Central banking in hard times: Knowledge, legitimacy, and politics

中央银行正在经历一场严重的政策知识和政治合法性危机。自2008年全球金融危机以来，中央银行--以及作为其关键支柱的宏观金融秩序--在专家和更广泛的公共领域都引起了越来越多的争议。中央银行如何驾驭这一新的政治化格局？在这种合法性压力下，货币理论和实践如何演变？为了回答这些问题，KNOWLEGPO将开发一个创新的理论和方法框架，研究中央银行的关系合法性管理。我们的混合方法将联合收割机定量文本分析与定性过程跟踪相结合。这个框架是围绕三个主要变量：公众，认知的立场，和政治立场。首先，KNOWLEGPO假设中央银行同时与几个不同的公众互动-金融市场，他们自己的政府，更广泛的公众，以及学术界和中央银行经济学家的专家社区。其次，央行的知识可能具有高度或低度的认识共识。最后，中央银行的做法发生在高或低的政治地位。我们的主要假设是，中央银行家更喜欢在一个由认知共识和安静的政治所定义的环境中运作，并会调整他们的话语和政策立场，以减少认知分歧和/或逃避嘈杂的政治。然而，认知共识和平静的政治很容易动摇：既定的政策范式往往随着时间的推移而变得不那么有效（“古德哈特定律”）;新的理论范式可能落后于实际的、危机引发的政策创新;公众的期望在不断变化的经济和政治条件下发生变化。KNOWLEGPO将研究中央银行如何在认知和/或政治假设的条件下调整其话语和政策立场。该项目汇集了四名具有互补方法技能和经验专长的研究人员，以开发研究技术官僚治理的新方法。本报告将涵盖自1990年代初通货膨胀目标制范式巩固以来的整整30年，重点关注三个关键政策领域：货币政策和金融稳定-长期以来一直是中央银行的核心议题，但最近在政策上发生了巨大变化-以及与气候变化有关的政策，这是许多央行最近不得不参与的一个昔日禁忌话题。如今，各国央行越来越多地被卷入如何应对21世纪核心挑战的辩论中，即不平等和全球变暖。KNOWLEGPO将研究中央银行如何在这些政策斗争中定位自己，其结果将在未来几十年内塑造国家能力和更广泛的宏观金融秩序。

Central banking is experiencing a severe crisis of both policy knowledge and political legitimacy. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, central banks – and the broader macro-financial order of which they are the key pillar – have become increasingly contested, both among experts and in the broader public sphere. How do central banks navigate this newly politicized landscape? How do monetary theory and practice evolve under this legitimacy pressure? To answer these questions, KNOWLEGPO will develop an innovative theoretical and methodological framework that studies the relational legitimacy management of central banks. Our mixed method approach will combine quantitative text analysis with qualitative process tracing. This framework is organized around three main variables: publics, epistemic contestation, and political contestation. First, KNOWLEGPO postulates that central banks simultaneously interact with several distinct publics – financial markets, their own governments, the broader public, and an expert community of academic and central bank economists. Second, central bank knowledge may be held with a high or a low degree of epistemic consensus. Finally, central bank practices occur amidst high or low political contestation. Our main hypothesis is that central bankers prefer to operate in an environment defined by epistemic consensus and quiet politics, and will adjust their discourse and policy stance in order to reduce epistemic dissensus and/or escape noisy politics. Epistemic consensus and quiet politics are easily destabilized, however: established policy paradigms tend to become less effective over time (‘Goodhart’s law’); new theoretical paradigms may lag behind practical, crisis-induced policy innovations; and public expectations shift under changing economic and political conditions. KNOWLEGPO will investigate how central banks adjust their discourse and policy stance under conditions of epistemic and/or political contestation. The project brings together four researchers with complementary methodological skills and empirical expertise to develop new methods of studying technocratic governance. It will cover the full three-decade period since the consolidation of the inflation targeting paradigm in the early 1990s, focusing on three crucial policy areas: monetary policy and financial stability – topics that have long been at the core of central banking but have recently undergone dramatic change in policy – as well as climate change-related policy – an erstwhile taboo topic that many central banks have recently had to engage with. Today, central banks are increasingly drawn into debates over how to address the central challenges of the 21st century, namely inequality and global warming. KNOWLEGPO will study how central banks position themselves in these policy battles, whose outcomes will shape state capacity and the broader macro-financial order for decades to come.