Making Policy Move : Towards a Politics of Translation and Assemblage

Responding to increasing interest in the movement of policies between places, sites and settings, this timely book presents a critical alternative to approaches centred on ideas of policy transfer, dissemination or learning. Written by key people in the field, it argues that treating policy’s movement as an active process of ‘translation’, in which policies are interpreted, inflected and re-worked as they change location, is of critical importance for studying policy. The book provides an exciting and accessible analytical and methodological foundation for examining policy in this way and will be a valuable resource for those studying policy processes at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels. Mixing collectively written chapters with individual case studies of policies and practices, the book provides a powerful and productive introduction to rethinking policy studies through translation. It ends with a commitment to the possibilities of thinking and doing ‘policy otherwise’.

John Clarke is a Professor Emeritus at The Open University and a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow. His research and writing have explored the contemporary transformations of nation, state and welfare.

Dave Bainton is a lecturer in Education at Goldsmiths College, University of London and works on relationships between education and development in the Global South.

Noémi Lendvai is a Lecturer in Comparative Social Policy at the University of Bristol and works on post-communist transformations and the Europeanisation of welfare.

Paul Stubbs is a UK-born sociologist, currently a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Economics, Zagreb, Croatia whose work at the junctions of research, activism and advocacy/consultancy focuses on social policy in South East Europe