Revolving doors and linked ecologies in the world economy: policy locations and the practice of international financial reform

Abstract

Are rules for the world generated by international organizations' bureaucracies or private authority? Certainly both. This paper questions the utility of a distinction between international bureaucracies and transnational private authority, and points to how actors responsible for governing the world economy move between public and private roles. To help understand this ‘revolving doors’ phenomenon we borrow from Andrew Abbott’s work on ‘linked ecologies’, in which actors within different professional ecologies form coalitions to create alliance strategies in which they can propagate the relevance of their ideas and skills. If successful, an alliance between ecologies can take control of a policy ‘location’ - how a policy problem should be legitimately understood. We examine the benefit of linked ecologies approaches through two case studies of alliances competing for the best way to solve international financial stability issues, drawing upon interviews with practitioners from key international organizations and policy networks