The crisis of the current global financial order is challenging us to critically reflect on how this order has been driven, and the development outcomes produced by its central political and economic actors. There is a great deal of academic knowledge about the role of the international financial institutions, powerful states and capital markets in international development, but there is little understanding of how regional dynamics and regional institutions influence global governance and developing countries.

This book offers an independent and grounded investigation concerning the political economic role of Regional Development Banks through a study of the world’s leading regional development bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The book examines the political economy of the IDB and its role in regional and national development during the neoliberalisation processes of the 1990s. In particular, the investigations explore the IDB’s power in regional and national development – via its technical, political and financial interventions – to frame policy alternatives, absorb opposition forces, support specific coalition forces and justify a particular direction of development, all in order to legitimize specific political economic projects directed by market-led pro-reform coalitions aligned with global financial forces and financial development guidelines.

This book will be relevant to scholars and professionals interested in the international and regional political economy of development financing.