A quest for democratic forms of governance in standard setting and assessment. The case of the IMF

1. A large number of specialised international standard setting bodies (ISSBs) produced in the last decades a plethora of principles, rules and codes (from now on standards) for the financial sector. Being technical bodies, they are meant to represent neither fully elected domestic organisms, nor the vast majority of countries. In addition, since the governance structure of each ISSB represents sectorial and often private interests, the standards they produce follow from different objectives that are not necessarily consistent among them. ISSBs’ mutual consultation procedures do not guarantee either the consistency of the whole or the absence of moral hazard behaviours by firms and investors in the form of regulatory arbitrages. Finally, for institutions acting in a soft law environment, the enforcement problem is a major preoccupation. Since the late ‘90s a supranational player, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), is giving primary importance to “oversight, monitoring, and implementation of the ‘working norms and rules’ of the evolving international financial system” (Bryant 2007). It should be the task of this public supranational player to state primary global objectives and to look for both sufficiency and consistency.