Description
Including transnational experts into the everyday work of IOs has become an anchoring practice of contemporary global governance. This paper argues that it has simultaneously transformed multilateral diplomacy and maintained colonial structures of power in the global economic order. I study the role transnational economic professionals from the Global South and the Global North have played in the design of multilateral development policies in the 1940s and 1950s. Practices of knowledge production among Western economists at the OEEC/OECD produced ignorance on the causes of global inequality by silencing the role that colonial extraction played in post-WWII European economic recovery. A partial interpretation of the success story of the Marshall Plan effectively ignored the structural and historical causes of national prosperity highlighted by Global South economists. As a result, questions of economic development were effectively removed from the decolonization process underway at the UN, and postcolonial countries became excluded from the multilateral coordination of development assistance.
