The Fear of Failure: Ratings as a Form of Provisional Governance
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Jacqueline Best
Abstract
In Rating Politics, Zsófia Barta and Alison Johnson dig deeply into how and why ratings agencies act the way that they do and come up with a surprising conclusion: in spite of their very considerable global power, ratings agencies are above all driven by their fear of failure. In this short essay, I will take a closer look at this preoccupation with rating failures and draw out some of its wider implications for how we think about global economic governance. I will suggest that rather than seeing this fear of failure as a specific feature of ratings agencies we may want to understand it as part of a wider global shift towards more provisional forms of governance.
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