Audit as Accountability: Technical Authority and Expertise in the Governance of Private Financing for Development

Abstract

The paper examines the emergence of a new landscape of international development finance that is blurring traditional boundaries between public and private resources for meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and other global public goods (GPGs). In the SDG financing ecosystem, private actors are no longer passive bystanders in the development process but as active contributors to and investors in development projects and programmes. The paper argues that the emerging ‘private turn’ in the architecture of development finance represents a technology of governance that is rooted in the assemblage of international development policy and practice. This regime constitutes an emerging complex and often problematic framework of organising and managing countries’ access to external finance and establishing their terms of engagement with the broader global economy.