Description
In 2011, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) voted to extend its mandate beyond Eastern and Central Europe (ECE) to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the first extension of its kind after EBRD began operations in Mongolia in 2006. In MENA, its investments have supported financial institutions and markets, private sector involvement, power and energy production and, most recently, infrastructure and service delivery reforms/development. While the Bank presents itself as aiding the region’s economic growth and ability to cope with added pressures of the refugee ‘crisis’, I question the deeper interests and power relations driving its investments there and the actors they benefit. I use the case of EBRD’s operations in Jordan to highlight the fundamental contradictions between their proclaimed goals and activities on the ground. I argue that EBRD’s investments in Jordan, particularly its (re)focused agenda on (public) infrastructure and services since 2014, are indicative of power relations that favor private sector interests and accumulation over local populations by expanding market/neoliberal strategies, legitimizing their rationalities and disciplining public dissent to them as local socioeconomic conditions worsen. In doing so, I understand EBRD’s expansion into MENA as an expression of neoliberal-led capitalism’s broader expansion ‘eastwards’ and its attempts to legitimize itself and its strategies in the face of compounding contradictions and rising regional (and global) dissent to it post-2007/8 financial crisis.
