Multilateral Lending Institutions and Transnational Policy Networks in Mexico and Chile.

The impact of economic globalization for the countries of Latin America was profoundly shaped by the impact of the debt crisis of the early 1980s. For these countries, the emergence of transnational policy networks involving multilateral and domestic technocrats was instrumental in ushering in market reforms. By 2007, a variety of factors would seem to place middle-income countries such as Mexico and Chile beyond the policy reach of multilateral lending institutions. I argue, however, that the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank have, in fact, become closely entangled in the development of conditional cash transfer programs through closed transnational policy networks. The nature and extent of that involvement has been shaped by the different institutional legacies and cultures of the two institutions. While both multilaterals tended to bolster the objectives of domestic policymakers and the exclusion of civil society organizations from the policy process, the greater rhetorical commitment of the World Bank to civil society participation did allow civil society organizations to pry open a small space for policy inclusion in the Chilean case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]