Executive policymakers in large international organisations are often caught in a bind. On the one hand, they must represent the political demands of member states. On the other hand, they seek to make decisions based on best-practice expertise.
In their new book, Making Global Norms, Alexandros Kentikelenis and Leonard Seabrooke explain how international organisations navigate the relationship between politics and science. They show that executive policymakers often wear two hats: they act both as state representatives and as experts with distinct worldviews, which must constantly be negotiated among themselves and with technocratic staff. The outcomes of these negotiations can have enormous consequences for global policymaking.
Kentikelenis and Seabrooke integrate insights from political economy and world society scholarship to theorise how these dual loyalties play out in practice. Drawing on an extensive archival study of the International Monetary Fund, they show how Executive Board members are educated and selected, and how career socialisation often informs their positions in negotiations—sometimes trumping their assumed political interests.
Through cases on capital controls, sovereign debt management, and taxation spanning the period from 1980 to 2010, Kentikelenis and Seabrooke demonstrate variation in how tensions between politics and science unfold across issue areas. They do so by developing a mixed-methods framework that combines qualitative (archival research, close reading, interviews) and quantitative/computational (sequence analysis, text-as-data) methods.
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