Description
The fact that the increasing scientisation of regulatory agencies such as central banks has shaped the way they operate is well established within the literature. However, so far we know very little about how such scientisation interacts with wider trends of convergence and divergence in regulatory institutions and national varieties of economic organisation. Using financial policy in Germany since the Global Financial Crisis as its case study, this article shows how scientised central banks can become unwitting agents of convergence, because of the way that scientific knowledge accumulation works within the transnational networks of which they are part. While much of the existing work on the role of transnational communities has tended to locate the source of convergence primarily in commitment to a shared policy programme or wider economic ideologies, the article thus highlights a so far underappreciated source of policy change: Convergence in this case is driven by the particular nature of individual epistemic norms that are incompatible with the processes of contextual knowledge construction that used to structure policy in the past.
