The Fear of Failure: Ratings as a Form of Provisional Governance

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.