This seminar analyzes the uneven progress of global financial regulatory reform in the wake of the 2007-9 crisis. In six years of reform, some elements of financial reform have advanced rapidly while in others, a wide gap between reform promises and implementation has opened. This pattern of reform shortcomings and advances is not random. It reveals the different institutional pathways that the G20 and the Financial Stability Board have taken and their respective chances of success. Contrary to the predictions of mainstream theories of global governance and regulatory cooperation, the greatest impediment to state-led reform is the state. More specifically, this seminar shows that legislation and legislators represent the foremost obstacle to financial regulatory reform progress. The phenomenon of legislative recalcitrance becomes understandable when situated in the context of tension between hierarchically organized territorial states and horizontal transnational networks. Over the last decades, we can observe a dramatic transformation from the interventionist to the regulatory state, and from domestic regulatory governance to transnational networked governance. The recalcitrance of legislators and the marginal importance given to transnational cooperation in new and old legislation becomes understandable when situating it in this framework of tension between state and network.

Peter Knaack is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Global Economic Governance Programme, University of Oxford. He is visiting research fellow at IBEI during January and February 2017. His research focuses on global financial governance. He has written and published on transatlantic coordination failure in derivatives regulation, the politics of global banking regulation, and the growing tension between nation-states and transgovernmental networks over the authority to govern cross-border economic activity. Peter's regional focus lies in the political economy of China's rise, and Latin American regional integration. Peter graduated from the University of Southern California with an MA in Economics and a PhD in International Relations.

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