It is almost a clich頴o invoke the Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath as an opening for an essay on international organizations and economic governance. Yet these events have demonstrated not only the importance of macroeconomic and regulatory cooperation, but also the role of crises in redefining the purposes of economic governance itself. In this essay, I offer a review of IR and IPE debates over global economic governance, defined broadly as encompassing efforts to organize, structure, and regulate economic interactions (Barnett and Duvall 2005). First, tracing the interplay of shifting moments of consensus, crisis, and change, I offer a history of post-Great Depression trends, contrasting neorealist (Gilpin 1981; Andrews 1994), neoliberal (Keohane 1984), and constructivist analyses (Ruggie 1982; Blyth 2002). Secondly, I shift to address the more recent tendency, in the context of the Global Financial Crisis, to synthesize insights from these approaches in analyses of strategic interactions (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Barnett and Finnemore 2004), social psychological forces (Best 2005; Ross 2006; Epstein 2008), and institutional innovations (Sharman 2006, Seabrooke 2007; Weaver 2008; Tsingou 2009;Avant, Finnemore, and Sell 2010). In concluding, I address broader tensions between pragmatic and critical orientations, arguing that these extend "beyond theory," to encompass differences over the purposes of theory itself.