Description
After the broad criticism of structural adjustment programs and of the Washington Consensus policies in general, how can one promote neoliberal reforms and push for an investment friendly environment? This article argues that new constitutionalist mechanisms are used in international agreements between the Global North and the Global South to promote neoliberal reforms in general, and financialization in particular. Though some scholars differentiate between the impact of New Constitutionalism (NC) on more and less industrialized states, they, do not delineate the specific mechanisms at work in the context of postcolonial statehood. A systematic analysis of NC mechanisms in the context of north-south development cooperation still is missing. Likewise, this also reveals how the original NC concept is partly unfit to grasp the realities of NC mechanisms under conditions of postcolonial statehood. The article contributes to closing the gap in the literature by asking: How does New Constitutionalism work in the context of North-South relations? Are there particular new constitutionalist mechanisms that are tailored to the context of postcolonial statehood? We operationalize the NC concept by applying a structuring content analysis to Stephen Gill’s studies of NC, in order to deduce individual NC mechanisms. The resulting new constitutionalist mechanisms are applied to a development cooperation treaty between the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and the Government of Ghana, the so-called MCC Ghana Power Compact. Almost 70 percent of the elaborated NC mechanism could be found in the MCC Ghana Power Compact. Beyond that, we also developed new mechanisms inductively where provisions reflected an asymmetric relationship between the Global North and the Global South. Overall, 13 new NC mechanisms were developed, of which seven can be linked to efforts of financialization. Beyond rendering visible the NC mechanisms in international agreements, this paper creates an analytical tool with which to research further the uneven (power) dynamics in international cooperation between the global North and South.
Keywords: Neoliberalism, Financialization, International Development Cooperation
