Andrea Knapp, Manuela Moschella
Central bank policymaking is often perceived as technocratic and driven by evidence-based learning. This project shifts focus to the political dynamics influencing the transnational diffusion of green policies in central banking. While recent studies confirm a 'green turn' in central bank policies, the role of political factors in shaping the pace and nature of policy frame dissemination remains underexplored. This project addresses this gap by examining the transnational diffusion of three key policy frames—sustainable development, green financing, and climate-related risk—across institutions, focusing not on full-fledged policies but on the spread of ideas. We hypothesize that large actors, acting as agenda-setters, significantly influence the speed and type of policy diffusion within networks, while individual central banks maintain autonomy in interpreting and adopting these frames. Furthermore, we argue that early adoption of a policy frame increases the likelihood of imitation, rather than adaptation or inspiration, in policy transfer. Using a combination of quantitative methods—seeded-LDA, network analysis, survival analysis, and similarity scoring—on a dataset of 17,000 central bank speeches from 2000 to 2023, this project enhances our understanding of how political forces shape transnational diffusion of policy ideas in central banking. It also evaluates how central bank networks contribute to the global response to urgent challenges like climate change.