2013

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Article
Global Social Policy
13(2) 125143
International organizations as The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1468018113484608
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Daniel Bland
University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Mitchell A Orenstein
Northeastern University, USA

Abstract
The study of how ideas and discourse evolve within international organizations is
one of the most important frontiers of global social policy theory. Setting forth an
ideational approach to understanding their behavior, the article argues that international
organizations are more open systems than most realists and structuralists believe.
Their constantly evolving discourse and ideas can directly impact domestic policy. In
order to stress this reality, drawing on the case of pension privatization, the article
compares these organizations with ideologically driven domestic think tanks which, as
far as pension privatization is concerned, have proved much more rigid in their policy
prescriptions than the World Bank and other international organizations traditionally
associated with the global pension privatization campaign.

Keywords
Ideas, international organizations, pension privatization, public policy, think tanks

Introduction
One of the core beliefs in the global social policy literature is that some international
organizations and coalitions are more liberal or more socialist than others, reflecting
the political biases of leading states. In their 1997 volume, Bob Deacon and his col-
leagues argued that, on social policy, the World Bank and the IMF followed the liberal
line of the United States while the European Union and the ILO took a more European
or socialist approach (Deacon etal., 1997). Robert OBrien (2002: 144) similarly

Corresponding author:
Daniel Bland, Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan, 101
Diefenbaker Place, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7N 5B8, Canada.
Email: daniel.beland@usask.ca

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126 Global Social Policy 13(2)

classifies international organizations into those with little concern for social policy
versus those that advocate a more vigorous social policy. Robert Wade (1996), in an
outstanding blow-by-blow account of debates over the landmark World Bank publica-
tion The East Asian Miracle, argues that liberal forces within the Bank successfully
fought off Japanese attempts to raise questions about liberal development strategies and
to highlight the successes of state-directed investment in a clear cases of paradigm
maintenance. International organizations, in this view, have more or less fixed prefer-
ences on social policy and other matters that reflect the politics of their masters (see also
Wade, 2001, 2002).
Taking seriously OBriens (2002: 145) notion that international organizations are
both a tool for implementing policy of powerful actors and an arena for contesting the
content of that policy, we argue that this characterization of international actors as politi-
cally aligned along predictable axes is problematic. Ideas matter much more and inter-
national organizations are far more flexible than most structuralist accounts would
predict. In fact, the policies of international organizations are highly and continually
contested (Deacon and Stubbs, 2011), to the extent that policy consensus within interna-
tional organizations may be the exception, not the rule. International organizations1 are
open systems in the sense defined by Bertalanffy (1968) and other system theorists, who
argue that a living or open system exchanges matter with its environment, presenting
import and export, building-up and breaking-down of its material components.
International organizations frequently have shown themselves to be open to new ideas
and approaches espoused by well-positioned policy entrepreneurs. They commonly
reverse course on policy. This makes it difficult to characterize the policy approach of
international organizations as stable, except during relatively short periods of time,
where they may exhibit ideological consistency. Intense contestation differentiates inter-
national organizations from those think tanks (Rich, 2004; Stone and Denham, 2004)
that are tied to a particular interest group or ideology. International organizations tend to
navigate a route between complex and shifting ideas and interests, rather than adhere to
a consistent, single path.
To illustrate this theoretical claim, the following analysis shows how international
organizations approached pension privatization from 1994 to 2011, with an emphasis on
the World Bank and, to a lesser extent, the European Union, to show that international
organizations changed their positions over time in response to changing circumstances
and perceptions within transnational pension policy networks. This made them far more
flexible than many domestic think tanks actively involved in the same policy area.
Working within international organizations, policy entrepreneurs (Kingdon, 1995;
Mintrom, 1997) directly impacted transnational pension policy advice, building and ulti-
mately rejecting the transnational campaign for pension privatization. Moreover, the
directions that these policy entrepreneurs took were not entirely predictable from their
political background or the governments they served. While it would be foolish to argue
that structures of political power have no bearing on the actions and advice of interna-
tional organizations, our point is that it is difficult to pin international organization
behavior too closely to the power of strong states or stable ideologies. International orga-
nizations as sites of contestation are simply too fluid for this to be true, except over rela-
tively short periods of time (see also Kogut and MacPherson, 2011). They are open

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Bland and Orenstein 127

systems that create incentives for continuous contestation and are vulnerable to political
and ideological shifts in the broader ideational arena. To stress this reality, we compare
these organizations with several ideologically driven think tanks, which have proven
much more rigid in their advocacy of pension privatization than the World Bank and
other international organizations.
Examining changing ideational and discursive processes within international organi-
zations matters because studies have shown that these processes can have a direct influ-
ence on domestic policy (e.g., Bland and Cox, 2011; Mahon, 2009; Mahon and McBride,
2008; Schmidt, 2011; Skogstad, 2011; True and Mintrom, 2001). This makes the analysis
of how ideas and discourse evolve within international organizations one of the most
important frontiers of global social policy theory. We contribute to this discussion by
showing that international organizations are far more open systems than many believe
and that their constantly evolving internal ideas and discourse can strongly impact
policy.

Ideas and international organizations

Since the 1990s, a growing number of scholars, including students of international orga-
nizations, have paid attention to the direct role of ideational and discursive processes in
politics and policy.2 A number of authors have demonstrated that ideational processes
help construct the social and economic problems most public policies are designed to
address (Kingdon, 1995; Mehta, 2011; Stone, 1997). Accordingly, ideas shape the under-
standings that underpin political action and the rationale and purposes of organizations
and policies. As far as the role of transnational actors is concerned, especially crucial are
the ideas that can supply country-level policy actors with goals, norms, and blueprints
grounded in a set of assumptions about how to address the issues of the day through the
use of specific policy instruments (Blyth, 2002; Hall, 1993; Skogstad, 2011). These ideas
provide guidance on institutional creation and reform and generally serve to reduce
uncertainty in times of perceived crisis (Blyth, 2002). By doing so, ideas help actors
define their interests, which are shaped not only by material conditions but through inter-
pretations of these conditions (e.g., Blyth, 2002; Hay, 2011; Jenson, 1989; Schn and
Rein, 1994; Steensland, 2006; Stone, 1997; Weir, 1992).
From the perspective of international organizations, ideas are a crucial vehicle through
which they can influence domestic policy development. This is true because these orga-
nizations lack formal veto power over domestic policy. This lack of formal veto power
forces them to work through persuasion, convincing important domestic veto players3
to adopt new policy preferences. Considering this and the limits of financial conditional-
ity, ideational processes are the most central means through which they attempt to shape
domestic policy (Orenstein, 2008). Consequently, under most circumstances, interna-
tional organizations are analogous to domestic think tanks, in the sense that ideas and
expertise constitute their main source of policy influence. Yet, as our analysis of the
pension privatization debate suggests, this analogy between international organizations
and think tanks should not hide one key distinction: that international organizations are
much more open to ideational change than ideologically driven think tanks. Ideologically
driven think tanks typically promote the same policy paradigm for extended periods of

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128 Global Social Policy 13(2)

time, regardless of changes in expert discourse, new information, or perceived successes

and failures of the paradigm. International organizations do not, since they tend to be
riven by disputes between different experts and policy paradigms.
Policy paradigms often are seen as a major source of policy stability. This is the
case because policy paradigms are coherent sets of assumptions that help policy
actors reduce uncertainty and deal with emerging social and economic problems using
integrated policy solutions (Hall, 1993; for a critique of the concept of policy para-
digm see Carstensen, 2011).4 In the analysis of international organizations, it is com-
mon to use the concept of policy paradigm, which offers much analytical leverage to
analyze the discourse and the domestic policy impact of such organizations (Skogstad,
2011). Yet, one contribution of this article is to show that, in the field of social policy
reform at least, international organizations like the World Bank do not stick to the
same policy paradigm over long periods of time, as these organizations are open to the
influence of diverse policy entrepreneurs who mobilize and bring about profound
ideational change.
International organizations are not consistent over time in their policy preferences
because they are not subservient to a single interest group or state, but rather open sys-
tems, vulnerable to a wide variety of influences and experts committed to competing
social policy ideas and paradigms. This view of international organizations as open sys-
tems contrasts with the realist one, which looks at international organizations through the
lens of a principal-agent dilemma. In the realist perspective, international organizations
are agents of national states. The principal decision-makers are powerful states.
Rarely do international organizations do anything important that they are not delegated
to do by their masters (see Hawkins etal., 2006).
While liberal internationalists contest the realist view by arguing that international
organizations can act on their own to promote cooperation among states, in recent
years, constructivist scholars have taken a different tack, focusing on the ideational or
agenda-setting function of international organizations. For instance, Michael Barnett
and Martha Finnemore (2004: 25) have argued that international organizations have
four basic sources of legitimacy: the rational-legal authority that comes from their
charters, the delegated legitimacy that they derive from states, the moral legitimacy
that comes from their important missions, and the expert legitimacy based on their
widely accepted expertise in core areas. While realists emphasize rational-legal and
delegated authority, constructivists emphasize moral and expert legitimacy as well,
showing that these give international organizations a certain autonomy from the agen-
das of powerful states.
This article adopts a constructivist approach, according to which international organi-
zations are open systems (Bertalanffy, 1968) motivated by agendas of a variety of power-
ful states as well as the training, beliefs, and ideas of their staffs (Chwieroth, 2010). As a
result of these competing sources of legitimacy and power, advocates of a wide variety
of perspectives may have an impact on the construction of the perceived interests and the
actual policy behavior of international organizations to an extent that may vary over
time. Empirical analysis of internal discourse of the World Bank on pension privatization
shows that IOs are in fact more open to the shifting ideas of expert communities than
ideologically driven think tanks.

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Bland and Orenstein 129

The example of pension reform is interesting to analyze because this field is typically
described as an arena in which the World Bank has developed a coherent and stable
policy paradigm associated with the idea of privatization (Merrien, 2001). Recognizing
the importance of the time frame used to study both ideas and policy changes (Campbell,
2004), the following analysis shows that, even within the World Bank, policy ideas are
continuously in flux, an important yet seldom recognized feature of the policy life of
international organizations.

Pension privatization:The World Bank-led campaign

Pension privatization began in 1981, when US-trained economists working for the gov-
ernment of dictator Augusto Pinochet cancelled the pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension sys-
tem in Chile and replaced it with one based on individual pension savings accounts
administered by competing pension fund companies (Brooks, 2005; Madrid, 2003;
Mller, 1999, 2003; Valdes, 1995; Weyland, 2005). Pension privatization, as the term is
used here, refers to the partial or full replacement of state-administered PAYG pension
systems with ones based on individual pension savings accounts. The Chilean experi-
ment garnered interest from the UK government of Margaret Thatcher, which initiated a
partial replacement of income-related state pensions with voluntary individual accounts
in 1986 (Pierson, 1994). Other Latin American countries began to show an interest in
pension privatization in the early 1990s once Chiles economy started to grow rapidly. It
was widely believed that pension privatization had created a pool of domestic capital that
helped to stabilize and grow the Chilean economy (World Bank, 1994).
At the same time, the World Bank got on board with the pension privatization cam-
paign. Chief Economist Lawrence Summers launched an effort to promote pension
privatization to help countries cope with demographic aging (Orenstein, 2008). Summers
believed that pension privatization would enable countries to continue to provide old-age
pensions without bankrupting PAYG pension schemes, which require a rough balance
between contributions and benefits and could run into problems as the proportion of
older beneficiaries increases. In 1993, Summers became Undersecretary of the US
Treasury for International Affairs under President Bill Clinton. Starting in 1994, with the
publication of its landmark report, Averting the Old Age Crisis,5 the World Bank led a
transnational campaign for pension privatization through a core group of pension reform
officials from its Social Protection division. This campaign was joined by additional
international organizations and government agencies, including the IMF (International
Monetary Fund), the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development),
the ADB (Asian Development Bank), and USAID (United States Agency for International
Development). Most of these were Washington-based organizations, with the exception
of the Paris-based OECD, which played a key role in popularizing pension privatization
in Europe. The campaign, as a result, had a major impact on policy in Central and Eastern
Europe, but also succeeded in spreading pension privatization ideas in Asia and Africa6
(Orenstein, 2005, 2008).
As Figure 1 shows, just as suddenly as pension privatization took off in the develop-
ing world, it stopped. Pension privatization was adopted by dozens of countries between
1994 and 2004, during the height of the World Bank-led campaign. As the United States

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130 Global Social Policy 13(2)

0
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994

1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
995
1995
Number of Countries

Figure 1. Pension privatization by year.

debated pension privatization during the presidency of George W Bush (Bland, 2005),
it appeared that the trend would reshape pension systems worldwide (Blackburn, 2003).
Then, the momentum stopped. Between 2005 and 2010, no country privatized its pension
system. In contrast, during the previous six-year period, 18 countries had adopted some
form of pension privatization.7
While the global financial crisis of 2008 can help explain the prolongation of the pen-
sion privatization lull, it started three years earlier and thus cannot be accounted for by
the 2008 crisis and its impact on both stock market valuations and the fiscal position of
national states. The timing of the decline in 2005 instead appears to be linked to three
factors that helped alter ideas and perceptions about pension privatization worldwide: (1)
the publication of major World Bank reports in 2005 and 2006 that produced a damning
critique of pension privatization and World Bank advocacy of it; (2) the revision of
Chiles landmark privatized pension system under President Michelle Bachelet; and (3)
the failure of President George W Bushs efforts to enact pension privatization in the
United States in 2005. Without consideration of these three episodes that had a strong
impact on pension privatization ideas and discourse worldwide, it would be hard to
account for the stoppage of pension privatization in 2005, since none of the other key
factors thought to account for pension privatization demographic, economic, political
changed at that time. Importantly, the critical ideas and discourse that seem to have
halted the pension privatization trend emerged, at least in part, from within the World
Bank, the very same international organization that had driven pension privatization in
prior years. This raises some important questions about how the World Bank (and inter-
national organizations in general) formulates its advice and how discourse within the
World Bank unfolds.
We observe this ideational battle in the pension arena, where international organiza-
tions have regularly become a battleground for experts of diverse perspectives who seek
to mobilize the resources of these organizations to their own ends. Starting in the 1990s,
the World Bank was captured by a core group of pension privatization experts, some

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Bland and Orenstein 131

from Chile and Argentina, two of the early adopters in Latin America, and their sympa-
thizers from OECD countries, who used the World Bank effectively to pursue their own
policy agenda. This group clearly enjoyed a period of strong ideational dominance
within the World Bank and broader global pension policy circles. However, the vigor-
ous campaign they launched for pension privatization worldwide drew detractors from
within the World Bank that ultimately challenged the dominance of the pension privati-
zation core group.
The first major challenge was launched in a 1999 conference organized by then-World
Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz, in which he presented a paper with future White
House Budget Director Peter Orszag (Orszag and Stiglitz, 2001) critiquing the World
Bank approach to old-age pensions. Their deliberately provocative paper took aim at
World Bank pension advice over the years since 1994 and questioned the basis upon
which the World Bank supported privately managed pension savings accounts. Orszag
and Stiglitz argued that pension privatization did not increase national savings rates as
advocates claimed, did not improve labor market incentives, did not increase rates of
return, could not control fees through competition, and was based on an erroneous cri-
tique of PAYG pension systems. In conclusion, as they claimed, most of the arguments
used to support pension privatization were not substantiated in either theory or practice
(Orszag and Stiglitz, 2001). This helps explain why Lawrence Summers, then
Undersecretary of the US Treasury for International Affairs, called for Stiglitz not to be
renewed when his term expired in 2000 (Wade, 2001).
This critique sparked other, more sustained efforts, culminating in two major reports
published in 2005 and 2006. Keeping the Promise of Social Security in Latin America
was a 2005 World Bank report that heavily criticized the impact of pension privatization
in that region of the world. It argued that mandatory private pension savings accounts
had little benefit other than ratcheting down . . .expectations (Gill etal., 2005: 280) of
unsustainably high promises made in PAYG pension systems in Latin America. However,
systems based on private pension savings accounts that replaced them did not give
appropriate focus to poverty reduction, did not address coverage issues, and suffered
from high fees. For instance, in Chile, such fees ate up half of all pension benefits for
workers who started contributing in the 1980s and retired starting in 2000 (Gill etal.,
2005: 272). The report concluded that there was no basis for individual accounts playing
such a large role in pension provision in Latin America.
As this report was being written, Chile, the country that pioneered pension privatiza-
tion, re-reformed its pension system under President Michelle Bachelet to improve pov-
erty reduction. Bachelets pension reform commission issued a bold condemnation of
the privatized system along lines that were similar to those emphasized in the 2005
World Bank report: half of contributions were lost to fees, the promise that the system
would increase coverage had not materialized, and the system was manifestly unfair,
harming the poor, women, or those without high salaries or long work histories
(Matijascic and Kay, 2006).
The 2006 Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) report headed by Emily Andrews
similarly criticized the World Banks pension work for focusing too much attention on
switching to individual accounts and ignoring poverty reduction goals (World Bank,
2006). Andrews had worked for the Bank in Kazakhstan and came to the conclusion that

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132 Global Social Policy 13(2)

the Bank had advocated reform in countries that lacked important preconditions for suc-
cessful private pensions, such as inadequate financial markets or regulatory capacity.
The IEG report recommended rebalancing the World Banks pension work to support
reform of PAYG pension systems and making sure that it only advocated pension priva-
tization in countries that had developed financial systems and institutional capacity. The
report argued, echoing Orszag and Stiglitz (2001), that there was little evidence that pen-
sion privatization had increased national savings or aided capital market development.
The World Bank had been over-enthusiastic in its support for pension privatization and
needed to refocus on other goals. Interestingly, the World Bank regularly commissions
independent evaluations of its advisory work. These IEG reports are directed by Bank
officials nearing mandatory retirement age who do so as their last assignment for the
Bank, to enable them to provide dispassionate analysis an institutionalized process in
which the Bank invites critical examination of its own work.
It is striking, given Wades (1996, 2001, 2002) conclusions about paradigm main-
tenance at the World Bank, that these reports were published at all. They appear to
have been subject to the same process of redaction that Wade reports for the docu-
ments he analyzes. Yet, the burning conclusions ultimately came through. And in this
instance, World Bank ideas and behavior seem to have changed. Pension privatization
fell out of favor at the World Bank. The Director of Social Protection who helped to
organize the World Bank campaign for pension privatization retired and was replaced
not by a pension advocate, but by a labor market expert with limited interest in pen-
sion privatization. Core pension privatization experts at the World Bank went to work
in a variety of other departments and their pension work no longer focused so heavily
on privatization. At the same time, government interest in pension privatization
worldwide slowed. Both supply and demand dried up as the pension privatization lull
of 20052010 set in.
The European Union experienced similar debates on pension privatization and similar
changes of opinion over time. While starting in 1990s, ECOFIN (European Council for
Finance) issued statements strongly in favor of pension privatization and fiscal sustain-
ability and modernization, social policy ministers came out against privatization and in
favor of pension adequacy. With the foundation of a joint committee to study the pen-
sions issue in 2001 (Council of the European Union, 2001), such contrasting views began
to be reconciled. This process culminated in a 2012 White Paper: An Agenda for
Adequate, Safe and Sustainable Pensions, in which pension privatization was no longer
seen as the chief means with which to address Europes demographic aging problem
(European Commission, 2012). Instead, increases in retirement age, unification of male
and female retirement ages, and restricting access to early retirement were stressed.
Encouraging greater supplementary pension saving was also mentioned as an important
target; however, it was portrayed as supplementary to, rather than as a replacement of,
public PAYG systems. This represented a change in emphasis even over the preceding
Green Paper (European Commission, 2010), which accorded private pensions a more
central role in resolving Europes demographic challenges.
It would be wrong, therefore, to view international organizations as single-minded
and stable on pension policy. The best way to emphasize this reality is to compare these
organizations with domestic think thanks that exhibit strong ideological and policy

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Bland and Orenstein 133

consistency over time. Although some think thanks like the US Brookings Institution are
genuine universit[ies] without students (Weaver, 1989) emphasizing detached, aca-
demic research over advocacy, other think thanks work more like interest groups and
political advocates defending the same policy alternatives over long periods of time. In
the field of pension privatization, as elsewhere, the comparison between this type of
advocacy tanks (Weaver, 1989) as they operate in the United States and international
organizations is especially telling.
As background to the discussion about US think tanks, it is important to stress the
nature of the debate on pension privatization in that country and, especially, the dra-
matic nature of the political rejection of this policy alternative in 2005, when President
George W Bush failed to convince Congress and the public to privatize the federal
old-age insurance scheme, which was created during the New Deal and is known as
Social Security. Although the push to privatize Social Security began in the 1970s and
1980s, it is only during the mid- to late 1990s that the privatization campaign strongly
impacted US policy debates. In the end, although President Clinton failed to support
this policy alternative, privatization became for the first time a mainstream legislative
option during his second term. Once in the White House, George W Bush put together
a commission that supported Social Security privatization but its report came out in the
aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001, after which pension reform was no lon-
ger a priority (Bland, 2005). It is only after his re-election in November 2004 that
George W Bush launched a bold campaign to privatize Social Security. In early 2005,
the president toured the country to advocate reform but he failed to convince most
members of Congress and the public to support reform. In the end, his campaign was
a genuine and spectacular political failure (Altman, 2005; Bland and Waddan, 2012;
Edwards, 2007; Ross, 2007). This rejection of pension privatization by a country that
had long supported this type of reform through organizations like USAID did not help
promote it around the world.
Interestingly, however, in the United States since 2005, influential ideologically
driven conservative think tanks have kept promoting pension privatization, both at home
and abroad. This is where the comparison between these think tanks and international
organizations is especially telling, as far as the ideational fluctuations of the latter are
concerned. Compare, for instance, the World Bank or the EU to the Cato Institute, a lib-
ertarian US think tank. For decades, this organization has been a strong advocate of pen-
sion privatization in the United States. In the mid-1980s, the Cato Institute even
developed a long-term, Leninist strategy to weaken support for defined-benefit public
pensions in the United States (Butler and Germanis, 1983; Teles, 1998). More than a
decade later, during the final years of the Clinton presidency, the Cato Institute was at the
forefront of the push for pension privatization in the United States, as it published books
and papers that backed this policy alternative and articulated a systematic privatization
paradigm (e.g., Ferrara, 1998; Ferrara and Tanner, 1998). The same remark applies to the
George W Bush years, during which Cato experts continued to support efforts to trans-
form Social Security into a system of individual savings accounts explicitly inspired by
the Chilean model. During the 2005 campaign to privatize Social Security launched by
President George W Bush, the Cato Institute provided strong support for the presidents
initiative (Niskanen, 2005). More interesting for our discussion, however, is the fact that

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134 Global Social Policy 13(2)

the crushing political defeat of this initiative and even the 2008 financial crisis did not
push Cato to significantly alter its views on pension privatization. As opposed to the
World Bank, which revised its position over time, the Cato Institute has continued to this
day to actively promote the pension privatization paradigm, without interruption (Cato
Institute, 2009; Tanner, 2007, 2012).
In the United States, the Cato Institute is not the only ideologically driven, conserva-
tive think tank that has maintained its support for Social Security privatization after the
humiliating defeat of President Bushs 2005 privatization campaign. Take the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI), for example. Since late 2007, the main Social Security expert
at the AEI is Andrew G Biggs, a strong privatization advocate who had been appointed
by President George W Bush as Principal Deputy Commissioner and, earlier on, Deputy
Commissioner for Policy of the Social Security Administration, the organization in
charge of administrating the federal old-age insurance program. A controversial figure,
Biggs moved to the AEI as a staunch advocate of Social Security privatization, an ideo-
logical orientation and a policy paradigm clearly displayed in his recent publications
(e.g., Biggs, 2011a, 2011b). The many publications of this LSE-trained economist illus-
trates the enduring commitment of the AEI to Social Security privatization, which
began long before the 2005 Bush initiative and was not deeply altered after its clear
political defeat.
As opposed to ideological think thanks like the Cato Institute, which constitute policy
entrepreneurs devoted to the stable, long-term promotion of a clear policy agenda (Rich,
2004; Weaver, 1989), international organizations are sites of contestation because they
are open systems. Governments of various and changing political stripes may seek influ-
ence at any point in time, though in the pension reform area, this influence appears to
have been minimal. The openness of international organizations also derives from their
expert character and staffing. Experts are free to change their minds with shifting percep-
tions of best practice. They are not trained ideologues, like some think tank experts,
who are little more than advocates, but shaped more by their professional training. This
may induce certain biases (Chwieroth, 2010), but in the pension area, it does not seem to
have prevented the existence of sharply contrasting policy views concerning pension
privatization. Led by policy experts, vulnerable to influence of governments, interna-
tional organizations are radically open to ideas that may arise in any number of ways
from a variety of sources.

The impact of policy entrepreneurs

One of the most important sources of international organization ideas is not govern-
ments, but individual policy entrepreneurs. In the expert-dominated environment of
international organizations, policy entrepreneurs have the ability to have a strong impact.
Indeed, the launching of the pension privatization campaign at the World Bank can be
traced to the advocacy of one leading policy entrepreneur, Lawrence Summers, together
with a policy team led by Nancy Birdsall, and a report-writing team led by Estelle James.
These entrepreneurial figures established a clear problem definition, a critique of pre-
existing PAYG pension systems, an analysis that proved the value of pension privatiza-
tion, and formed an advisory group to promote this privatization paradigm around the

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Bland and Orenstein 135

world. Without the efforts of these individuals, pension privatization would never have
become Bank policy (Orenstein, 2008).
Similarly, the following Chief Economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, also
acted as a policy entrepreneur in this area to sell a very different perspective on policy.
Rather than supporting pension privatization, he opposed it. While his initial paper, book
publication, and conference did not put an end to pension privatization, he did encourage
further dissent within the World Bank that ultimately brought the pension privatization
campaign to a close. Likewise, the individuals who sought to make their careers within
the World Bank through a critique of pension privatization certainly had a strong impact,
as did the outgoing Bank official who led the internal evaluation report that slammed its
pension work.
Since the World Banks reputation depends on its expert legitimacy, the viewpoints of
individual experts can matter a great deal. Like in domestic policymaking (Kingdon,
1995), powerful and well-placed policy entrepreneurs can have a substantial impact on
policy. Often, this impact takes place through careful analysis and scholarly proof, not
just bureaucratic infighting. Since the currency of the World Banks work is largely
knowledge, individuals who appear to improve upon that knowledge can gain consider-
able power. Their expert legitimacy may also be closely tied to their training and aca-
demic track record in the top western universities.
What is also interesting is that it would be difficult to trace the views of these policy
entrepreneurs to the parties or governments that elected them. Lawrence Summers and
Joseph Stiglitz, for instance, both served in the Clinton administration in the United
States, the first just after and the second just before his term as Chief Economist of the
World Bank. The fact that they took diametrically opposed views on pension privatiza-
tion suggests that the policy ideas of these policy entrepreneurs are not tightly connected
to those of particular governments, but reflect their own professional opinions, at least in
some important instances. Experts opinions are not dictated entirely by their career pro-
fession or academic background either, as both these diametrically opposed economists
were trained and employed at both Harvard and MIT.

Adaptability and impact

As we argue in this article, the policy prescriptions of international organizations change
regularly in response to a number of factors, including expert ideas. As evidenced above,
the position of the World Bank and EU on pension privatization has been anything but
stable. The World Bank has swung from having no real position on pension privatization,
to launching a major advocacy campaign, to backing away and endorsing other
approaches, in more recent years. The EU similarly has been riven by disputes that it has
sought to resolve in a decade-long process culminating in a recent White Paper on pen-
sion reform across Europe.
One may wonder: if international organization ideas about policy are so contentious
and unstable, why would anyone accept their advice? Yet, the idea that policy advice
should be stable is nave. As the world changes, countries typically demand the most up-
to-the-minute policy advice, even if it differs from what was on offer in previous years.
The expert legitimacy of international organizations demands flexibility and adaptability

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136 Global Social Policy 13(2)

to changing demands and not to be bound primarily by ideology or past practice. Indeed,
up-to-the-minute, flexible expertise may be part of why demand for international organi-
zation advice is in such great demand.
The impact of international organizations depends upon their delegated, expert, and
other sources of legitimacy. In order to maintain this credibility, they cannot afford to be
far out of step with dominant expert paradigms or ideas in international politics. They
must change with the times, in contrast to ideological think tanks, which ideologically
driven individuals and political organizations of various stripes rely on to provide intel-
lectual support at times when they have access to government. Access to, and control of,
international organizations is a valuable prize. Policy entrepreneurs and their networks
compete to define the policy ideas and agendas of international organizations. This sug-
gests that the key to influencing international organization ideas and behavior is to
develop and control policy networks with expertise and credentials relevant to particular
organizations and situations.

Conclusion
Wade (1996), in a brilliant account of paradigm maintenance, argued that the East Asian
Miracle report of the World Bank showed that the World Bank was in thrall to a liberal
economic ideology at the service of the United States. Yet there is a different interpreta-
tion of his story. A truly rigid, ideological organization would never have agreed to write
the East Asian Miracle report in the first place. That the World Bank was forced by
Japan, one of its shareholders, to study the Japanese model of economic development at
a time when its leaders were committed to a different policy path shows openness to new
policy ideas as a matter of principle and organization. The East Asian Miracle story is
one of contestation, not unchallenged hegemony. Different camps and policy entrepre-
neurs within the World Bank debated whether state planning or market signals contrib-
uted to rapid development in Asia and found some sense in both perspectives. It is true
that liberal perspectives were inserted and even dominated, for a number of years. It is
true that the report had no real impact on the World Banks work in subsequent years, in
which it sought to impose liberal policies on Asia. However, times, as well as ideas,
change. Today, the Chief Economist of the World Bank is a Chinese economist, Justin
Yifu Lin, who supports the state side of the East Asian Miracle story. At the time, the
Japanese were isolated. This is no longer the case.
International organizations are open systems that may be dominated for relatively
short periods of time by certain paradigms and other ideational influences that arise
from powerful governments, professions, or policy communities. However, they also
display a remarkable fluidity over time, especially when compared to ideologically
driven advocacy tanks that operate in countries like the United States. International
organizations are truly sites of contestation. They may be influenced from a variety of
different sources, but in the pension area, they appear to be particularly swayed by
dedicated and well-placed policy entrepreneurs, who help promote ideas they believe
best address the problems of the day. Thanks to their reliance on expert legitimacy,
expert discourse and ideas can have a fundamental impact on the behavior of these
organizations. In contrast to advocacy think tanks, which identify with relatively

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Bland and Orenstein 137

stable ideological creeds and policy paradigms, international organizations can and
do change.
In this article, we have suggested a comparative context, in which international orga-
nizations are relatively open compared to ideologically based think tanks. We have
developed several propositions about international organization behaviors, such as see-
ing international organizations as open systems (Bertalanffy, 1968), sites of contestation
(OBrien, 2002), and deriving their legitimacy from expert discourse (Barnett and
Finnemore, 2004). This makes international organizations open to a variety of ideas and
perspectives on policy, and rarely committed to one perspective forever. We have shown
that it is dangerous to stereotype international organizations viewpoints on policy,
except during relatively short periods when key policy entrepreneurs and their network
succeed in asserting their dominance.
It should be recognized that this contested and continually changing perspective on
best practice within international organizations makes them difficult to study. One can-
not assume much about their intent without doing a detailed analysis of the thinking and
expert debates taking place within the organization (Kogut and MacPherson, 2011).
Nonetheless, the experience of pension privatization suggests that, despite these inherent
difficulties, it is vital to policy analysis to improve our understanding of changing ideas
and discourse within international organizations, as these relatively flexible, expert orga-
nizations can have such a major impact on policy decisions made by governments
throughout the world.
Much more research in global social policy needs to be conducted on the determinants
of ideational change in international organizations and other transnational actors. For
instance, in future research, scholars could take a truly systematic look at the mecha-
nisms according to which, at certain points in time, some ideas, and the experts articulat-
ing them, become more legitimate or dominant within particular international
organizations. Another important issue to address in future research is the conditions
under which international organizations are likely to change their dominant policy ideas
and paradigms. Future research also may identify the factors that empower or reduce the
influence of experts and their ideas within particular organizations. This type of analysis
could test the applicability and identify the potential limitations of our ideational model.
In short, there is plenty of work ahead for scholars who recognize the role of ideas in
international organizations and in global social policy and seek to develop a systematic
understanding of their impact.

Acknowledgements
A previous version of this article was presented in August 2009 at the Annual Meeting of the
Research Committee 19 of the International Sociological Association (Montreal). The authors
would like to thank Caroline de la Porte, Angela Kempf, Rianne Mahon, Stephen McBride, Sonya
Michel, and the Global Social Policy reviewers for their comments. Daniel Bland acknowledges
support from the Canada Research Chairs Program.

Notes
1. The literature on international organizations is very extensive. For example: Abdelal, 2007;
Bs and McNeil, 2004; Checkel, 2005; Dion, 2008; Epstein, 2008; Keck and Sikkink, 1998;

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138 Global Social Policy 13(2)

Pop-Eleches, 2009; Simmons etal., 2008; Tarrow, 2005; Vachudova, 2005; Woods, 2006;
Yates, 2001. This article only engages with the most relevant publications dealing with the
core theoretical and empirical issues we raise.
2. For example: Bland and Cox, 2011; Campbell, 2004; Hall, 1993; Goldstein and Keohane,
1993; Hansen and King, 2001; Lieberman, 2002; Moreno and Palier, 2005; Padamsee, 2009;
Parsons, 2007; Skogstad, 2011; Somers and Block, 2005; Stone, 2004; Surel, 2000; True and
Mintrom 2001; Wendt, 1999; Yee, 1996.
3. The concept of veto players refers to institutional actors whose support is needed for the
adoption of concrete policy reforms (Tsebelis, 2002).
4. For a critique of the concept of policy paradigm, see Carstensen, 2011.
5. On the long-term intellectual roots of the multi-pillar model formulated in that 1994 report
see Leimgruber, forthcoming.
6. On the debate about pension privatization in Africa, see Kpessa and Bland, 2012.
7. In 2011, two countries privatized their pension systems, Czech Republic and Malawi
(Orenstein, 2013). Actually, Malawis decision to mandate individual pension savings
accounts above a certain income threshold was not strictly a privatization, since it had no
prior national pension system. Participation in the Czech Republics system is voluntary.
It is difficult to know if this signifies the restart of a pension privatization trend or two
anomalous cases. However, if pension privatization does restart, it will most likely take a
different form, reflecting the evolution of expert debate since 2005 (Orenstein, 2011).

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Rsum
Les organisations internationales comme acteurs politiques: une
approche idationnelle
Ltude de la faon dont les ides et les discours voluent au sein des organisations inter-
nationales est une des frontires les plus importantes de la thorie en analyse globale des
politiques sociales. En privilgiant une approche idationnelle pour comprendre leur
comportement, nous pensons que les organisations internationales sont des systmes plus
ouverts que la plupart des ralistes et structuralistes ne le croient gnralement. Leurs
ides et discours en constante volution peuvent directement influencer les politiques
intrieures des pays. Afin de mettre en vidence cette ralit, nous comparons ces organ-
isations aux think tanks domestiques qui, dans la mesure o la privatisation des retraites
est concerne, se sont avres tre beaucoup plus rigides dans leurs prescriptions que la
Banque mondiale et les autres organisations internationales traditionnellement associes
la campagne mondiale en faveur de la privatisation des retraites.

Mots-cls
Ides, organisations internationales, politiques publiques, privatisation des retraites, think
tanks

Resumen
Los organismos internacionales como actores de la poltica: un
enfoque conceptual
El estudio de la evolucin de las ideas y el discurso al interior de los organismos inter-
nacionales es una de las fronteras ms relevantes de la teora de la poltica social global.
El artculo elabora un enfoque ideacional para comprender su comportamiento, plante-
ando que los organismos internacionales son sistemas ms abiertos que lo que la mayo-
ra de los realistas y estructuralistas suponen. Su discurso e ideas en constante
evolucin - pueden tener un impacto directo sobre las polticas nacionales. Para enfatizar

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Bland and Orenstein 143

esta realidad, comparamos a los organismos con think-tanks locales ideolgicos que,
como en el caso de la privatizacin de los sistemas jubilatorios, han elaborado recomen-
daciones de poltica mucho ms rgidas que las del Banco Mundial y otros organismos
internacionales tradicionalmente asociados con la campaa global para la privatizacin
de las jubilaciones.

Palabras clave
Ideas, organismos internacionales, polticas pblicas, privatizacin de pensiones, think-
tanks

Author biographies
Daniel Bland is Canada Research Chair in Public Policy (Tier 1) and Professor at the Johnson-
Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy. A political sociologist studying public policy from an
historical and comparative perspective, he has published 10 books and more than 70 peer-
reviewed journal articles. With Robert Henry Cox, he recently edited a special issue of Governance
(26(2) 2013) on policy paradigms. Since 2004, professor Bland has held visiting fellowships at
Harvard University, the University of Helsinki, the University of Southern Denmark, and the
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Mitchell A Orenstein is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Northeastern
University in Boston. A political economist working on the politics of economic reform in middle-
income developing countries, he has published many articles and book chapters. He is the author
of Out of the Red (University of Michigan Press, 2001), which compares strategies for economic
transformation in Central and Eastern Europe, and Privatizing Pensions (Princeton University
Press, 2008), which explores the role of international organizations in the spread of pension pri-
vatization worldwide.

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