Introduction

The views of a small number of industrialized states, along with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and eventually the World Bank converged in favour of the appropriateness of multilateral debt relief for poor countries. They attempted to persuade powerful member states and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to endorse an emerging policy norm on multilateral debt relief. Yet, the IMF staff, trained as neoclassical economists and socialized within a technocratic organizational culture that had been hesitant to adopt the multilateral debt relief norm, was unable to translate debt relief into policy without serious modifications, leading to an IMF-devised policy norm. This chapter traces how IMF staff and management interactions with the Fund's board and other external actors enabled the emergence of the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) policy norm. The HIPC policy norm was more compatible with the Fund's belief system and organizational culture (compared with the social development norm, for example; see Vetterlein, chapter 5 this volume).

Key states, acting as norm advocates, first raised the idea of giving debt relief to poor countries in the early 1980s. These states attempted to negotiate and persuade other states, IO leaders and staff that debt relief was necessary to ensure the economic viability of what would become known as ‘heavily indebted poor countries’. The HIPC had per capita income below US$785 and could only borrow under the terms of both the World Bank's International Development Agency (IDA) and the IMF's Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) (Teunissen and Akkerman 2004: xxiii).