The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements

Abstract

strengthened, IMF conditionality reformed, and World Bank, IDA and other official development assistance expanded. These are all well-known remedies, but it is important that they have been endorsed by a representative North-South group. The group also favours the establishment of a multilateral forum to discuss trade, money, finance and macroeconomic policies, and the inter-relationships between them. 'The IMF, World Bank, GATT and UNCTAD should jointly service a body functioning somewhat like the IMF's advisory Interim Committee, eventually evolving into the analogue of the decision-making Council authorised in the IMF's Second Amendment' (paragraph 7.36). This, says the report with somewhat less realism than usual, 'must not be or be seen to be an extension of the jurisdiction of the IMF into trade policy issues' (ibid). The report leaves it to be understood that the Bretton Woods system of weighted voting would apply, and it is this that would determine the character of the new mechanism, regardless of whether or not IMF jurisdiction were expanded. While there is a case for saying that any international institution possessing such extensive powers would have to be subject to weighted voting, the Bretton Woods weighting is so one-sided as to limit the incentive for the major powers to take the views of the Third World fully into account. Thus, a concentration of authority of the magnitude envisaged in the report could conceivably represent a step backwards for world trade and development. On the other hand, the group is to be commended for raising this problem, and there is probably no solution to it that would satisfy everybody.