Legitimacy by expertise: How the IMF built authority through technical assistance, 1964–1990

How do international organisations translate technical expertise into political authority? We examine how the International Monetary Fund (IMF) responded to political and economic upheaval not only through crisis lending, but through the everyday practice of technical assistance. Using an original dataset covering all IMF technical assistance missions from 1964 to 1990 (a period marked by decolonization, fiscal crises, and challenges to multilateral legitimacy), we document how the Fund embedded itself within national administrations, advising on fiscal, monetary, and statistical reforms even in countries without lending arrangements. These early missions reveal how the IMF transformed external shocks into opportunities for institutional adaptation, diffusing its policy paradigm by cultivating bureaucratic trust and professional dependence - a process we term ‘technocratic socialisation’. The analysis identifies how this mode of influence expanded geographically and thematically, prefiguring later forms of policy convergence around fiscal rules, statistical reporting, and central bank independence. Conceptually, the paper reframes technical assistance as a mechanism of ideational power and institutional resilience through which international organisations sustain legitimacy amid global disruption.