Industrial policy, once a taboo in mainstream economics, is being mainstreamed by the very institutions that spent four decades stigmatising it. In March 2026, the World Bank published Industrial Policy for Development: Approaches in the 21st Century, co-authored by Ana Margarida Fernandes and Tristan Reed. The IMF, has done a similar volte face, first in its 2019 working paper ‘The Return of the Policy That Shall Not Be Named’ and again in the October 2025 World Economic Outlook, which has a chapter titled ‘Industrial Policy: Managing Trade-Offs to Promote Growth and Resilience’. That the IMF and World Bank have now openly readmitted industrial policy into their vocabulary is no small thing. Does it mean the tide has turned on austerity and market fundamentalism?

The argument of this article is that this rhetorical turn arrives bound by two structural constraints that the new Bretton Woods literature largely refuses to confront: the ongoing rentierisation of Global South economies through IMF-World Bank conditionality, and the imperial retaliation that meets serious attempts at sovereign industrialisation. Industrial policy on the terms set by Washington and Wall Street will not free up the policy space the Global South needs; it risks becoming another financial product or technocratic buzzword layered onto an already extractive architecture.