Collaboration, cooperation, coordination: a history of the Bretton Woods twins’ efforts to work together

Why and how international organizations (IOs) collaborate, cooperate and coordinate (the 3Cs) are important but understudied issues in international political economy today. The three terms are rarely defined in the IR literature or by the IOs themselves and are often used interchangeably. However, the differences matter in terms of when, how and why staff of different IOs are expected to work together, and whether and how such efforts contribute to IO performance. This article develops the concepts of the 3Cs, drawing from work in the public administration, management and organizational design fields. It illustrates ways in which the differences matter by examining the history of efforts by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to work together. The two Bretton Woods siblings were explicitly designed to be complementary partners at the apex of the post-World War II global economic order. I argue that formal collaboration efforts between the Fund and the Bank took place through at least 25 attempts by the two institutions to define how to work together, and may be categorized into four different, sometimes overlapping approaches, from basic information sharing to fully engaged joint initiatives. What they have called ‘collaboration’ is in fact a range of engagement. Efforts by the Fund and Bank to work more closely together have been an ongoing struggle, driven by unavoidable institutional overlap, which intensified at times of systemic change and external shock. This case is important to the study of how IOs work together, given these institutions have a unique relationship and may be seen as a most-likely case of successful collaboration.