The Importance of Being Ernest: The IMF as a reputational intermediary
Dr Andre Broome - University of Birmingham

For international organizations (IOs) building a credible reputation is hard work, and 'good' reputations quickly become tarnished when things start to go wrong. Generating a credible reputation among its relevant international audiences enhances an IO's authority, increasing the opportunities available to an IO to shape the behavior of public and private actors in the global political economy and amplifying an IO's capacity to influence international political and economic outcomes. Equally, when an IO's reputational authority is degraded, its capacity to act as a credible external enforcement mechanism, and its ability to influence change in the global political economy more broadly, is diminished. Without a credible reputation, an IO's material actions are more likely to be viewed as inconsequential by its audiences, and its public pronouncements are more easily dismissed as 'cheap talk'. The International Monetary Fund's reputation as a credible and competent crisis manager has taken a battering in the decade since its well-publicized policy blunders during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. Critics of the IMF's contemporary global role often fall into two (overlapping) camps: (1) those who see the IMF as a neoliberal policy enforcer that pushes its own agenda and is unaccountable to its membership; and (2) those who see the IMF as a foreign policy instrument of its major power shareholders. In an attempt to move beyond criticisms of the IMF that view the organisation simply as a global economic police force or a pawn of major powers, this paper examines how the IMF has sought to reinvent itself as a reputational intermediary for its member states in the post-Bretton Woods era.