Policy Transfer in Global Perspective

Mark Evans, Mark Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351910453
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique publique

The world of public policy is becoming increasingly small due to dramatic changes in global communications, political and economic institutional structures, and to nation states themselves. This book evaluates the implications of these changes and challenges for both the study and the practice of policy transfer, and provides a unique understanding of the relationship between systemic globalizing forces and the increasing scope and intensity of policy transfer activity. It provides: an explanation of policy transfer as a process of organizational learning; an insight into how and why such processes are studied by policy scientists; an evaluation of its use by policy practitioners; and the first published collection of policy transfer case studies between developed countries, from developed to developing countries, and from developing countries.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Is Policy Transfer Rational Policy-making?

Mark Evans

First, if any individual points have been well made by previous writers, let us try to follow them up; then from the collection of constitutions we must examine what sort of thing preserves and what sort of thing destroys cities and particular constitutions, and for what reasons some are well administered and others are not.

Aristotle (384 to 322 BCE), Nicomachean Ethics (X, 1181b).

Evolving Opportunity Structures for Policy Transfer

There is nothing new about the concept of policy transfer or its practice. As early as 315BCE Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics advised us of the rationality of engaging in lesson-drawing from positive and negative administrative experiences elsewhere. Policy transfer, a generic concept that refers to a process in which knowledge about institutions, policies or delivery systems at one sector or level of governance is used in the development of institutions, policies or delivery systems at another sector or level of governance, has thus been habitual practice since the dawn of civilization. Nonetheless, it has become increasingly common to observe that the scope and intensity of policy transfer activity has increased significantly as a consequence of changes to the field of action in public policy-making (see Common, 2001; Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000; and, Evans and Cerny, 2003). It is claimed that this is largely the function of the world of public policy becoming increasingly small due to dramatic changes in global political and economic institutional structures and to nation states themselves.

These changes at the structural level have impacted upon the work of public organizations either directly or indirectly and have created new opportunity structures for policy transfer. The following empirical statements illustrate the scope of change and the emergence of new opportunity structures for policy transfer.

i. A process of external ‘hollowing-out’ has occurred to different degrees in different states as a consequence of the differential impact of processes of globalization on domestic policy formation such as changes in the nature of geopolitics, political integration, the internationalization of financial markets and global communications.

ii. A process of internal ‘hollowing-out’ of the state has occurred to different degrees in different countries as a consequence of the differential impact of processes of privatization, the marketization of public services, and, decentralization on both the institutional architecture of the state and domestic policy formation.

iii. New technology has impacted on the work, services and commercial activities of public organizations and has created attractive new ways of delivering public goods.

iv. The shift from traditional government to collaborative governance has increased the range of non-state actors involved in delivering public goods and has created an opportunity structure for cross-sector policy learning.

v. The increasingly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic character of liberal democracies have created new challenges for public administrators that are best dealt with through drawing rational lessons from positive and negative international experiences.

vi. The policy agenda in many, but not all, nation states has become increasingly internationalized with regard to: stable economic management and economic prudence; public management based upon economy, efficiency and effectiveness; a change in the emphasis of government intervention so that it deals with education, training and infrastructure and not industrial intervention; reform of the welfare state through managed welfarism; and, reinventing government through decentralization and the opening-up of government.

At the same time, these changes at the structural level have precipitated a range of problems at the organizational level such as: issues of cost containment; increased pressure on public organizations to engage in income generating activities; the need for more effective coordination of policy systems across sectors and levels of governance; new patterns of need caused by the widening gap between rich and poor, changing social and demographic patterns (e.g. longer life expectancy, smaller sized families) and greater ethnic diversity and conflict within urban areas; the formation of stronger regional identities through processes of administrative decentralization; and, rising expectations of public services due to the pervasiveness of quality management (e.g. performance indicators).

Policy Transfer as Rational Policy-making

Public organizations in both developed and developing countries do not always possess the expertise to tackle the problems they confront and increasingly look outside the organization to other governments or non-governmental organizations for the answers to problems. The public expects more from government than ever before and this expectation has been mediated through politicians to civil servants:

This government expects more of policy-makers. More new ideas, more willingness to question inherited ways of doing things, better use of evidence and research in policy-making and better focus on policies that will deliver long-term goals (UK Cabinet Office, 1999).

Given this emphasis on the importance of evidence-based policy-making, policy transfer has become a rational choice for most developed countries (see Davies et al., 2000 and Pawson, 2002).

The story, however, is less clear for developing countries, transition societies or countries emerging from conflict. Policy transfer remains largely a rational process in the sense that such states still need to engage in lesson drawing from successful exemplars in order to engineer effective national development or reconstruction planning and programming. However, governments in developing countries are often compelled by influential donor countries (e.g. countries that give large amounts of aid to developing countries such as the United States, Britain or Japan), supra-national institutions (e.g. the European Union), global financial institutions (e.g. the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund), international organizations (e.g. the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) or transnational corporations (e.g. Time Warner), to introduce policy change in order to secure grants, loans or forms of inward investment. For example, in the past the securing of loans by developing countries from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has become conditional on the introduction of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) including initiatives such as administrative reform, privatization, competition policy and other forms of market liberalization. Such programmes are predicated on a western interpretation of ‘Good Governance’ and give rise to negotiated processes of policy transfer that often undermine the sovereignty of nation states to make public policy in the national interest. The history of failed SAPs is testimony to the omnipresence of poorly conceived processes of policy transfer in developing countries. At the same time, however, it is evident that such countries can improve their bargaining position with international organizations and donors if they have the capacity to engage in evidence-based policy discourses (see Stiglitz, 2002: 26–33). Sadly this is not often the case which is why building the human resources necessary to attain this position should be a key goal of any national development plan.

This book evaluates the implications of these changes and challenges for both the study and the practice of policy transfer. It provides: an understanding of policy transfer as a process of organizational learning; an insight into how and why such processes are studied by policy scientists; and, an evaluation of its use by policy practitioners. This will allow for the development of a better understanding of the phenomenon of policy transfer and its relationship with global and domestic processes of economic, social and political change.

Argument

The book develops two central arguments. The first is a normative argument, policy transfer can be a rational and progressive learning activity but only if the policy that is transferred is compatible with the value system of the recipient organization, culturally assimilated through comprehensive evaluation, and, builds on existing organizational strengths. In most instances, locally sensitive solutions must be found to local problems. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. For example, while the British Empire contributed much to its former colony, Sri Lanka, in terms of transferring an effective administrative system, the present ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka is a manifestation of a crisis of the state that has its roots in British imperialism. The British left behind a majoritarian constitution that privileged one ethnic group over all others and ensured its dominance in politics, economy and society. As a GOSL Minister (Evans, 2004) puts it, ‘[u]ntil we have a constitution that reflects the multi-ethnic character of Sri Lankan society and protects the rights of minorities, the conflict will continue’. As a rule of thumb, however, policy transfer must be able to work with the grain of the indigenous policy system.

The second argument centres on the domain of enquiry in policy transfer analysis. The study of policy transfer can only be distinctive from the analysis of normal forms of policy-making if it focuses on the remarkable movement of ideas between systems of governance through policy transfer networks and the intermediation of agents of policy transfer. It is claimed that these two arguments hold in both developed and developing countries.

Bridging the Gaps

Policy Transfer in Global Perspective has three main aims that seek to bridge significant gaps in the existing literature on policy transfer.

The first aim is to provide an interdisciplinary framework for studying processes of policy transfer. The recent literature analysing policy convergence, policy diffusion, policy learning and lesson drawing assesses the nature of different forms of policy transfer from the perspective of a host of disciplines ranging from domestic and international political science to comparative politics. The study of policy transfer has a truly interdisciplinary character. Yet what is commonly viewed as a strength can also be identified as a weakness. As a consequence of the diffuse nature of this field of study, policy transfer analysts do not have the benefit of a common idiom or a unified discourse of theoretical or methodological discussion and reason from which lessons can be drawn and hypotheses developed. Indeed, despite often having complementary research agendas these disciplines have continued to speak past each other. Our starting point then is that policy transfer analysis can provide a context for integrating common research concerns of scholars of domestic, comparative and international politics.

The second aim is to provide an explanatory model of policy transfer. The study of policy transfer is an area of research that remains under theorised and weak in explanatory power or what we will term additionality (Stone, 1999; Page, 2000). Specifically, it may be asked of policy transfer, what does it tell us which we did not know before? Max Weber (Gerth and Wright-Mills, 1948: 145) once cautioned:

Consider the historical and cultural sciences…they give us no answer to the question, whether the existence of these cultural phenomena have been and are worthwhile. And they do not answer the further question, whether it is worth the effort required to know them.

Policy transfer analysis must become more distinctive from the analysis of normal forms of policy-making if it is not simply to rearticulate other ideas. It must justify itself in the theoretical and the empirical domain. Indeed, it will be argued in the next chapter that the survival of policy transfer as a framework of understanding relies on its ability to be adapted into a multi-level, interdisciplinary perspective which both recognizes the importance of global, international, transnational and domestic structures and their ability to constrain and/or facilitate policy development and allows for the possibility that policy transfer may purely be the product of interpersonal relations in a policy transfer network.

The third aim is to present a broad range of detailed empirical case studies of policy transfer:

• between developed countries;

• from developed to developing countries; and,

• from developing countries to developing and developed countries.

There is presently a dearth of literature on the study of policy transfer in the last two categories (see Stone, 1999). The empirical investigation that follows will therefore involve chapters on new public management, welfare policy, health policy, local government reform, youth employment policy, health policy, and education policy in countries as diverse as Britain, Brazil, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, the special administrative region of Hong Kong in China, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, Tanzania, the Ukraine, and, the United States.

Policy Transfer in Global Perspective thus provides the first account of policy transfer in the global sphere. Drawing on the first published collection of case studies of policy transfer between first, second and third world countries, it presents a multi-level explanatory model that accounts for the emergence and development of processes of policy transfer between nation states. In addition, its findings provide a guide to best practice for practitioners engaged in policy transfer activity that highlights the importance of finding local solutions to global policy problems.

The Structure of the Argument

The discussion that follows is organized around a critical review of the policy transfer literature, ten empirical chapters and a concluding chapter. The final chapter reviews the book’s empirical findings and establishes a set of empirically testable hypotheses to guide the identification of potential independent and dependent variables in future policy transfer research.

Chapter Two provides an insight into the main components of the theory of policy transfer in order to prepare the ground for the empirical investigation to follow. The existing literature is organized into four main approaches to the study of policy transfer: process-centred approaches, ideational approaches, comparative approaches, and, multi-level approaches. It is argued that the first three of these approaches are virtuous in their descriptive powers but weak in their explanatory power and it emphasizes the merits of following a multi-level perspective. The chapter then moves on to present a defence of policy transfer analysis from recent criticisms and to identify some theoretical propositions and methodological techniques that should inform the analysis of processes of policy transfer.

The empirical investigation is then divided into three parts: policy transfer between developed countries; policy transfer from developed to developing countries; and, policy transfer from developing countries. From Chapters Three to Eleven a broad range of empirical cases of policy transfer are presented. These case studies have been selected for four main reasons. First, with the exception of Chapter Ten, they provide illustrations of the application of multi-level approaches to the study of policy transfer. Secondly, they provide a truly global perspective on the policy transfer phenomenon. Thirdly, they include case illustration of failed as well as successful processes of policy transfer and ‘in-process’ as well as completed processes of policy transfer. And, finally they involve an evaluation of the three basic forms of policy development – ‘policy’, ‘programmes’ and ‘delivery’ issues. In this context we refer to ‘policy’ as a course of action or plan that has been conceived to deal with a particular political problem, while a programme involves an action oriented activity which in combination with other action oriented activities will, at least in theory, lead to the implementation of the policy and ultimately provide a solution to the problem(s). Hence, a policy is an attempt to define a rational basis for action or inaction. ‘Delivery’ issues focus upon the mechanics of policy or programme design that deal directly with delivery issues and are rarely subject to public scrutiny but remain wholly political.

In Part One, Policy Transfer Between Developed Countries, three case studies of voluntary processes of policy transfer mediated through policy transfer networks are presented. In Chapter Three, Mark Evans and Paul McComb provide an account of the emergence and development of a performance measurement and resource allocation programme within the UK Department of Social Secu...