About Policy Transfer

  20Important contextual factors.
Barriers for cross-national and cross-regional learning.
Factors determining the transferability of policies, tools, and instruments?


Important contextual factors

Dolowitz and Marsh (1996) set up seven policy subjects of transfer:

1.    policy goals, structure and content;

2.    policy instruments of administrative techniques;

3.    institutions;

4.    ideology;

5.    ideas;

6.    attitudes and concepts;

7.    negative lessons.

De Jong (2004) describes the most used contextual denominators as the legal, political and cultural differences. He further argues, that the most important distinction in contextual factors is between:

-        formal institutions formed by legal rules;

-        informal institutions formed by social practices and rituals based on cultural norms and values.

 

De Jong & Edelenbos (2007, pp. 690-691) do not believe in instrumental rationality and state three observations as starting points for their research: 

1: Learning rather than transfer.  

2: Practical rather than scientific transfer.   (learning from other practitioners)

3: Contextual rather than generic (local issues)

Barriers for cross-national and cross-regional learning.

Thus, Spaans and Louw (2009) argue that the degree to which policy transfer takes place depends on the contextual diversities between the countries from and to which policies are transferred. Several authors on policy transfer emphasize the importance of contextual diversities, however, ususally they do so without further investigating the concret character or parameters of contextual diversities. The general perception is that transplantation within families is most successful while transplantation across families is more difficult. 

Factors determining the transferability of policies, tools, and instruments?

Bogason (2000) suggests that a general approach to make institutional analyses and compare across different institutional settings could be:

1. to define the perception of the policy problem (e.g. regional integration) in the relevant institutions;
2. to define the positions and networks dealing with the policy problem (formal and informal roles and networks: tasks, interests, resources, competences and authority);
3. to define the norms and values in the institutions (e.g. rules, laws, professional and political norms and values – cultures);
4. to define order and meaning in relation to the policy problem. Here we find the constitution of sense making in relation to important ‘concepts’, meanings and behaviour as appropriate and ‘good’ (Bogason, 2000; see also chapter 5).

  Conclusions

1.    The object of policy transfer or – phrased differently – the potential candidate tools for the toolkit.

2.    The critical contextual elements influencing the nature of these tools.

Source:
Annex 1 to the Final Report | Literature Review, June 2012, RISE Project, ESPON