The Duck of Minerva

Kate Weaver

Catherine (Kate) Weaver is associate dean for students and associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. She is a distinguished scholar at the Strauss Center for International Security & Law, where she is the founding director of Next Generation Scholars Program. She also chairs the university’s Graduate Assembly Academic Committee, the President’s Award for Global Learning steering committee, and the Truman Scholarship committee. Weaver’s research focuses on transparency in international development aid, reforming global economic governance, and the politics of data in the world economy. She has developed methods to track and dynamically geomap aid and climate adaptation, and writes about the shifting power, players and paradigms in governing the global economy. Her latest project, the Global Indices Network (GIN), examines the interdependent power and pathologies of global indices.

Recent Posts

Will Transparency Save the World Bank?

by Kate Weaver | 11 July, 2011 |

I confess that I am a World Bank junkie. There is nothing (well, very little) that perks my intellectual interest more than an in-depth discussion on the internal and external politics of the Bank. Over the past two weeks in DC, I have mercilessly subjected my graduate students to numerous conversations about the challenges facing the organization with experts within the Bank, US Senate, and the world of NGOs and think tanks. To my fabulous students, I want to say thanks for letting me nerd-out. To faithful Duck readers, I'd like to pose a few questions about the future of the Bank that...

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En Garde, Lagarde

by Kate Weaver | 28 June, 2011 |

I happened to be walking up 19th Street in downtown DC today in the early afternoon. Numerous media vans were parked along the road, and the sidewalks between F and H Streets were filled with eager reporters and bemused staff, obviously enjoying a long lunch break. A stranger, clearly new to the area, came up to me and asked, "Do you know where 700 19th Street is?"Me: "Are you looking for the IMF?"Lost stranger (from the UN in New York, as it turned out): "Yes, I am,"Me: "You just missed it. It's the big gray building with the excited crowd and throng of cameras in front of it."Lost...

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Groupthink at the IMF?

by Kate Weaver | 21 June, 2011 |

This week, the Independent Evaluation Office at the International Monetary Fund released its report on the relevance and utility of research at the Fund (see also today's Financial Times article on the report). The report itself echoes an earlier IEO report on the Fund's performance running up to the 2008 financial crisis, which found that the Fund's failure to foresee the crisis was in part due to pervasive groupthink within the organization.The IEO report reveals much about the ideological culture of the Fund. Importantly, it draws from interviews and surveys with academics, national...

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Beware the Blog?

by Kate Weaver | 14 June, 2011 |

Being new to the blogging world, I have been thinking a lot about the utility and influence of blogs. Blogs seem appealing in so many ways. They appear to be an effective means of disseminating facts and views quickly to a wide audience, facilitating timely responses to emerging policy issues (and other fun pop politics). At the same time, blogging is a way of discussing real intellectual ideas free of many of the pitfalls of peer review and academic publishing (see last week's Duck entry by Brian Rathbun). More importantly, blogging is concise, pithy and entertaining and can potentially...

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Crisis and Change in International Organizations

by Kate Weaver | 8 June, 2011 |

The ongoing saga over the leadership crisis at the IMF poses a bigger existential question about crisis and change in international organizations: do crises in fact provoke change? This was the question at the forefront of my mind as I was driving from Texas to DC last week to start teaching a summer graduate seminar for the LBJ School of Public Affairs on, of all things, Crisis and Change in International Organizations. I was struck by the irony that the last time there was a major leadership crisis in the Bretton Woods institutions, it was at the World Bank. In May 2007, then President...

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IMF: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?

by Kate Weaver | 29 May, 2011 |

I find myself impressed with the obvious talents of Christine Lagarde, the current French Finance Minister and lead candidate for Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s replacement at the IMF (just endorsed by the G8 today ). I am admittedly drawn to the idea of appointing the first women to ever head the Fund, a testosterone-driven organization if there ever was one. Yet the fawning news coverage of the stylish Lagarde (see Maureen Dowd’s op-ed in the New York Times today) also leaves me with a sinking feeling. The crisis at the helm of the Fund should present an opportunity for change, permitting for...

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