States delegate authority to international organizations (IOs) for many reasons. Incentives to delegate fall under the general heading of informational concerns, such as monitoring behavior or providing scientific expertise, and distributional concerns, making sure that policies reflect major state interests. This chapter elaborates the informational and distributional logics of delegation, draws observable implications from them, and uses these propositions to examine the development of policies regarding conditionality within the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Some would argue that the IMF has achieved greater agency or autonomy than IOs in any other sphere of activity. I use the definition of autonomy presented in the introduction to this volume: the range of potential independent action available to the agent (I also sometimes use the term agency to refer to the same concept). Initially, the IMF was merely a set of rules regulating member state behavior rather than an organization with any autonomy. However, it quickly transformed into an active organization. Much of this transformation took place via debates about the use of Fund resources by members, leading to the practice of conditionality.

I begin by setting out two potential sources of variation in the autonomy of IOs: distributional conflict and the demand for information. I develop a number of expectations about how the delegation of authority should vary in response to the concerns. In the IMF, these concerns take the form of divergence of preferences among the executive directors (EDs) and private information held by the staff.