Description
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been often criticised for imposing austerity measures with adverse distributional outcomes, disproportionately hurting the poorest and most vulnerable groups. Yet, the IMF has also been increasingly vocal about the importance of social protection and the need for mitigating inequality, to the extent that both the research output of the organization and high-level speeches of IMF management have designated inequality as a “macro-critical” issue. This contrast raises important questions: Why does the IMF’s own official discourse on inequality not manifest in norm- and policy change? Why is the Fund not “walking the talk”? We build on approaches in organisational sociology that take seriously both individuals and their embeddedness in institutional structures and culture and hypothesise two mechanisms to explain this gap. First, we posit that demands from principals and the external environment may clash with the organizational culture of the Fund, thereby causing the hypocrisy, or façade, observed in practice. Second, we propose that at the individual level, norm entrepreneurs on distributional issues may be hindered by two factors: ambiguity over the interpretation of inequality as a “macro-critical” issue and its operationalization in lending programs; and lack of formal institutional channels to transform new knowledge into policy action. We test these hypotheses using a mixed methods approach that combines a survey of IMF staff across levels and departments with in-depth interviews. Our findings suggest that rather than being “orderly”, the hypocrisy of the IMF over distributional issues is quite disorganised.
