New Directions in the Study of Policy Transfer

Policy transfer analysis seeks to make sense of the cross-cultural transfer of knowledge about institutions, policies or delivery systems in an era of globalization. The purpose of this volume is to evaluate how useful policy transfer analysis is as a descriptive, explanatory and prescriptive theory of policy change. It provides both a response to its critics and it presents a variety of new directions for studying processes of policy transfer. The chapters proceed from an underlying assumption about the field of enquiry; that policy transfer analysis alone cannot provide a general explanatory theory of policy change but when combined with other approaches an empirically grounded account of policy change can be developed. Hence each of the chapters adopt a methodological pluralism in which complementary theories of policy development are combined in order to develop a theory of policy change that accounts for the role of particular agents of policy transfer in forging policy change. This is an important contribution to our understanding of the impact of globalization on domestic policy formulation.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Policy Studies.

Mark Evans is Director of the Australia-New Zealand School of Government’s Institute for Governance at the University of Canberra. Mark’s published research focuses on four areas of concern: public administration and public policy; policy analysis; evaluating the impact of processes of globalisation on domestic policy formation; and, post-war reconstruction and development. The research theme that binds all of these areas together is his interest in institution-building and processes of governance.