The national life of transnational models: macroprudential policy and the politics of translation in Germany and the UK

Most scholarship to date has treated macroprudential policy as a relatively coherent approach developed through transnational processes of knowledge construction. Using Germany and the UK as a case study, this article shows that there was indeed a remarkable level of convergence on an internationally validated set of key ideas, models, scripts, and policy tools even in countries with otherwise widely diverging traditions of financial governance. Surprisingly, however, similarities in discourse are often still accompanied by very different uses of individual policy tools. This article argues that to make sense of these persistent differences, we have to pay attention to the ways in which central bankers tend to subject imported ideas and scripts to a process of translation before using them in the actual policy process. Of particular importance in this regard are attempts at endogenization and contextualization of models and indicators imported from the transnational realm. In drawing attention to these processes of policy translation, the article also reaffirms the inherently political nature of the operationalization of transnationally validated ideas. 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.