International Political Economy

Abstract

The OECD is at the core of the liberal international order (LIO) that has characterised relations among Western countries since 1945. We review how the OECD has been analyzed in the field of International Political Economy (IPE). By revisiting the intellectual debates on why countries cooperate through International Organizations (IOs), we argue that the OECD has been in one of the blindspots as scholars did not grasp the role played by knowledge in legitimating the LIO. The OECD plays an important role in the creation and maintenance of a working consensus over the norms, ideologies, and practices that constitute the LIO. This started to change in the 1990s as scholarship on IOs expanded beyond IR debates over international cooperation, towards the development of an interdisciplinary study of global economic governance. Expanding on the work of Susan Strange, we suggest that the OECD’s main role in global economic governance is epistemic.