Experts versus representatives? Financialised valuation and institutional change in financial governance

Valuation devices and institutional change are key aspects of financialisation, but have been largely separated in the literature. This article explores the causal link between both concepts. We draw on the linked ecologies framework to argue that financialised valuation, such as market valuation of assets and liabilities, creates opportunities for financial experts to influence policy processes. Making use of their institutional position, experts frame policy problems to advance further financialisation as a solution. So doing, they perform essential boundary work to tie authority over financial knowledge to their social position as financial market actors. The result is a process of endogenous institutional change, whereby financial experts increasingly displace other actors in governance arrangements. We illustrate this argument providing a case study of pension fund governance in the Netherlands. There, financialised valuation requirements led to a crisis of pension funding, to which policymakers responded by strengthening experts’ positions on pension fund boards, thereby eroding century-old corporatist institutions. We show how the infrastructural entanglements between financial markets and the state in the Dutch pension system not only benefited financial actors’ institutional positions, but also point to limits of financial agency as the state increased its own capacity over a formerly corporatist domain.