British politics symposium on Ben Clift (2022) the OBR and the politics of technocratic economic governance (Oxford University Press)

This contribution to the symposium situates Clift’s (The office of budget responsibility and the politics of technocratic economic governance, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2023a) book in wider scholarship on ‘epistemic politics’ in comparative and international political economy. I argue that the book serves to foreground the power and politics of economic knowledge and technocratic expertise in three ways: (1) by unpacking the ‘everyday’ life of ideas as grounded in material processes of knowledge production; (2) lifting the veil on the ‘model world’ of economic policy by analysing the epistemological foundations of technocracy; and (3) deconstructing the politics of crisis by revealing the OBR’s critical role in interpreting and narrating developments like Brexit and Covid. The rest of the paper is devoted to reflecting on the core theme of the book—technocratic economic governance—focussed on three related issues: problematising technocracy and technocratic expertise; the dynamics of learning and accountability; and the importance of historicising economic governance since 2010.