Mulgan on Policy Transfer
The wonders of the web… in following the e-trail from Mulgan’s Prospect piece I came across an interesting article he had written while head of policy at 10 Downing Street that offers an insider’s view on policy transfer.
As a government policy maker in the UK, leading the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, much of my work involves thinking about what we can learn from the rest of the world. Britain has always been a trading nation, good at importing and exporting goods, ideas and people. But we, like other states, have never before been so willing to import ideas and learn from other countries. Tax credits and early years support from the US; welfare to work from Scandinavia; neighbourhood wardens from the Netherlands; restorative justice from New Zealand; an independent central bank copied from many countries; urban planning from Barcelona; night courts from America – these are just a few examples of Britain’s own recent borrowings.
He argues:
1) Concepts are the unit of policy transfer
2) Concepts are linked to intellectual systems
3) Sometimes practice leads theory
4) Concepts spread through networks - ‘Today we also have plenty of formal institutions to help: the OECD, EU, UN, WHO all produce ample analysis, case studies and recommendations. But the biggest change must be the sheer speed and volume of today’s traffic in ideas which is made possible by websites like policy.com, policybrief, openDemocracy.net or the World Bank, and search engines which allow you to hoover in thousands of examples in seconds. These are still in some senses prototypes – their future counterparts will presumably be able to sift better by quality of evidence, to manage and interpret. Yet they have already transformed the day-to-day business of policy making’.
He also expands some views on different types of policy (stable, in flux and novel fields) requiring different types of transfer, where government looks for ideas and how the Blair government have gone about it…
An interesting ‘on the record’ confirmation of some of the policy transfer theorists’ claims perhaps?
