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⁶⁸ In particular: Campbell, John L., ‘Mechanisms of Evolutionary Change in Economic Governance: Interaction, Interpretation and Bricolage’, in Lars Magnusson and Jan Ottoson, eds, Evolutionary Economics and Path Dependence (London: Edward Elgar, 1997), pp. 10–32Google Scholar; Campbell, John L., ‘Ideas, Politics and Public Policy’, Annual Review of Sociology, 28 (2002), 21–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Campbell, John L., Institutional Change and Globalization (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

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¹⁰² Campbell, Institutional Change and Globalization; although Schmidt agrees that the ‘shift in historical institutionalism … to incremental or evolutionary approaches has gone a long way toward overcoming institutional stickiness order to account for change’, she still maintains (erroneously) that ‘problems remain’ and alleges that HI has no agent-centred account; see Schmidt, ‘From Historical Institutionalism to Discursive Institutionalism’, p. 1.

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¹³⁰ Probably the frankest statement of the new resolve came from (then Deputy Governor) Ian Macfarlane in 1992: ‘It may have been possible to have a somewhat smaller recession if all the policy guns had been quickly turned towards maximum expansionary impact. But if we had followed this course how could people credibly have believed we were serious about reducing inflation? … The central point is that on this occasion we had to run monetary policy somewhat tighter than in earlier recessions and take the risk that the fall in output would be greater than forecast. To do less than this would be to throw away a once-in-a-decade opportunity for Australia to gain an internationally respectable inflation rate’. (Quoted in The Australian, 22 May 1992.)

¹³¹ The pattern of institutional interaction can also be important in helping to empower or enable actors. In this case, the relationship between the RBA, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) and the federal Treasury proved important in providing authoritative backing for the push against inflation and the move towards central bank independence (CBI). Michael Keating, the Head of Prime Minister and Cabinet at the time, argues that PM&C was supportive of the push against inflation, especially when the depths of the recession became obvious. But he also points to Treasury's even greater significance in this context: ‘In my view the Bank did not enjoy sufficient independence at the time that it could have run an anti-inflation policy purely on its own initiative, even if it had been fully united in this endeavour. In fact the role of Treasury was perhaps almost as critical as that of the Bank in this whole policy episode’. (Written communication to the author, 23 August 2003.)

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