Another BRICS in the Wall

The BRICS countries recently approved the creation of a new multilateral development bank to mobilize resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects. This paper examines the New Development Bank (NDB) through the IFI (international financial institution) elite to understand the complex organizational environment in which the elite operate, and thus offers important contributions to existing work on multilateral development banks and organizational behavior. It highlights how different discourses of the BRICS Bank were created and reproduced by the IFI elite to largely minimize the importance and relevancy of the former. The study concludes that the NDB's construction was produced not only from existing power exchanges and institutional dependencies, but also by the IFI elite's own environmental unawareness.