Abstract: Abstract The past two decades have seen a wealth of papers on policy diffusion and policy transfer. In the first half, this paper reviews some of the trends in the literature by looking backwards to the political science diffusion literature, and forwards to the expanding multi-disciplinary social science literatures on policy ‘learning’, ‘mobilities’ and ‘translation’ which qualify many of the rationalist assumptions of the early diffusion/transfer literatures. These studies stress the complexity of context that modifies exports of policy and the need for interpretation or experimentalism in the assemblage of policy. The second half of the paper focuses on role of international organisations and non-state actors in transnational transfer in the spread of norms, standard setting and development of professional communities or networks that promote harmonisation and policy coordination. The ‘soft’ transfer of ideas and information via networks whether they be personal, professional or electronic is rapid and frequent. It is rather more infrequent to see such ideas structure governance and become institutionalised. Knowledge transfer is more extensive than policy transfer. Keywords: diffusionnetworkstransnational governance Acknowledgements This paper acknowledges the support the University of Western Australia through its Winthrop Chair, and of the FP7 large-scale integrated research project GR:EEN - Global Re-ordering: Evolution through European Networks. European Commission Project Number: 266809: administered by the University of Warwick. Notes 1. The method to help Member States progress jointly in the reforms they needed to undertake in order to reach the Lisbon goals included the following elements:•Fixing guidelines and timetables for achieving short, medium and long-term goals;•Establishing quantitative and qualitative indicators and benchmarks, tailored to the needs of Member States and sectors involved, as a means of comparing best practices;•Translating European guidelines into national and regional policies, by setting specific measures and targets;•Periodic monitoring of the progress achieved in order to put in place mutual learning processes between Member States. 2. Think Tank Initiative: http://www.idrc.ca/thinktank
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-06-26
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 471
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