The Art of Inter-Organisational Boundary Work: Unpacking IMF-World Bank Interactions

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank constitute a unique dyad of international organisations (IOs) in contemporary global governance. They were born at the same time (at the end of the Second World War), are headquartered in the same city and even across the same street (19th Street in Washington, DC), operate within comparable governance structures, and have near-identical memberships and palpably overlapping mandates. In such a setting, it is not about whether inter-organisational cooperation has to happen because non-cooperation is not a serious option, but about how it ought to be designed and carried out. In this contribution, I combine primary data from expert interviews and ethnographic moments with secondary data from official documents to delineate boundary work practices in the context of IMF-World Bank interactions. This body of evidence demonstrates – across different issue areas (especially crisis lending, concessional lending and debt relief, and financial sector surveillance) – that IMF and World Bank officials engage in finely calibrated interactions, with boundary work ensuring balance between proximity and distance. Boundary work helps these representative to (re)negotiate their individual identities as boundary-spanning professionals, to (re)define relevant bodies of macroeconomic knowledge and the grey areas of their organisations’ mandates, and to (re)position their own organisation in the wider global governance space. Analytical attention to boundary work among IOs refines our understanding of acts of social construction by self-acclaimed technocrats in institutionally dense spaces where overlaps of organisational memberships and mandates are quite common.