The Washington Consensus and the post-Washington Consensus

Guven, Ali Burak (2024) The Washington Consensus and the post-Washington Consensus. In: Dauncey, E. and Desai, V. and Potter, R.B. (eds.) The Companion to Development Studies, 4th Edition. London, UK: Routledge, pp. 108-112. ISBN 9780367244248.

Abstract

The terms ‘Washington Consensus’ and ‘post-Washington Consensus’ denote two successive variants of the neoliberal economic policy paradigm associated with international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank from the early 1980s until recently. The Washington Consensus advocated various orthodox policies including deregulation, privatisation, and trade as well as financial liberalisation. The failures of these policies, which were often implemented via conditionalities attached to IFI loans, inspired a broadened variant by the mid-1990s. Labelled the post-Washington Consensus, this new variant preserved the market-oriented outlook of its predecessor, but expanded the prescriptive focus towards institutional reforms and social sustainability. Today, the IMF and the World Bank’s policy advice still displays a broadly neoliberal character, although ongoing transformations of the international development regime and reforms within these organisations make grand paradigms such as the Washington Consensus both ideationally and operationally less feasible than before.

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