A/HRC/38/33 committed $750 billion to expand IMF operations, leading its Managing Director to proclaim with justification that “the IMF is back”.8 6. Earlier criticism, combined with the nature and scale of the new global crisis, prompted an internal reassessment at IMF, 9 including revisiting parts of the “neoliberal agenda”.10 This included developing the theory of “macro-criticality”, explained below, to justify the possible inclusion of an expanded range of issues, such as social protection, in its analyses and prescriptions. As a result of those various changes, IMF considers that it has fundamentally changed its approach, as illustrated by a response to a question by its Managing Director, Christine Lagarde, at a press conference in 2014: “[S]tructural adjustments? That was before my time. I have no idea what it is. We do not do that anymore.” 11 By 2016, some leading IMF economists were even conceding that neoliberalism had been oversold and that “the short-run costs [of austerity] in terms of lower output and welfare and higher unemployment have been underplayed”.12 7. Many of the critics, however, are not convinced that the basic policy paradigm has changed. Some have characterized the changes at IMF as “a smokescreen designed to deflect criticism” and part of its “escalating commitment to hypocrisy” and have pointed to evidence that “structural conditionality remains alive and well”, suggesting a return to the “old” IMF.13 But IMF staff characterized such criticisms as “shadowboxing with neoliberal ghosts from the past”, rather than acknowledging the deep changes that had occurred. 8. Although these questions are vitally important in terms of social protection and thus of human rights, a necessarily brief report, such as the present one, cannot aspire to do justice to the broader debate over whether IMF has reformed or been “born again” or is “still neoliberal”.14 Instead, the more modest, but still ambitious, goal is to examine the impact of IMF on the human rights of the poor through its work on social protection. At the outset, it should be noted that IMF, for all its homogeneity and hierarchy, is not a monolithic institution without any internal diversity of views or differences in operational practice. As with any complex international organization, its approach is evolving. The current Managing Director, like her predecessor, has championed major changes, including a newfound focus on issues such as inequality, gender equality, governance, climate change and social protection. Much of the new discourse, and the research underpinning it, is welcome from a human rights perspective, but the real test is whether it will be fully translated into operational reality, which is where new ideas meet entrenched institutional culture, vested interests and ideology. 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 4 A. Walker, “The International Monetary Fund returns”, BBC, 24 April 2009, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8015979.stm. The evolution of IMF in taking poverty eradication and related social issues more seriously over these years can be traced through the rebranding of its “Structural Adjustment Facility” to the “Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility” in 1987, then to the “Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility” in 1999, renamed “Extended Credit Facility” in 2009. C. Ban and K. Gallagher, “Recalibrating Policy Orthodoxy: The IMF Since the Great Recession”, in Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions (vol. 28, No. 2, April 2015), p. 141. As the below article points out, the “neoliberal” label is used more by critics than the architects of these policies, but it is a useful container term nevertheless. The neoliberal agenda generally refers to policies intended to increase market-based competition and decrease the role of the state in an economy. J. Ostry, P. Loungani and D. Furceri, “Neoliberalism: Oversold?”, in Finance & Development (June, 2016). See transcript of the International Monetary and Financial Committee press briefing (12 April 2014), available at www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/54/tr041214b. Ostry, Loungani and Furceri “Neoliberalism: Oversold?”, p. 40. A. Kentikelenis, T. Stubbs and L. King, “IMF Conditionality and Development Policy Space, 1985– 2014”, in Review of International Political Economy (vol. 23, iss. 4, 2016), p. 556. S. Babb and A. Kentikelenis, “International Financial Institutions as Agents of Neoliberalism”, in The SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism, D. Cahill et al (eds.) (SAGE Publication, 2018) p. 16; and A. Broome, “Back to Basics: The Great Recession and the Narrowing of IMF Policy Advice”, in Governance: An International Journal of Policy, Administration, and Institutions (vol. 28, No. 2, April 2015), p. 161.