Scholars often portray contemporary financial globalization as a homogenizing, complex, and volatile socioeconomic process that links distant economic spaces together through increasingly abstract and opaque financial products, practices, networks, and agents. The subsequent financialization of the global economy refers to the outcome of financial globalization wherein finance capital dominates the real economy and the production of economic policy. This dissertation explores some of the specific financial mechanisms and agents that help facilitate financialization across global space by examining the financial institution building initiatives of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), an affiliate of the World Bank Group.

This dissertation is intended to advance research on how financialization unfolds across global space through the private sector financial institution building initiatives of the IFIs. Previous research has emphasized the need to identify and investigate the financial actors, relations, and sites that shape the uneven development of financialized contemporary capitalism within the simultaneously social and geographic constitution of economic relations. This dissertation takes a step in that direction by investigating the IFC through the theoretical lens of financial globalization, uneven development and governmentality. It conceptualizes the IFC as an important international "framing agent," "institution builder," and "market maker" operating within a geofinancial power network.

It examines the Corporation's investment and technical and advisory services operations centered on financial institution building in developing countries. It explores the manner in which the Corporation's operationalization of the shareholder value-added risk management framework articulated in its investment decisions, technical and advisory services operations, and its monitoring and evaluation system compels its client financial intermediaries to adhere to international investor conceptions of a "good investment climate" as part of the financial institution building process. The IFC's accounting techniques, embedded in its financial/information technologies and monitoring and evaluation system, help frame new financial spaces through institutional transformations that alter many existing financial practices. There are two main conclusions from this dissertation: (1) the manner in which the IFC operationalizes the shareholder value-added risk management framework through its investments, advisory operations, and monitoring and evaluation system are best understood as technologies of power used in the surveillance practices of the neoliberal global governance model and play a key role in financial institution building; and (2) the IFC plays an important role in the production of new financial spaces and in catalyzing the financialization of development through financial technology diffusion.