While peer review mechanisms are heterogeneous in their form and function, they often involve regulatory decision-making in one jurisdiction being reviewed by a committee of international peers , who can be policy-makers, domestic or international officials and even academic experts. After being pioneered by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the use of peer review has grown significantly. Recent efforts to cope with important global challenges – including strengthening financial stability in the face of crisis, climate change, terrorism or even the handling of a pandemic – have employed variants of transnational peer review.
For present purposes, it is worth highlighting that peer review (a mechanism typically used to safeguard disciplinary expertise) has been relied upon in EU and global governance even in the face of events that have highlighted the limits of expert knowledge (such as the global financial crisis). Despite such ubiquity, little is understood about both the formats and effects of peer review on regulatory practice. Is peer review a mechanism through which regulators are made to conform to conventional wisdom or one which provides deliberative discipline on local experimentation to deal with the limits of expert knowledge? To frame the debate, we will discuss the formalisation of peer review within market regulation in the European Union, as well as preliminary results on the effects of transnational peer review for financial stability.
Yane Svetiev is Fernand Braudel Fellow at the EUI Law Department and Associate Professor of Law at the University of Sydney Law School (research funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on Transnational Peer Review and Financial Regulation)
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