Standardizing the state: the IPSASB's role in transnational private regulation

Thesis

The IPSASB, a private sector body, has quietly attained dominance in the field of public sector financial reporting: nearly 50% of countries, and all major IGOs, draw on its standards in some form. The astounding success of these private standards in public sector accounting is inherently puzzling, but is made even more so by the meaningful distributional consequences within societies adopting IPSAS: the standards create winners and losers among parliaments, politicians, and within the bureaucracy, and have the potential to mechanistically drive financial policymaking and financialization, thus benefiting accountants and big accounting firms while potentially disadvantaging labor and taking discretion away from elected representatives.

This puzzling regulatory relationship is understudied in the literature. Through an in-depth case study of this organization, this thesis explains why and how private actors successfully “standardize” states. Drawing on over 3400 pages of Board minutes, 37 elite interviews, and ethnographic observation of three in-person Board meetings, it argues that private rulers generate demand for their standards by pushing these standards through international and domestic “supply chains,” targeting both IGOs and national and subnational bodies, while depicting them as universally applicable and apolitical – even if they have clear distributional implications. In doing so, the thesis makes several contributions to the literature. First, it uncovers an understudied phenomenon in transnational private regulation (TPR), in which the state itself is a target of rulemaking by a private actor. Second, it provides for the first time an empirical exploration of a case of private regulation of the public sector. Introducing the IPSASB as its case, the thesis expands existing literature on financial reporting, filling and important empirical gap. Finally, it develops a novel theory for this new regulatory arrangement which puts the suppliers of standards in the center of analysis.

Authors: Willmes, C

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-aeavymjp0
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: orchestration; private authority; private regulation of the public sector; private standard setting; transnational private regulation; financial reporting standards; global governance
• Subjects: Public administration; Finance, Public--Accounting; Public-private sector cooperation; International relations; Regulation