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Learning from abroad: The role of policy transfer in contemporary policy‐making

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In recent years there has been a growing body of literature within political science and international studies that directly and indirectly uses, discusses and analyzes the processes involved in lesson-drawing, policy convergence, policy diffusion, and policy transfer. David Dolowitz discusses.

Image courtesy of interviewee. April 30, 2024

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This video video discusses the concept of policy transfer, which refers to the process by which one political entity learns from or adopts the policies and practices of another. It examines the stages and factors involved in this process, including who the key actors are, the reasons and timing for policy transfers, and how policies may change as they move between systems.

The author highlights various theories related to policy transfer, such as diffusion, lesson drawing, and conversion theories, emphasizing the complex interconnections that influence policy outcomes. Specific examples, such as welfare-to-work reforms that migrated from the U.S. to the U.K., illustrate how policies can fail when they do not consider the unique context and embedded factors of the adopting system.

The author also discusses the increasing complexity of global governance and the demand for effective policy solutions. It stresses the importance of understanding the entire policy process and the need for better communication between academic research and policy-making. Moreover, there is a call for greater focus on non-Western policy models to enhance understanding of policy transfer dynamics in different political contexts.

In conclusion, successful policy transfer requires an awareness of the originating system's intricacies and the ability to adapt policies to fit local needs without losing their effectiveness. This video video suggests that fostering cross-learning and understanding among different political systems is essential for effective policy development and implementation.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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Policy transfers is really the process by which,

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one political unit learns from the activities

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or the policies or the ideas of another political unit.

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Um, and it really looks at how that process occurs.

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Um, so who are the major agents in it? Why does it occur?

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When does it occur? Um, how do policies change

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as they move from one system to another,

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or are how they change if they're mixed

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between multiple systems?

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Um, so policy transfers is really, as I said,

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looking at the process in which things move from one

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political system to another.

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Um, and when you're talking about policy failure,

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policy failure in relations to policy transfer

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can happen at multiple stages.

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Um, so a failure can occur at the input stage.

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So those involved in the transfer process don't

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understand, what is actually occurring when they,

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when they, when they study the, the model, shall we say.

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Um, it can be that they don't borrow

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what's the most important bits.

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Um, because one of the biggest problems in policymaking,

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particularly if you want

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to engage in policy transfer in the policymaking process, is

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that politics are embedded in webs.

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And those webs often determine whether a policy is

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successful or unsuccessful within a, an originating system.

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Um, so without knowing those webs, it becomes very difficult

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to see just how a policy is dependent upon other

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elements of a political system.

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This particular study was really to look at,

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it was to explain how

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different types of policy moved from the US

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to the uk, particularly in relation to

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the Blair, the Blair era,

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and the, basically from the Thatcher to the Blair era.

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Um, and looking at basically

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in the first elements we're really looking at the welfare

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to work reforms that, that were implemented in the,

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initially in the US and then moved to the uk.

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Um, and then the second part was really looking at trying

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to explain why elements of that movement didn't work.

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Um, and in particular it was a focus on the child support

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agency,

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and why the child support agency just didn't work in the uk

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even though it was working quite successfully at

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the time in the United States.

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Yeah, I, I mean, if you wanna look at it in terms

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of a evolution, it really would start out with,

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diffusion studies in the United States.

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Um, so you were talking about people like Jack Walker's

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work, and he did a, a really wonderful called diffusion

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of innovation among American states.

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Um, and then you had Rogers

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who looked at diffusion of innovation.

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So it was looking at how innovation really moved.

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Um, the, the big issues

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with those is they seemed very mechanistic,

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and that there was no, there was,

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they two things looked alike, so they moved,

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so there wasn't re there wasn't a lot

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of focus on the actual mechanisms involved in the movement.

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And that's the next stage moved into sort of lesson drawing.

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And that came out of the, out of really Britain in a lot

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of ways with the work of Richard Rose.

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Um, and this was very deliberate.

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He, he said that policymakers deliberately act

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in a very rational way by using policies

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and other systems to fix problems they encounter at home.

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Um, then really neither

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of those worked well.

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Um, another element was known as conversion theories,

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and these are basically things

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came together and they looked alike.

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So they converged, again, lack of mechanisms.

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And so really the policy transfer work that I did

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initially was trying

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to find a way in which we could talk about the mechanisms

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by which things moved, so that we could demonstrate

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and actually show that system a look to system B

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or that agent A was involved in this process.

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Um, then as it developed, we, you got into new ideas.

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Um, so it sort of, it wasn't that it was necessarily

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a system A to B,

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but it could be international consultants might be pushing

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policies around or the work of NGOs, in,

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in creating standard models.

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Um, so you see that a lot

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with structural adjustment policies during the 1980s.

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Um, then it sort of moved again

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to look at the way in which things

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transformed as they moved.

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So you, you had a policy that changed

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as it moved across, so that it wasn't that it changed

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as it entered the system that was looking at it,

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but it was actually changing as it moved to that system.

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Um, then the next stage

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of the development was really looking at learning.

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Um, and, and while policy transfer is a clearly a learning

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process, the very little was discussed about

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what was learned in the transfer.

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Um, and so then we started looking at whether you had

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complete learning or whether there was very

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little learning involved in it.

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Um, people like Elli got into,

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and Dunlop were talking about the learning process.

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Um, while you can see

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Peck and Theodore looking

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At fast policy, which is sort of the transformation of it.

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Um, and so we're sort of here today with, with really

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a very advanced model of looking at

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how things move

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and are changed as they move academically, I would say,

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because it's, it, it helps put flesh on the bones of,

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of why governments look around.

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Um, if they look around.

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Um, I, I mean, I'm, I don't want to

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to make it sound like everything's involved,

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everything's policy transfer.

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It's not. Governments create their own things.

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Um, but when policies do transfer, a lot has

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to do with the growth of interconnections.

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Now, I mean if you look at Diane Stone's

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where she talks about the networks

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that surround government policy making,

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she's not the only one, but she links it directly

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to transfer and trans transformations.

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Um, but realistically we have

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so many new ways in which we're interacting with each other.

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So economically, we're connected politically,

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we're connected, we're socially we're connected.

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We have new ways of communication.

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So, you know, at one time, you to learn

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what the government was doing, it took months to years.

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Now it takes seconds. Um, you have the rise, as I said,

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of international policy consultants,

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and that's their job is to basically go around

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and push policies they like.

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Um, and so again,

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a whole networks have evolved almost that are designed

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for the movement of information.

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I would say governments have a demand because policy,

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because the world's more complex now

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and the more complex the world becomes, at least

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to the politician or the policymaker I should say,

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because one of the things you have to remember is

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that policymaking doesn't, isn't just politicians.

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Policymaking is is a very broad, very, very broad field

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that involves many, many, many different actors,

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and agents.

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But, really I think the complexity has made

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the desire not to fall behind

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or not to be on the losing end of a continuum,

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or to stay ahead of the curve.

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One of the major reasons that it occurs.

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Um, and it's also, I think, I think

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that you hear more about it,

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but I'm not sure how much more there is.

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Um, and,

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and what I mean by that is like, if you look at China,

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their political system is really designed

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around policy experimentation at the local level.

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And if, and if local experiments work

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well, they spread very quickly.

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Uh, but we don't, we don't realize that, that a lot of the

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national policies are actually based on local policies.

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Um, and so I think it's always been there,

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but we're more aware of it as well, really what, what we've,

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we really, if you think about transfer,

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you can go from a copy of a something

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so you can just send a copy it,

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with very little thought involved

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or a lot of thought involved to be perfectly honest.

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I mean, it all depends on what you mean by copy

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and why you're copying it all the way to just sort

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of inspiring you to think about something in a new way.

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Um, and really transcript can

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occur anywhere in between that.

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Um, now when we, when we originally created this continuum,

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which we tried to put sort of

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labels on different stop points to make it look

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more comprehensible,

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but realistically, it, it can be anything can move,

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how well it can move is different.

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Why it moves is very important for explaining,

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explaining outcomes in a lot of ways.

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But, as I said,

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it really is anything from a direct copy all the

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way to an inspiration.

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A very quick policy would be like the child support Agency.

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It was piloted in the United, well,

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it was probably piloted in Australia

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and then moved into the United States.

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Wisconsin created the system that was borrowed

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by Britain under the Thatcher regime.

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Um, and they basically took it lock, stock, and barrel.

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Um, they did very little adaptation to it.

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Um, and that, that lack of adaptation actually led to a lot

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of the agency's failures really

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to engage in policy transfer is difficult in that it's easy

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in that you can, I mean, I can walk down the street in any

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city and say, that's a good idea.

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Um, and bring that model back with me.

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Um, so if I see that you have tree boxes on every,

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every 10 feet and you've got cutouts in your, in the,

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in the road system so

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that water doesn't go straight down into the gutters,

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and so that you, and you see rain gardens

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and everything else set up around, you'd say,

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this is a pretty good model

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for stormwater management using green technologies.

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Um, but that's not an easy thing necessarily to transfer

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because you have to think about the road system might not be

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appropriate for these things.

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Um, you might not have the infrastructure

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to implement these, these policies.

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Um, and so you might say, let's do this

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and then find out that you can't do it.

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Um, so that would be sort of in an appropriate transfer.

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Um, uninformed transfer can also occur in the sense

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of like, you just don't know enough.

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You just don't know enough.

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So you engage in a transfer,

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but you just don't know enough about the originating system.

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Um, and so it, that gets into that idea of webs

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and webs of knowledge and embedded webs.

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And an an embedded web means

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that a policy depends upon something else for success.

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And so really you've got legislation

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around stormwater management,

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but there's a whole lot that's embedded within environmental

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protection legislation,

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which is embedded within urban governance legislation,

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which is go into urban planning legislation.

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And so really to be able to be successful, you have

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to understand how all of those different policy areas

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fit together to make one policy operate the way it does.

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Well, the welfare to Work system emerged into United States,

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and one of the things that it did have that, that helped it

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spread, I won't say successfully,

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but it spread, it, it appeared to be very successful

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during the Clinton period, but that was a time

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of economic expansion.

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And then when the economy started to slow down

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and collapse, the welfare to work system didn't work

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so well any longer.

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Um, but one of the things that it implemented was a, a,

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a considerable amount of job training.

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Um, so it was not a work first program initially.

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Um, it became a workforce program,

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but it initially was not a workforce program.

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Um, and that training element was very important

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for those early successes, particularly, for,

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for not skimming.

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'cause one of the things you see in Welfare

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to Work programs is that you can skim off those

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that are job ready and make it look very successful

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and then, and then shove those

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who aren't job ready into a different program,

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into a different welfare strata,

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into a different welfare structure.

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Um, and that's sort of what happened here is

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that they didn't look at, when Thatcher started the Welfare

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to Work program, it was much more of a work fair program.

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So it was designed really to get those job ready into work

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and reduce the unemployment count rather than designed

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to really help in any real way so

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that the training was really never offered.

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It was much more of a, you keep searching for a job,

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we'll help you search for a job,

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but we're not gonna really help you get ready

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for the next level of job.

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Implications are that really, I think governments,

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not governments, I don't like to use governments.

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Those involved in the transfer process.

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I think a they need to understand the policy process better.

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Um, and that when transfer occurs within the policy process

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can lead to very different outcomes.

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Um, the way in which things develop needs

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to be understood better as well, I think particularly

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amongst policy policymakers.

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Um, because one policymaking unit doesn't seem to know

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what another policymaking unit's doing a lot of the time.

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And so when you're engaged in transfer

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and you're trying to transform it to fit your system,

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if you don't have a joined up system, you're going to,

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you're gonna have problems.

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And so one of the things I'd like to see is more linkages

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between academics who follow the process

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and policy makers engaged in the process.

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Um, I think there's still a,

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a disjuncture there in a lot of ways.

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Um, I would also like to see substantial more

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use of an understanding of non-Western models,

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because realistically, I mean,

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you've got people like os Mani

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Porto who's looking at Brazil out

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and you're looking at,

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you have some people looking at China out, but not a lot.

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But when you actually look at the transfer process,

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it it is, it actually might not be all that

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similar when you look at an authoritarian system

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versus a democratic system.

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And if it is very similar between the two systems, well

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that tells you something, that's very important.

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Um, and there isn't,

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there isn't much communication going on.

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Um, so like I'm looking at the Rivers chief systems in China

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right now, and there's only 56 articles published in

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English, even though there's over 200

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articles written in Chinese.

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Um, and,

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and most of those just simply are very basic.

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They say it went from A to B2C,

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but they don't tell you how it went from A to B2C.

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And they also don't tell you what was,

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what was actually moved in A to B2C,

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nor do they actually tell you very much about

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its development, during that process.

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'cause the river chief system developed substantially from

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its origins as an emergency stopgap measure all the way

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to a national policy.

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And so I think understanding how things work in,

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in different, in different political settings

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and systems is where we need to start going next.

00:00 - Policy transfers is really the process by which, one political unit learns from the activities or the policies or the ideas of another political unit. and it really looks at how that process occurs. so who are the major agents in it? Why does it occur? When does it occur? how do policies change

00:27 - as they move from one system to another, or are how they change if they're mixed between multiple systems? so policy transfers is really, as I said, looking at the process in which things move from one political system to another. and when you're talking about policy failure, policy failure in relations to policy transfer can happen at multiple stages. so a failure can occur at the input stage.

00:59 - So those involved in the transfer process don't understand, what is actually occurring when they, when they, when they study the, the model, shall we say. it can be that they don't borrow what's the most important bits. because one of the biggest problems in policymaking, particularly if you want to engage in policy transfer in the policymaking process, is that politics are embedded in webs. And those webs often determine whether a policy is

01:32 - successful or unsuccessful within a, an originating system. so without knowing those webs, it becomes very difficult to see just how a policy is dependent upon other elements of a political system. This particular study was really to look at, it was to explain how different types of policy moved from the US to the uk, particularly in relation to the Blair, the Blair era, and the, basically from the Thatcher to the Blair era.

02:11 - and looking at basically in the first elements we're really looking at the welfare to work reforms that, that were implemented in the, initially in the US and then moved to the uk. and then the second part was really looking at trying to explain why elements of that movement didn't work. and in particular it was a focus on the child support agency, and why the child support agency just didn't work in the uk even though it was working quite successfully at

02:41 - the time in the United States. Yeah, I, I mean, if you wanna look at it in terms of a evolution, it really would start out with, diffusion studies in the United States. so you were talking about people like Jack Walker's work, and he did a, a really wonderful called diffusion of innovation among American states. and then you had Rogers who looked at diffusion of innovation. So it was looking at how innovation really moved.

03:11 - the, the big issues with those is they seemed very mechanistic, and that there was no, there was, they two things looked alike, so they moved, so there wasn't re there wasn't a lot of focus on the actual mechanisms involved in the movement. And that's the next stage moved into sort of lesson drawing. And that came out of the, out of really Britain in a lot of ways with the work of Richard Rose. and this was very deliberate.

03:41 - He, he said that policymakers deliberately act in a very rational way by using policies and other systems to fix problems they encounter at home. then really neither of those worked well. another element was known as conversion theories, and these are basically things came together and they looked alike. So they converged, again, lack of mechanisms. And so really the policy transfer work that I did

04:14 - initially was trying to find a way in which we could talk about the mechanisms by which things moved, so that we could demonstrate and actually show that system a look to system B or that agent A was involved in this process. then as it developed, we, you got into new ideas. so it sort of, it wasn't that it was necessarily a system A to B, but it could be international consultants might be pushing policies around or the work of NGOs, in,

04:53 - in creating standard models. so you see that a lot with structural adjustment policies during the 1980s. then it sort of moved again to look at the way in which things transformed as they moved. So you, you had a policy that changed as it moved across, so that it wasn't that it changed as it entered the system that was looking at it, but it was actually changing as it moved to that system.

05:24 - then the next stage of the development was really looking at learning. and, and while policy transfer is a clearly a learning process, the very little was discussed about what was learned in the transfer. and so then we started looking at whether you had complete learning or whether there was very little learning involved in it. people like Elli got into, and Dunlop were talking about the learning process.

05:51 - while you can see Peck and Theodore looking At fast policy, which is sort of the transformation of it. and so we're sort of here today with, with really a very advanced model of looking at how things move and are changed as they move academically, I would say, because it's, it, it helps put flesh on the bones of, of why governments look around. if they look around.

06:24 - I, I mean, I'm, I don't want to to make it sound like everything's involved, everything's policy transfer. It's not. Governments create their own things. but when policies do transfer, a lot has to do with the growth of interconnections. Now, I mean if you look at Diane Stone's where she talks about the networks that surround government policy making, she's not the only one, but she links it directly

06:51 - to transfer and trans transformations. but realistically we have so many new ways in which we're interacting with each other. So economically, we're connected politically, we're connected, we're socially we're connected. We have new ways of communication. So, you know, at one time, you to learn what the government was doing, it took months to years. Now it takes seconds. you have the rise, as I said, of international policy consultants,

07:24 - and that's their job is to basically go around and push policies they like. and so again, a whole networks have evolved almost that are designed for the movement of information. I would say governments have a demand because policy, because the world's more complex now and the more complex the world becomes, at least to the politician or the policymaker I should say, because one of the things you have to remember is

07:51 - that policymaking doesn't, isn't just politicians. Policymaking is is a very broad, very, very broad field that involves many, many, many different actors, and agents. But, really I think the complexity has made the desire not to fall behind or not to be on the losing end of a continuum, or to stay ahead of the curve. One of the major reasons that it occurs. and it's also, I think, I think

08:23 - that you hear more about it, but I'm not sure how much more there is. and, and what I mean by that is like, if you look at China, their political system is really designed around policy experimentation at the local level. And if, and if local experiments work well, they spread very quickly. but we don't, we don't realize that, that a lot of the national policies are actually based on local policies.

08:53 - and so I think it's always been there, but we're more aware of it as well, really what, what we've, we really, if you think about transfer, you can go from a copy of a something so you can just send a copy it, with very little thought involved or a lot of thought involved to be perfectly honest. I mean, it all depends on what you mean by copy and why you're copying it all the way to just sort of inspiring you to think about something in a new way.

09:24 - and really transcript can occur anywhere in between that. now when we, when we originally created this continuum, which we tried to put sort of labels on different stop points to make it look more comprehensible, but realistically, it, it can be anything can move, how well it can move is different. Why it moves is very important for explaining, explaining outcomes in a lot of ways.

09:59 - But, as I said, it really is anything from a direct copy all the way to an inspiration. A very quick policy would be like the child support Agency. It was piloted in the United, well, it was probably piloted in Australia and then moved into the United States. Wisconsin created the system that was borrowed by Britain under the Thatcher regime. and they basically took it lock, stock, and barrel.

10:25 - they did very little adaptation to it. and that, that lack of adaptation actually led to a lot of the agency's failures really to engage in policy transfer is difficult in that it's easy in that you can, I mean, I can walk down the street in any city and say, that's a good idea. and bring that model back with me. so if I see that you have tree boxes on every, every 10 feet and you've got cutouts in your, in the, in the road system so

11:03 - that water doesn't go straight down into the gutters, and so that you, and you see rain gardens and everything else set up around, you'd say, this is a pretty good model for stormwater management using green technologies. but that's not an easy thing necessarily to transfer because you have to think about the road system might not be appropriate for these things. you might not have the infrastructure to implement these, these policies.

11:30 - and so you might say, let's do this and then find out that you can't do it. so that would be sort of in an appropriate transfer. uninformed transfer can also occur in the sense of like, you just don't know enough. You just don't know enough. So you engage in a transfer, but you just don't know enough about the originating system. and so it, that gets into that idea of webs and webs of knowledge and embedded webs.

11:59 - And an an embedded web means that a policy depends upon something else for success. And so really you've got legislation around stormwater management, but there's a whole lot that's embedded within environmental protection legislation, which is embedded within urban governance legislation, which is go into urban planning legislation. And so really to be able to be successful, you have to understand how all of those different policy areas

12:25 - fit together to make one policy operate the way it does. Well, the welfare to Work system emerged into United States, and one of the things that it did have that, that helped it spread, I won't say successfully, but it spread, it, it appeared to be very successful during the Clinton period, but that was a time of economic expansion. And then when the economy started to slow down and collapse, the welfare to work system didn't work so well any longer.

12:57 - but one of the things that it implemented was a, a, a considerable amount of job training. so it was not a work first program initially. it became a workforce program, but it initially was not a workforce program. and that training element was very important for those early successes, particularly, for, for not skimming. 'cause one of the things you see in Welfare to Work programs is that you can skim off those

13:24 - that are job ready and make it look very successful and then, and then shove those who aren't job ready into a different program, into a different welfare strata, into a different welfare structure. and that's sort of what happened here is that they didn't look at, when Thatcher started the Welfare to Work program, it was much more of a work fair program. So it was designed really to get those job ready into work and reduce the unemployment count rather than designed

13:56 - to really help in any real way so that the training was really never offered. It was much more of a, you keep searching for a job, we'll help you search for a job, but we're not gonna really help you get ready for the next level of job. Implications are that really, I think governments, not governments, I don't like to use governments. Those involved in the transfer process. I think a they need to understand the policy process better.

14:24 - and that when transfer occurs within the policy process can lead to very different outcomes. the way in which things develop needs to be understood better as well, I think particularly amongst policy policymakers. because one policymaking unit doesn't seem to know what another policymaking unit's doing a lot of the time. And so when you're engaged in transfer and you're trying to transform it to fit your system, if you don't have a joined up system, you're going to,

14:58 - you're gonna have problems. And so one of the things I'd like to see is more linkages between academics who follow the process and policy makers engaged in the process. I think there's still a, a disjuncture there in a lot of ways. I would also like to see substantial more use of an understanding of non-Western models, because realistically, I mean, you've got people like os Mani

15:35 - Porto who's looking at Brazil out and you're looking at, you have some people looking at China out, but not a lot. But when you actually look at the transfer process, it it is, it actually might not be all that similar when you look at an authoritarian system versus a democratic system. And if it is very similar between the two systems, well that tells you something, that's very important. and there isn't,

16:03 - there isn't much communication going on. so like I'm looking at the Rivers chief systems in China right now, and there's only 56 articles published in English, even though there's over 200 articles written in Chinese. and, and most of those just simply are very basic. They say it went from A to B2C, but they don't tell you how it went from A to B2C. And they also don't tell you what was,

16:28 - what was actually moved in A to B2C, nor do they actually tell you very much about its development, during that process. 'cause the river chief system developed substantially from its origins as an emergency stopgap measure all the way to a national policy. And so I think understanding how things work in, in different, in different political settings and systems is where we need to start going next.

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