|| This seminar is open ONLY to EUI members ||

Join us for the next event of the ‘Finance in the Tuscan Hills’ seminar series, where we host Manuela Moschella, Professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna, Director of CONNECT, and Director of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence EUFutures.

In this seminar, she presents her paper, which examines how central banks have interpreted climate change as it has spread across the central banking community, asking whether later adopters replicate the ways in which early movers defined the issue or reinterpret them to fit their own institutional contexts. Drawing on 2,754 climate-related speeches from 83 central banks between 2000 and 2023, she shows that timing matters: central banks that engage with climate issues in relatively quick succession tend to frame them in more similar ways, while greater temporal distance is associated with greater reinterpretation. This pattern varies across different understandings of climate change, depending in part on how readily they can be accommodated within existing central-bank mandates and policy frameworks, while early adopters tend to remain more attached to their initial definitions. The findings suggest that the international spread of new policy ideas does not necessarily produce convergence: as new issues travel across institutions and over time, they are progressively adapted to different institutional settings.

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Manuela Moschella is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna, Director of CONNECT, and Director of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence EUFutures. She is also an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS and an editor of the Review of International Political Economy. Her research examines the politics of economic policymaking, technocratic governance and democratic accountability, and transformations in European political economy. Her latest book is Unexpected Revolutionaries: How Central Banks Made and Unmade Economic Orthodoxy (Cornell University Press, 2024). She recently co-edited the special issue The New Politics of EU Industrial Policy: From the Regulatory State to a Transformational State and is co-editor of European Political Economy (Oxford University Press). 

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The FBF seminar series ‘Finance in the Tuscan Hills’ focuses on financial sector issues and aims to bring together researchers from across the EUI community who share an interest in these subjects.