, but even those who subscribe to basic cosmopolitan principles reach different conclusions on the role of international institutions. Some, most notably Thomas Pogge, hold that global institutional are implicated in producing and reproducing radical inequality and that they have extensive duties to improve the situation for the globally worst off. Others see international institutions as mutually beneficial and hold that it would be a mistake to assign extensive duties to promote justice to them. International institutions constitute a part of the global basic structure that distributes the advantages of social cooperation. The sheer magnitude of global inequality that this basic structure produces could lead us to question the legitimacy of existing institutions. On the other hand, existing institutions seem indispensible in the pursuit of global justice. They are needed to overcome collective action problems and to mediate cosmopolitan duties. The paper explores and evaluates different perspectives on international economic institutions, their duties and their legitimacy. The analyses is centered on different ways of conceptualizing harm and benefit, duties, obligations, and feasibility, and the proper task for political theory under nonideal circumstances.
