ABSTRACT
Over the last three and a half decades, multilateral development practice – the ideas and modalities operationalized by multilateral organizations in the name of development – has undergone important shifts propelled by the fraught context of neoliberalism and late capitalism. 1 Multilateral organizations such as the World Bank Group, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been central in both developing and contesting development practice and the role of the state in relation to both development and economic growth. Southeast Asia – a region of over 600 million people, the world’s third largest developing country (Indonesia), and large numbers of poor and marginal populations – has been at the forefront of innovations in the activities of multilateral development organizations (MDOs), while also being an important site of popular social protest and resistance to these innovations. It is also a region of increasing economic importance in global and regional value chains (production, assembly and services), attracting private investment capital as well as relatively large flows of official development assistance (ODA) (see Tables 6.1–6.4). This has made the region an important locale in terms of contestation and cooperation between governments, civil society and MDOs over the very nature of development practice.
