The Joint Vienna Institute

"How does the intellectual role played by international training organisations fit into the contemporary architecture of global governance? The international diffusion of economic policy ideas represents one of the core dimensions of contemporary global governance, which has generated heated controversy in recent years with international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank castigated for championing a ‘one-size-fits-all’ brand of neoliberal economic reform. Yet while substantial scholarly attention has focused on analysing the effects of the formal compliance mechanisms that the IMF and the World Bank rely on to implement neoliberal policy changes in borrowing countries, such as loan conditionality, less attention has been devoted to exploring the intermediate avenues through which neoliberal ideas travel from global governance institutions to national governance contexts. This article aims to address this gap in the study of contemporary global governance and neoliberal policy diffusion through critically examining the evolving role of the Joint Vienna Institute (JVI), an international training organisation set up after the end of the Cold War to transmit global ‘best practice’ economic policy ideas to national officials in post-communist economies."