After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the international aid and development policies of the United States and other Western powers were dominated by the Washington Consensus, a standard package of legal and economic reforms designed to allow the free hand of competitive markets to bring economic prosperity and political stability to the developing world. The Consensus stressed the shrinking of states and their regulatory structures, privatization, trade liberalization, the protection of individual rights, and the general Westernization of poor countries' legal systems. In the view of most commentators, these Consensus reforms failed to achieve their intended results. Poor countries who adopted them became poorer and less politically stable.
In recent years, United States development policy has focused on the importance of healthy institutions. While the Consensus aimed to drastically pare governmental institutions, the new institutional approach acknowledges the vital role of institutions - particularly laws and legal enforcement mechanisms - and focuses on ensuring that those institutions are healthy, high-functioning, and conducive to economic growth and political stability.
This Symposium will explore whether the new institutional approach will - and should - remain at the center of future law and development policy. It will ask whether other voices may prevail, including a growing call for the United States to stop meddling in the developing world and withdraw entirely from the international development business. It will raise the question of whether the emergence of China and India as powerful economic and political actors will alter the rules of the law and development game. Finally, the Symposium will question whether a bold new vision for international law and development will take shape under the Obama administration.