The Development Mandate of International Institutions: Where Did it Come From?

What was the origin of the commitment of international institutions to promote economic development in poorer countries? A popular view in “post-development” scholarship has been that this international development project was born with Truman’s Point Four program of 1949. This article suggests instead that it emerged for the first time in a significant way out of the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, with US-Latin American relations in the early 1940s acting as a key incubator for this innovation in international governance. This historical reinterpretation leads to a different view of the initial content of the international development project and the politics that generated it. It also challenges those who have downplayed the significance of the development content of the Bretton Woods negotiations.