Jacqueline Best - Endogenizing the limits of ideas:

a how-to guide

Date April 14, 2025 from.10.00 -11.30

Location Copenhagen Business School, Kilevej 14 A, 2000 Frederiksberg in Room K4.74 (4th floor)

Jacqueline Best is a Professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her research sits at the intersection of international relations, political economy, and social theory, with a particular focus on economic exceptionalism, policy failure, and the evolution of neoliberalism. Her most recent book, Governing Failure: Provisional Expertise and the Transformation of Global Development Finance, examines the role of expertise in economic governance. She is an honorary research fellow at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) and has held visiting positions at the Global Economic Governance Centre and the Department of Development Studies, both at Oxford University. She is a former editor of Review of International Political Economy a member of the editorial board for International Political Sociology and the Cambridge Studies in International Relations Book Series.

Jacqueline is visiting CBS as part of the Carlsberg-funded project MAKRO, led by Oddný Helgadóttir. Her talk will explore key themes from her research, offering reflections on contemporary developments in the study of economic ideas. Everyone is welcome to attend the seminar and no reading is required ahead of it.

Endogenizing the limits of ideas: a how-to guide 

This talk makes the case for changing the way the political economy of ideas is understood by focusing on the limits of ideas—specifically, the role of ignorance, failure, and friction in policymakers’ efforts to translate ideas into practice. Recent practice-based scholarship has introduced important innovations to ideational research, shifting from a paradigm-based methodology to an approach that begins with concrete, everyday ideas, and developing a richer ontology of ideas that acknowledges the materiality of policy devices, models, and techniques. However, this scholarship continues to rely too heavily on an epistemology of social learning, in which failures and ignorance are seen as temporary obstacles to be overcome through policy adaptation and change. This talk advocates for a more nuanced epistemology that endogenizes the limits of ideas, recognizing that policymakers do not always seek to learn from failures and, at times, find ignorance to be useful. Drawing on efforts to integrate these limits into research, the discussion will offer practical guidance on how to examine the role of failure, friction, and ignorance in economic policymaking.