Rising Powers and the Reform of Global Economic Governance: The BRICS and the Normative Challenge Ahead

At a time when the liberal international economic order seems under threat, the transformation of global economic governance poses a strong normative challenge to existing international institutions. The recent establishment of new international financial institutions (IFIs)–the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank (NDB)—signified a steady process of transformation of the architecture of contemporary global governance. How rising powers understand, establish and conduct formal and informal rules within new international financial systems is of fundamental importance for the future of world economic order, although not necessarily signaling a decline for the Western-style economic governance and its normative principles. While global economic governance has profoundly changed in the last decade, the suggestion here is that rising powers’ efforts to reshape the current global economic order have often been overestimated and only partially contextualized within the enormous achievements gained from economic opportunities driven by Western globalization. Focusing on the contestation of these different worldviews, the paper analyzes the approach of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) New Development Bank countries to global economic governance within the newly established IFIs, questioning how the normative challenge represents either an opportunity or a threat to the current global order.