Leonard Seabrooke

Economists and
diplomacy
Professions and the practice of economic policy

Ministries of foreign affairs, of trade, and of finance are the traditional

locations for economic diplomacy between states. This continues to be
the case for most states, but it would be an exaggeration to suggest that
the organs of economic diplomacy are restricted to the state. This thought
piece discusses how the relationship between economists and diplomacy is
best understood by examining the professions behind policymaking, their
work content, and the mediation of public interstate and private collective
interests. Professions matter because they provide a common language to
those generating economic policy knowledge and they also stretch and test
allegiances to national interests when these conflict with the professions

Leonard Seabrooke is professor in the department of business and politics at the Copenhagen
Business School and professor in international political economy at the Centre for the Study
of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick.
The author is grateful to Ole Jacob Sending, Vincent Pouliot, and Iver B. Neumann for
an excellent workshop at McGill University in Montreal, and to Andr Broome and Eleni
Tsingou for conversations about this piece. He is currently running a project on professions
in international political economies, which provides case studies on how professions
compete to solve long-term socioeconomic problems.
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ideologies and beliefs. Work content matters because the practice of economic
diplomacy is often delegated to parties who are not located in ministries. We
then have to distinguish between who has authority and who does the work,
and to determine to what extent the authority is professionally equipped to
judge the quality of the work. The mediation of public interstate interests
and private collective interests also matters because, once foreign economic
policy has been delegated, it is important to understand the interests
of those doing the work. I suggest that professions, work content, and
mediation are the crucial elements in the relationship between economists
and diplomacy. I examine these elements by exploring the demand for
transparency from states, international organizations, nongovernmental
organizations, and firms, in contrast to the diplomats need for discretion.
In economic policymaking, the zest for transparency also places more stress
on professional abstract knowledge. Transparency and abstract knowledge
conflict with the traditional role of the diplomat, who is responsible for
guarding secrets and using tacit knowledge.1
Understanding the generation of foreign economic policy through the
lens of professional conflicts provides an interesting point of departure to
discuss economists and diplomacy. This lens immediately changes the key
questions. Locating and associating economists with diplomacy raises a
set of questions about state power, public and private authority, and who
is controlling the information. These questions are of the who-has-morepower type and call for measurement of the rule-of-thumb variety, assigning
distributions of power and resources to a range of entities we understand
as important to world politics: states, bureaucracies, firms, transnational
advocacy networks, and the like. Pie charts can be created and guesstimated
values assigned. This type of logic also informs much of the classic work
on diplomacy as foreign economic policy. Iver Neumann has described
the common roles in diplomacy as a mix of bureaucrats, heroes, and
mediators, and these same characters are commonly thought of as the
workhorses in the development of foreign economic policy.2 Most of the work
in comparative and international political economy does not adopt these
1 This has long been a concern for scholars of diplomacy. See, for example, Paul Keal,
Unspoken Rules and Superpower Dominance (London: Macmillan, 1983), and, more
recently and differently, Vincent Pouliot, The logic of practicality: A theory of practice
of security communities, International Organization 62, no. 2 (2008): 257-88.
2 Iver B. Neumann, To be a diplomat, International Studies Perspectives 6, no. 1
(2005): 72-93.
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frameworks but removes the personalities and the practices they use.3 Work
in these areas concentrates on how foreign economic policy is generated
by bargains between the state and domestic coalitions (big business, trade
unions, and others) in the face of external opportunities and constraints.4
While context is crucially important, we need not endlessly reassess how the
identity of big business, trade unions, or the state is changing, because their
interests can be more or less assumed. Rather, through coalition politics and
game and bargaining theories, this literature provides a range of shortcuts
to permit the assessment of case variations so as to distil general lessons
about the distribution of power and resources in the international political
economy.
The conventional questions asked in comparative and international
political economy are important because they demand that we consider the
emergence of new practices that lead to changes in the distribution of power
and resources. Who gets what does matter and the effects often compound
over time. With this in mind, this issue of International Journal is interested in
the future of diplomacy and changes in the distribution of power in global
governance, so we should explore these questions thoroughly, especially as
they point out the rise of nonstate actors not usually considered to be part
of formal diplomatic efforts. As the editors state in their introduction, the
practice of diplomacy necessarily involves ever-changing configurations of
social relations beyond the state. I explore some of those here with reference
to economists and diplomacy through the lens of the professions.5 I place the
role of economists and diplomacy in relation to developments in the field of
international political economy, and especially the work on private authority.
This issue is also interested in the role of ideas and the emergence of
forms of diplomacy. The above questions do not explicitly ask us to link
3 This is especially so given that in the biographic literature the personalization of
practice is the value-added for the reader and the author in studies of diplomacy.
Immediately here we have a contrast between a stress on the personality and tacit
knowledge of the diplomat in comparison with the professional and abstract knowledge
of the economist. Of course the great economic diplomats, such as Keynes, were
required to have both.
4 The best examples are provided by David Lake and Stephan Haggard in work done
in the 1980s. See David A. Lake, The state and American trade strategy in the prehegemonic era, International Organization 42, no. 1 (1988): 33-58.
5 I draw in particular on the work of Andrew Abbott. See Abbott, The System of
Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988).
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| Leonard Seabrooke |

the emergence of new practices to the emergence of new entities and the
processes,6 but this is where the real meat is when it comes to linking
economists to diplomacy. I suggest that locating and associating economists
with diplomacy also raises a set of more reflexive questions, the most relevant
of which is what is diplomacy? Beyond the obvious role of the diplomat in
the foreign service or in an international organization, we need to identify
diplomats functions and practices. Below I hazard some suggestions on
how economists and diplomacy fit together in modern international society
and how we may study them. My primary suggestion is that economists,
and the economic practices they use, are linked to diplomacy through the
performance of multiple roles. In addition to Iver Neumanns bureaucrats,
heroes, and mediators, I suggest that we examine the roles of technocrats
and brokers.
I will elaborate on how studying the professions assists in the
understanding of economists and diplomacy, especially the work content
of economic diplomacy and its role in the mediation of economic policy
governance. Within the framework established by the editors in the
introduction, the actors I look at in this piece are actively involved in governing
and are often shy of representation. They are typically deterritorialized,
although there are exceptions. I suggest that we can identify trends and
the future of diplomacy in conflict. Conflict drives most social activity;
economists and diplomacy are no exception. Transparency as a tool of good
global economic governance and the conflict it provides for those engaged
in economic diplomacywho place a great deal of effort on discretionis
worth examining. Those on the frontlines of economic diplomacy are not
the diplomats who sit in the foreign ministries of governments, but are
more likely to be technocrats and brokers with jurisdictional claims over
the governance of international economic policy and how foreign economic
policy should be guided.
PRIVATE AUTHORITY AND PROFESSIONS

As an advocate of the practice turn in international relations and more

sociological approaches to world politics, I share with the contributors to
this issue a concern that we should not falsely oppose historical evolution
with new practices. History is not the realm of things that happened over

6 Andrew Abbott, Time Matters: On Theory and Method (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2001).
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a long period of time while sociology is about what happened within the
relevant groupings along the way. If we are interested in explanations of
change between periods rather than specifying differences within them, we
have to do more than show how established entities slot into different time
periods. The economist and the diplomat are not fixed categories. The work
content of the economist and the diplomat has changed over time, as have
the ways in which they are connected. Some would locate these changes with
the rise of consultanciesa rise associated with financializationand the
growth in the global insurance industry.7
In The Anarchical Society, Hedley Bull suggests that economic activity
is becoming more important, and that greater strength to the private sector
and the growth of international cooperation through such organizations as
the OECD, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund forces a
change in the character of the professional diplomats work rather than a
decline in his role.8 The relationship between economists and diplomacy is
certainly one that has evolved. Some of this evolution has been recognized in
work on the new diplomacy, which raises questions of who holds authority
as well as the nature of the evolution of diplomatic practices. The editors
of this issue suggest that authority claims can be separated by territorial
versus nonterritorial representation, and that diplomatic functions can be
broadly separated by representation and governance functions. Lets begin
with authority. If economists are to be included in the range of actors in
the new diplomacy, the most similar work in my main field, international
political economy, has been on the rise of private authority.
Work on private authority sought to redress the stress on public authority
by providing a host of cases to which the answer to the question whos the
boss? was clearly not the state.9 This literature was concerned with broader
trends within the world economy that had already been identified as the
retreat of the state and the need for a new diplomacy to connect states and

7 As identified early on by Susan Strange, The future of the American empire, Journal
of International Affairs 42, no. 1 (1988): 8.
8 Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (Columbia
University Press, 1977), 168.
9 Rodney Bruce Hall and Thomas Biersteker, eds., The Emergence of Private Authority
in Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); A. Claire Cutler,
Virginia Haufler, and Tony Porter, eds., Private Authority and International Affairs
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
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| Leonard Seabrooke |

firms.10 It was also linked to the rise of international standard-setting and

guidance for public policy that was actually in the hands of private interests.
The argument from the work on private authority was straightforward: the
rise of the market and its power in the post-Bretton Woods period places
authority over economic policy into the hands of private actors rather than
states. For the relationship between economists and diplomacy, this literature
stressed how those devising financial instruments, for example, were
empowered at the expense of the state. A recent extension of this argument
is that the scientization of economic policy has depoliticized policymaking
and removes the autonomy of national governments.11 This conception of
economic policymaking suggested that diplomacy was really the realm of
security and political, rather than economic, concerns. At the same time,
older work on transgovernmentalism12 that explicitly recognized diplomacy
was updated with new work on transnational governance that only implicitly
recognized diplomacy.13
In demonstrating how private authority was becoming more and more
prominent, some have suggested that the emphasis on private authority
tipped too far. This has been addressed by Rawi Abdelal in his work on
financial liberalization, which argues that the last decades have not seen
the rise of private authority as much as the delegation of public authority
to private actors.14 From this perspective the question is really about
which practices support and reinforce such a delegation, and whether the
10 Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); John Stopford and Susan Strange
with John S. Henley, Rival States, Rival Firms: Competition for World Market Shares
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
11 Kenneth Dyson and Martin Marcussen, eds., Scientization of central banking: The
politics of apoliticization, in Central Banks in the Age of the Euro: Europeanization,
Convergence and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): 373-90.
12 Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Transgovernmental relations and
international organizations, World Politics 27, no. 1 (1974): 39-62. In the contemporary
literature the best example is Andrew Baker, The Group of Seven: Finance Ministries,
Central Banks and Global Financial Governance (London: Routledge/Warwick Studies
in Globalisation, 2006).
13 Marie-Laure Djelic and Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson, eds., Transnational Governance:
Institutional Dynamics of Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
14 Rawi Abdelal, Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Rules (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007). See also Daniel W. Drezner, All Politics Is Global: Explaining
International Regulatory Regimes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
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practices differ significantly from the intentions of those responsible for the
delegating. The role of economists and diplomacy in these relationships is
not as simple as the public sphere (the diplomat) and the private sphere (the
business person). Economists, as professionals, commonly skip back and
forth between these spheres, in a practice known in the financial world as
the revolving door.15
And it is here that we have the key problem. The rise of private authority
presupposes that the category of public authority conveys an identity and an
entity that has legitimacy and works in practice.16 As I have discussed in my
work with Eleni Tsingou, the notion that we can study public authority as
a separate sphere with regard to how economics is regulated and governed
is particularly problematic if one considers how actors commonly move
between public and private spheres of activity. This is equally true for
the notion of private authority as something separate from the influence
of public institutions. To ascribe public or private identities to actors and
then seek to link those identities to forms of authority that are understood
as absolutes distorts how we understand the practice of how international
standards and benchmarks are formed. Ascribing public or private labels
provides a pre-social determination that inhibits us from identifying new
practices, and may exclude other logics behind decision-making.17
In general, reading actors interests and behaviour from the hierarchy of
power in their public or private institutions does not tell us very much about
their practices. To ascribe an identity to actors that is informed by a power
relationship (master-slave, for example) or organizational environment
(dog-eat-dog or communal, etc.) papers over how actors may actually behave
in practice. In this sense, assuming that identities dictate interests provides
a pre-social judgment of how actors operate in a social environment. It
also tends to treat actors in a field of command or organizational culture
as necessarily singing the same tune when they may actively seek to
15 Leonard Seabrooke and Eleni Tsingou, Revolving doors and linked ecologies in the
world economy: Policy locations and the practice of international financial reform,
Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, working paper 260, no. 09,
University of Warwick, 2009.
16 On legitimacy and global governance, see James Brassett and Eleni Tsingou, The
politics of legitimate global governance, Review of International Political Economy 18,
no. 1 (2011).
17 Ole Jacob Sending, Constitution, choice and change: Problems with the logic of
appropriateness and its use in constructivist theory, European Journal of International
Relations 8, no. 4 (2002): 443-70.
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| Leonard Seabrooke |

form alliances with others that, in principle, violate logics of command

or appropriateness. Ole Jacob Sending and Iver Neumann, for example,
have asserted how concepts such as global governance replicate a publicversus-private dichotomy and assume a logic of command, while staff on the
ground have to learn from policy as practice if programs such as population
control are to be successful.18
The above relationships are as true for economists as they are for other
professions. As Tsingou and I have argued, we can create a strong narrative
and correlate how economists are trained and where they have worked, as
well as changes in policy outcomes, but this does not take us very far in
understanding how groups emerge in the first place.19 Fixing an identity to
actors prior to their interaction may distort our capacity to see their practice
of policy-problem construction. Bureaucrats from a public international
organization may not call upon the technical expertise and rational-legal
authority of their organization in asserting control over how a policy problem
should be considered.20 Rather, in some cases these bureaucrats may call
upon skills associated with professions in the private sphere or in academia
to justify their approach to policy.
Actors who seek to move through revolving doors will prize a skill
set that differs from the typical representative of an organizations culture,
whether in the public or private sector, and behave in abnormal ways.
Individual deviation from an organizational culture may be considered
policy entrepreneurship if the effort is later successful, or sabotage if it
is not. In most cases policy entrepreneurship or sabotage will be not the
action of an individual actor but that of an alliance of actors from within
the organization and, more likely, from a number of organizations that can
lend the initiative legitimacy and force. Professional associations, including
the various types used by economists, can then mobilize to claim their
jurisdiction over different kinds of activities, including the governance of
domestic and international economic policymaking. In short, while we can
speculate and attempt to measure the retreat of the state or the rise of private
18 Ole Jacob Sending and Iver B. Neumann, Governance to governmentality:
Analyzing NGOs, states, and power, International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 3 (2006):
651-72.
19 Seabrooke and Tsingou, Revolving doors. Jeffrey M. Chwieroth, A Capital Idea:
The Role of Neoliberalism in the Resurrection of Global Finance in Emerging Markets
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
20 Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International
Organizations in Global Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
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authority, such evaluations will be of little use in providing us with tools

to study economists and diplomacy, other than to reinforce a general trend
and the gain or loss of established actors. And, as Bull states, the rise of
private power and increased international cooperation does not mean that
the diplomats are out of a job, but that their work content has changed. We
need better analytical tools.
The work on professions, led by Abbott and others, provides such tools,
since the focus is on how different professions make jurisdictional claims over
different types of activities.21 For example, economists divide themselves up
according to their field and specialtymacroeconomics, microeconomics,
labour economics, development economics, and so forth. Additionally, in
recent decades a number of professional groups have asserted themselves
in the world of policy, such as with the emergence of risk managers in the
world of finance, or the rise of groups making jurisdictional claims through
the creation of work contentsuch as Transparency International, with
the creation of national integrity system assessments, and the subsequent
ranking of countries for corruption and transparency.22
The literature on professions suggests that looking at work content is a
way to examine how a system is changing. In this piece I am interested in the
relationship between economists and diplomacy. A wide range of examples
could be used to test theories of delegation, private or public authority, and
the like. I will restrict myself to two. The first is the International Monetary
Fund and the World Banks financial sector assessment program. Since it
commenced in 1999, the assessment has included sending a mission from
the international organizations to the state in question, where national
authorities are engaged. As the assessment includes a range of international
financial standards from bodies of which many states are not members, such
as the Basel committee, the assessments necessarily include a great deal
of diplomacy to lessen legitimacy problems. Staff in these assessments are
21 Abbott, The System of Professions.
22 Historically, this has been the case in the UK, France, and the US. See Marion
Fourcade, Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain,
and France, 1890s to 1990s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). On the rise
of groups using risk management within financial models, see Eleni Tsingou, Power
elites: Club model politics and the construction of global financial governance,
unpublished manuscript, Copenhagen Business School, 2011. On Transparency
International, see Peter Larmour, Civilizing techniques: Transparency International
and the spread of anti-corruption, in Brett Bowden and Leonard Seabrooke, eds.,
Global Standards of Market Civilization (London: Routledge, 2006): 95-106.
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| Leonard Seabrooke |

often trained economists who are working for an international organization,

have worked for one in the past, or are working in a consultative capacity. As
they are actively seeking to reform the financial policies of a state through an
assessment, they refer to their abstract professional knowledge as economists
and their experience in the world of policy or the private sector in the process
of making assessments. In doing so, they attempt to use persuasion with
reference to abstract knowledge and a commitment to supposed universal
standards, such as transparency, rather than to engage in a diplomatic
negotiation. The work content of the assessment team includes a great deal
of diplomacy and must engage in mediation processes, but in a manner in
which the diplomats in the state under assessment have fewer cards to play,
given the stress on transparency. In the case of OECD states, consultants
are often brought onto mission teams. They then refer to their professional
associations and abstract knowledge to gain legitimacy for their place on the
team.23 I have suggested in other work that this type of engagement can be
regressive and that confidential environments where tacit knowledge and
discretion are more prominent are more likely to be sites of policy learning.
Another example is the World Banks doing business survey, which
provides measures of business regulations across a range of areas in the
economy, such as getting credit, protecting investors, and employing
workers, and then ranks states on how much money, time, and steps these
various activities require. It compiles rankings on all participating countries,
which are made public on their website and are intended to assist investors
with their decision-making. The data for the survey are collated from
professional groups inside the respective economies, including lawyers,
business consultants, government officials, and the professions engaged
in enforcing regulations. In this case also the mediation process involves
actors who would traditionally be associated with diplomacy but place more
importance on knowledge generation from unconventional diplomatic
sources, including the economics and law professions. As with the financial
sector assessment program, the doing-business survey emphasizes the
need for transparency and a global norm for good governancein this case
lowering the costs for foreign investors seeking to establish a business
and less stress on actors who have discretion. The real discretion in these
cases is either in data manipulation from national authorities or from the
23 Leonard Seabrooke, Pragmatic numbers: The IMF, financial reform, and policy
learning in least likely environments, Journal of International Relations and Development
15, forthcoming.
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consultants who have selective information. In this sense professions are

important for the new diplomacy, especially once we look at their work
content. They are particularly important because much of the mediation role
we would typically associate with conventional diplomacy has been assumed
by other actors who have claimed jurisdiction over the content of domestic
and international economic policy.
ECONOMISTS AND DIPLOMATS AS TECHNOCRATS AND BROKERS

The purpose of this thought piece is to consider how the relationship

between economists and diplomacy is changing. In the first section I
noted that Neumanns work on diplomacy and the designation of roles
as bureaucrats, heroes, and mediators can be reconsidered with regard to
economists and diplomacy. While, as noted by the editors of this issue, the
work on diplomacy is long on typology and short on theory, I add a spin
to Neumanns categorization of actor-types. My suggestion is that if we
look at how economic policy is made when diplomats are engaged, we still
have a conventional diplomat. This person, to my mind, is most commonly
associated with trade policy and sits at the negotiating table in bilateral and
multilateral forums. More prominent, however, are two types who provide a
different spin on Neumanns categorization and help us to understand the
changing relationship between economists and diplomacythe technocrats
and brokers.
In the world in which economists and diplomats interact over
policymaking, be it foreign economic policymaking or pressure and
assessment from external bodies, as in the examples above, the actors can be
seen as technocrats and brokers rather than as bureaucrats and mediators in
a more conventional setting. Like Neumanns Norwegian diplomats, people
in the field of international economic policy or in the diplomatic service
dont readily identify themselves as technocrats, but do self-identify as policyengaged scientists using their abstract knowledge with hands-on policy work.
This trend towards a managerial technocracy in economic diplomacy has
long been identified, including in 1970s work on intergovernmentalism and
complex interdependence.24 Unlike the work on transgovernmentalism, I
suggest that technocrats and brokers do not have to be separated according
24 Stopford and Strange with Henley, Rival States, Rival Firms, 22. For a review of links
between the older work on transgovernmentalism and the new work on transnational
forces, see Leonard Seabrooke, Transnational institutions and international regimes,
in Glenn Morgan et al., eds., Oxford Handbook of Comparative Institutional Analysis
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 253-74.
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| Leonard Seabrooke |

to the public or private sphere, but operate and practice in both, drawing
on skills and ideas from both to engage in what we understand as the new
diplomacy.
To add more detail, I suggest that the technocrats stress the relationship
between diplomacy and the science of economic policy in national and
transnational forums. They use professional skills of economic abstraction
to fight over policy content in the meeting room and then take off their
science hats and put on their national representative hats in the corridor
to talk compromises. They are commonly engaged in the international
benchmarking of economic policies, an activity strongly encouraged by both
the formal economic diplomatic system and the private sector. They gain
credibility by adhering to international benchmarks based on professional
abstract knowledge and publicly defend aims such as transparency, even,
perhaps, when it impedes domestic political processes. Technocrats are
more likely to draw credibility and legitimacy from their ties to New York
as much as they do to Washington. Technocrats provide representation and
governance functions and can be held to account, to some degree, on the
former.
The brokers engage in diplomacy by bringing together different parties
to discuss change to policy and business, and to provide information to
parties on how a problem can be ameliorated. They play a very important
part in the role of mediation between different interests in the determination
of economic policy, not simply on the basis of superior professional abstract
knowledge, but also from their tacit knowledge and insider information. To
this extent they can exhibit a great deal of discretion over what information
matters for domestic and international assessments and which evaluations
inform economic policy choices. I refer to them as brokers rather than
mediators because they have a clear economic interest in their activity (from
fees and other rents) and because they are not only involved in lowering
information asymmetries between parties and creating consensus, but also
actively create new information problems that are for strategic economic
advantage at the national and international level.25 Like technocrats, these
25 See, for example, the practices exhibited by the actors in international commercial
arbitration studied in Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth, Dealing in Virtue: International
Commercial Arbitration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996). To play off Eric Helleiners excellent work, as
economists they are doctors rather than dealers. See Eric Helleiner, The culture of
money doctoring: American financial advising in Latin America during the 1940s,
in Jacqueline Best and Matthew Patterson, eds., Cultural Political Economy (London:
Routledge, 2010): 91-109.
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actors are likely to gain credibility from their ties to policy communities as
much as they are to wealth-generating communities in the private sector.
They differ from the technocrats in terms of their faith in good science
and their public accountability. In general they lack both and seek to find
pragmatic governance solutions rather than provide a form of representation.
Both technocrats and brokers are an integral part of new transnational
policy communities, or what Tsingou refers to as clubs that preside over
much of the international economic policymaking process.26 As noted above,
Tsingou and I have suggested that actors within professional environments
form alliances within their own environment and seek to influence
practices within other professional environments. We have suggested that
thinking about linked ecologies allows us to see how a loose grouping can
distinguish itself (by professional skills, for example) while also stressing
that within the grouping there is a great deal of contestation between actors.
This also permits the view that actors will seek to increase their own prestige
and welfare within the group by forming strategies that link them to other
groups, or by propagating their own groups ideas and skills within other
groups. Focusing on the identification of professional training and skills,
the actors are not considered to be public or private prior to their social
interaction, in a manner that casts an assumption about how they should
and will behave.
For economists and diplomacy, technocrats and brokers have established
mediation activities centred on a range of practices for the expansion of
international benchmarking, economic reporting activities, and coordination
to check governments and firms compliance with international soft and
hard law. The number of actors doing this kind of work has expanded and
professions compete over who has the right to do it. While the common view
of much of this activity is that the policy content follows from the command
structure as, for example, the IMF tells a representative office what to do,
much of the practice is about negotiation and diplomacy, including access to
data.27 Increasingly, the range of actors involved in diplomatic negotiations
includes technocrats and brokers.

26 Tsingou, Power elites.

27 Andr Broome, The Currency of Power: The IMF and Monetary Reform in Central Asia
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
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CONCLUSION

My suggestion here is that we should consider the role of technocrats

and brokers in our thinking about economists, economics, and the future
of diplomacy. This is particularly important for the contemporary period,
because economic policymaking has become increasingly transnational.
More often than not this is related to positive norms, or at least ideas that
we associate with good practices, such as transparency, good governance,
benchmarking, and best practice. When it comes to the relationship
between economists and diplomacy, my suggestion here is that the stress on
transparency changes the work content for conventional diplomats engaged
in economic policymaking, since it removes much discretion to mediate and
negotiate on behalf of the state. We should be alert to these changes. I suggest
that in order to locate these changes in the relationship between economists
and diplomacy and diplomatic activity around economic policymaking, we
should look at professions and the work content in diplomatic mediation
processes. For economic policy, the future of diplomacy will be driven by
professions and professional knowledge more than by traditional public or
private distinctions.

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