Description
Most scholarship to date has treated “macroprudentialism” as a relatively coherent approach developed through transnational processes of knowledge construction. Once we look at how macroprudential policy has been received and implemented at the national level, however, we are confronted with quite complex patterns of convergence and divergence. This paper argues that to make sense of these patterns, we have to pay attention to how central bankers have converged on an internationally developed and approved set of models and policy tools to bolster their scientific credibility and legitimacy, while simultaneously subjecting imported ideas and scripts to heavy processes of “translation”. Of particular importance in this regard are attempts at endogenisation and contextualisation of models and indicators imported from the transnational realm. The result of these processes is that while we are seeing an increasing convergence in the rhetoric, models, and policy instruments employed by different countries, a considerable divergence in how macroprudential policies are actually used remains. In drawing attention to processes of policy translation, the paper both reaffirms the inherently political nature of the operationalisation of transnationally validated ideas, as well as the importance of looking “under the hood” of supposedly technical models to properly appreciate how national differences are perpetuated underneath a more similar sounding discourse. While countercyclical macroprudential policies in Germany and the UK form the bedrock of the empirical part of the paper, it will be argued that the processes of translation thus uncovered are likely to be relevant to a much broader array of policy domains and countries.
Keywords: IPE, debt, comparative political economy, politics of expertise
