STUDIES IN THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PUBLIC POLICY

The Architecture
of Policy Transfer
Ideas, Institutions and Networks
in Transnational Policymaking

Tim Legrand
Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy

Series Editors
Toby Carroll
City University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Paul Cammack
University of Manchester
Manchester, UK

Kelly Gerard
The University of Western Australia
Crawley, Australia

Darryl S. L. Jarvis
The Education University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14465
 Tim Legrand

The Architecture
of Policy Transfer
Ideas, Institutions and Networks in Transnational
Policymaking
Tim Legrand
University of Adelaide
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

ISSN 2524-7441 ISSN 2524-745X (electronic)

Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy
ISBN 978-3-030-55820-8 ISBN 978-3-030-55821-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55821-5

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For my grandparents, Mike and Phyllis Legrand.
Heavens to Mergatroyd!
 Acknowledgements

This book is as much a diary as it is a monograph, for it chronicles a

substantial part of my scholarly journey over the past ten years. Back in
2009, it seemed to me that, having completed my Ph.D., my attention
to the esoterica of policy transfer theory was unlikely to continue in the
absence of a scholarly appointment, and my sights had turned towards
a career in the civil service where I intended to make my mark at the
applied end of public policy development. An unlikely but timely inter-
vention by Professor Simon Bronitt, to whom I am indebted, brought me
to a research fellowship at Griffith University to reignite my research in
policy transfer, and the journey has continued unabated ever since. At the
Australian National University, where much of this book was researched
and written between 2012 and 2018, I held appointments at the National
Security College, the Crawford School of Public Policy, the School of
Regulatory Networks and the National Centre for Epidemiology and
Population Health. Most recently, I have landed in the Department of
Politics and International Relations at the University of Adelaide.
In the lengthy process of researching and writing, I have racked up
more than a few debts—some scholarly, many emotional—for which
acknowledgement is necessary albeit scant repayment. The research
contributing to this book was accumulated during my time in the
various limbs of the ANU above, where I remain indebted to Gabrielle
Bammer, Roger Bradbury, Michael Clarke, Carsten Daugbjerg, Michael
L’Estrange, Adam Graycar, Adam Henschke, Jennifer Hunt, Adrian Kay
and Matthew Sussex. Public administration being a remarkably colle-
gial discipline, I have had the good fortune of making many friends of
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

colleagues across the world, who have been instrumental in nurturing and
guiding the ideas expressed here, prominently: Caner Bakır, Melissa-Ellen
Dowling, Claire Dunlop, Jenny Lewis, Paul Fawcett, Lisa Hill, Lee Jarvis,
Michael Lister, Siobhan O’Sullivan and Diane Stone.
Earlier forms of the research that appears here have been published
in journals, and so I would like to thank those journal editors and peer
reviewers for their feedback along the way, and I acknowledge their
publishers for permission to reproduce these works and their arguments
thus:

An earlier version of the arguments in Chapters 3 and 4 was

published as an article under the title: ‘Overseas and Over Here:
Policy Transfer and Evidence-Based Policy-Making’. The final defini-
tive version of this paper has been published in Policy Studies, 33(4),
329–348, published by Taylor & Francis. Reprinted with permission.
An earlier version of arguments in the Chapter 3 and the Conclusion
was published as an article under the title: ‘Transgovernmental Policy
Networks in the Anglosphere’. The final definitive version of this
paper has been published in Public Administration. 93(4), 973–991,
published by Wiley. Reprinted with permission.
An earlier version of arguments in Chapter 7 was published as an
article under the title: ‘The Merry Mandarins of Windsor: Policy
Transfer and Transgovernmental Networks in the Anglosphere’. The
final definitive version of this paper has been published in Policy
Studies, 33(6), 523–540, published by Taylor & Francis. Reprinted
with permission.

I would like to thank the supremely patient and professional shepherding

of this book’s author and publication by Nick Barclay, Oliver Foster,
and Balaji Varadharaju at Palgrave Macmillan. My thanks also to Hibra
Qureshi for her assistance in proofing the manuscript. I am also grateful
to the series editors of Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy
for accepting this book into its prestigious collection of scholarly works.
Finally, I would like to warmly acknowledge the love and support of
my family, and especially my Mum, Louise. As well as being a wonderful
researcher and writer in her own right, she has been at times transcriber of
my research interviews and at other times a patient copyeditor too. Above
all else, she has been a brilliant Mum.
 Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic that tore through states across the world in
2019 and 2020 was a stark reminder to governments of the inextricable
interdependencies and co-dependencies that characterise today’s global
society. National officials were confronted with a health, societal and
economic catastrophe on a scale unseen since the Spanish Flu of 1918.
Compounding the crisis, in the frantic search for effective policies to
contain the worst social, health and economic effects of the pandemic,
the World Health Organisation was widely held to have failed to estab-
lish authoritative global strategy to manage the outbreak, leaving govern-
ments bereft of expert, external leadership on an issue of profound global
governance at a time where the need for policy learning was at its most
urgent.
Amidst the bedlam, chief finance ministers of a small group of five
states quietly worked together to learn from one another’s management
of the pandemic’s effects on their economies. In an interview with The
Australian on June 8th 2020, the Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg
announced the meeting of finance ministers of Canada, New Zealand, the
UK and USA:

These meetings will be an opportunity to swap notes about the various

domestic economic initiatives each country is undertaking in response to
the crisis. In this increasingly inter–connected global economy, it will also
be critical that we co-ordinate policies to ensure global financial stability
and a strong, sustainable and balanced economic recovery.

ix
x INTRODUCTION

The meetings were reported as an offshoot of ‘countries in the Five Eyes

pact’,1 or more colloquially known as the Anglosphere countries (more on
that later), but in reality the relationship between the five countries had
long since flourished beyond the intelligence and security partnership that
emerged in the early years of the Cold War. In the previous year, July
2019, the Home Affairs Ministers and Attorneys General from the same
five countries met in London for a high-level summit. In the joint commu-
nique issued at the culmination of the meeting, the participating officials
committed to ‘Share frameworks and tools between the Five Countries
on managing residual risk’ and to use their collective bargaining power
to influence international organisations such as the International Civil
Aviation Organisation and United Nations. The same communique made
special reference to their shared identity:

We reaffirm today the critical importance of the Five Country partner-

ship. Bound by our history of cooperation, united by our shared values,
and strengthened by our enduring friendship, we pledge the commit-
ments made today as we seek to share opportunities and address security
challenges together.

Their purpose was to agree a common set of policies between the five
states on global challenges they collectively and separately faced: Internet
safety measures, child exploitation, online encryption, national security
and counter-terrorism. All issues affecting the countries separately and
jointly as dilemmas of the global agora.
There are two puzzles prompted by the examples described above.
First, why did the ministers of these states decide to form their own policy
group, why not simply learn from or collaborate with the best examples of
policy-making, no matter the country of origin? After all, there are many
other countries that prima facie have systems of public management just
as sophisticated and as capable as any of these five. Second, why these five
countries specifically?
Answering these two questions is the purpose of this book, but the
short answer should not be a surprise: the strength of national identity
on policy collaboration (see Chapter 4) is a theme that becomes apparent
in the pages that follow, in which we see more than a few hints of some-
thing fundamental in the policy mindset or policy settings, perhaps more
meaningful, in how officials of this select group of states interact with one
other to the exclusion of others. The examples also call to our attention
 INTRODUCTION xi

the point that domestic policy-making is no longer a parochial, unilateral

matter (if it ever was). Contemporary policy-making is an endeavour that
must have one eye on the soil and another on the heavens, for the state
is more globalised now than ever before. The spillover effects of trade,
pandemics and security threats are very real, but so too are global policy
trends: collaboration with and learning from the successful experiences of
officials overseas is increasingly becoming the rule, not the exception.

A Global Public Policy Revolution

Governments around the world are in the throes of a public policy revo-
lution. Never before have state officials had such immediate and expansive
access to the policy outcomes and experiences of overseas counterparts.
Digital technologies are steadily overcoming the frictions of time, distance
and communication, making it easier and faster for officials, agencies and
states to not only collect data and evaluate policy effectiveness, but
to share that knowledge, acquire new policy ideas from elsewhere and
collaborate across borders to ameliorate shared problems. The incipient
rise of a ‘digital era governance’ (Dunleavy et al. 2006) has made more
possible than ever cross-border policy collaboration in transgovernmental
networks. In these networks, policy officials gain ready access to policy-
relevant experience from overseas peers and coordinate their actions on
the global stage to address collective action problems spanning borders.
Paired with an increasing abundance of policy-relevant evidence, expert
advice, ‘big data’ and surging computational power, a new epoch of
international policy transfer is imminent, if it has not already commenced.
So it is that seemingly successful government initiatives spread rapidly
to other parts of the world. Paul Cairney (2009) traces how prohibitions
on smoking in public places were initially a matter of local and city provi-
sions, until 2003 when New Zealand introduced the first national legisla-
tion. Ireland and Norway quickly followed in 2004, Scotland in 2007, and
rest of the UK shortly after. Similarly, single-issue social campaigns can
use the momentum of successful reform in other countries to urge similar
reform at home. In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country to
legalise same-sex marriage, followed by Belgium and British Columbia in
2003 (Canada nationwide in 2005), South Africa in 2006, and since then
a flurry of countries have followed suit, often as a result of a referendum
or, in Australia’s case, an ‘advisory’ postal survey in 2017.
xii INTRODUCTION

As the example of the COVID crisis shows, we might also observe that
such cross-border policy sharing and collaboration has never been more
urgent. In just the past decade, a raft of transnational policy patholo-
gies has acquired an unsettling permanence in domestic political agendas:
global financial turbulence, cyber-crime, accelerating climate change, the
scourge of international terrorism, amongst others, are ‘wicked prob-
lems’ that have deleterious consequences for individuals, communities and
governments yet often remain impervious to unilateral state action. Inter-
national policy learning and multilateral collaboration is thus emerging
as a fundamental imperative of modern public administrators seeking
to pursue the domestic public interest. These are ascendant ‘expanding
global spaces’ (Scholte 2002, p. 281) and they represent a troubling impli-
cation for the nation state: for if it is in these spaces that the domestic
effects of international challenges must be met, then national sovereignty
is becoming potentially negotiable and negotiated. And for domestic
officials, notably, extraterritorial action requires extra-sovereign license.
The public policy literature has recognised the blurring of the
domestic/international spheres and has done much to theorise the inter-
secting planes of domestic, regional and global governance in both its
administrative and (policy) decision-making facets. Diane Stone and Stella
Ladi, for example, conceive of these supranational bureaucratic landscape
as analytically demarcated by transnational administration and global
public policy. Transnational administration is framed as ‘the regulation,
management and implementation of global policies of a public nature
by both private and public actors operating beyond the boundaries and
jurisdictions of the state, but often in areas beneath the global level’
(2015, p. 840). Global public policy, by contrast, refers to ‘overlapping
but disjointed processes of public–private deliberation and cooperation
among both official state-based and international organizations and non-
state actors’ (2015, p. 840). Decision-making and implementation, on
their view, may be understood as distinct pillars within the matrix of
managing global problems since different actors (government and non-
government) have differing levels of involvement therein. They are correct
to make this differentiation but, in the case discussed herein, the exception
of the Anglosphere potentially proves the rule.
Yet where do states look for new ideas and collaborations, and how do
they decide which of these are most useful? What influences policy officials
to privilege some sources of policy ideas over others? And how do they
reconcile, if they do at all, contrasting ideologies of other governments
 INTRODUCTION xiii

with otherwise compelling policy ideas? If the digital revolution offers a

true cornucopia of new ideas and information, it provides little by way of
guidance on what are the most important—let alone the most compat-
ible—policy lessons. For the policy official enthused to learn from her
overseas counterparts, knowing how to overcome the tyranny of choice
can be just as daunting as remedying a paucity of knowledge. In this
context of digital era governance (Dunleavy et al. 2006), cross-border
collaboration and communication is not the sluggish exercise experienced
by nineteenth century and many twentieth-century officials, but merely
a matter of basic digital literacy, a laptop and an Internet connection.
Collaboration across borders is becoming increasingly necessary as the
converse of digitisation and globalisation bites. The modern age of digital
public management, in this respect, is more permeable to new policy
ideas, both of domestic and overseas provenance, than ever before.
For those engaged theoretically and empirically in such debates, this
book offers an examination of international policy learning through the
lens and conceptual language of policy transfer. Put simply, the argu-
ment forwarded in this book is that prevailing explanations of policy
learning overwhelmingly emphasise individuals’ motives and have yet to
really explore the complex, powerful influence of long-standing institu-
tional governing traditions and structural relationships. So, the nebulous
metatheory of structure and agency, which are a mainstay in political
science debates, features prominently in the pages that follow. Nowhere
are these dynamics so pronounced than amongst the ‘Anglosphere’ states:
the English-speaking countries which, at one point in their history, either
adopted or had imposed upon them the British mode of governing, and
especially those with entrenched military and security links of Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA. These are countries deemed to
have ‘propinquity’, according to Richard Rose. Exploring this relationship
in particular reveals that the manner in which governments (and their offi-
cials) adopt ideas from elsewhere is as much a function of administrative
political philosophies and structures of the state as the decision-making
agency of policy-makers.
This book tracks the emergence of imperatives—structural, agential
and contingent—from the late 1990s to today that in concert have not
only spurred the exchange of policy ideas in welfare and labour markets,
but also carved out collaborative structures that persist and cement that
ongoing exchange relationship. It seeks to provide an explanation of how
policy officials adopt policy ideas and embark on collaborative ventures
xiv INTRODUCTION

with overseas peers. Specifically, it is focused on the unusual case of Anglo-

sphere countries, which over the past twenty years have displayed an
astonishing propensity to learn and collaborate with one another, often
to the exclusion of other states. The analysis delves into the question of
how and why policy learning and collaboration between these states have
become so pronounced. To do so, it embraces the conceptual dynamics
of structure, ideas and agency. The resulting analysis reveals a complex,
multi-layered Anglosphere relationship underpinned by a sense of shared
history and global fraternity and driven by a philosophical convergence
of public administration in the Third Way, New Public Management
and today’s digital era governance. This study is situated within a field
of policy transfer analysis, which is broadly concerned with how policies
are transported across jurisdictions. The overarching argument presented
and defended is that challenges to the state, particularly those tran-
scending national borders, are now overwhelmingly viewed by policy offi-
cials through lenses that are, at once, institutional, historical, cultural,
technological and political.

Overview
The first task of this monograph is to engage with the contemporary
political economy of policy ideas across the world, and specifically in
Australia, the UK and USA. Predicated on policy transfer scholarship
of David Dolowitz and David Marsh, Diane Stone and Mark Evans, it
argues that the conditions of increased transnational policy learning have
been cemented by the rapid upsurge in digital technologies, promoting
collaboration, cooperation and data exchange to a level and extent not
previously possible. Second, it suggests this has occurred in the ideational
context of emergent normative claims of how policy should be made in the
UK, USA and Australia. This is an ideational context of a policy-making
milieu created gradually and sequentially by the adoption of principles of
New Public Management, rational utilitarianism of evidence-based policy-
making, digital era governance and the communitarianism of Third Way
politics. Third, this ideational environment has produced both a shared
‘Anglosphere’ understanding of the policy problems faced by these states
and a shared commitment to cooperation/collaboration to resolve those
problems.
 INTRODUCTION xv

Second, the book undertakes an empirical assessment of these struc-

tural drivers of policy transfer by exploring how these manifest in substan-
tive policy transfer across three cases: (i) social policy [(a) consolidated
benefit services and (b) child support] and (ii) labour market policy (viz.
welfare-to-work programmes). In all cases, the book links the evolving
milieu of structural learning to policy transfer: e.g. (i) social policy transfer
(driven by NPM imperatives) linked to the adoption of one-stop benefits
and service centres; (ii) labour market policy (driven by Third Way ideas
and commitment to EBPM) linked to consequent welfare-to-work ratio-
nale and quantitative evidence-based assessments of efficacy. The empirical
section, in itself, offers a novel contribution for its findings, positing (i)
the genesis of ideological channels of policy learning; and (ii) consequent
long-term networks of policy learning and collaboration (‘Anglosphere
Policy Networks’) embedded between Australia, the UK and USA.
Finally, the book reflects on these cases of policy transfer in the context
of public policy beyond the state. A model of Emergent Policy Transfer is
thus developed and proposed as a means to link domestic ideas and insti-
tutions to cross-border and transnational policy challenges. The model
connects the stratifying effects of political-administrative transformation
with the emergence of a swathe of cross-border (or transnational) policy
problems. Indeed, many have drawn attention to a nascent transnational
public policy domain (e.g. Diane Stone, Stella Ladi, Mark Evans) and the
uncertain processes of decision-making therein. The theoretical contribu-
tion of this model offers a means to link the ideology of policy-making
with the dynamics of transnational policy processes.

The Roots of Public Policy Learning

Public administration has never been an entirely parochial affair. At one
time or another, all states have drawn on the lessons of their contempo-
raries elsewhere, albeit local idiosyncrasies inevitably transform how those
lessons are used. It is widely held that the origins of many modern public
services, and certainly those derived from the Westminster system, can be
traced to the observations by a nineteenth-century British diplomat of
Chinese governance innovations. In 1847, Thomas Taylor Meadows, the
British Consul in Guangzhou, published these observations in Desultory
Notes on the Government and People of China. Meadows’ book reflected
at length on China’s cultural outlook, economy, politics and, significantly,
its sophisticated system of public administration predicated on competitive
xvi INTRODUCTION

and meritocratic selection of administrators through the Imperial Exam-

ination. Observing these innovations, Meadows recommended Britain
learn from China’s far-sighted system: ‘Some well-digested system of local
and metropolitan general examinations, for all British subjects, like that
which has existed with little variation in China for the last thousand
years’. Meadows work was widely–read and influential in the subsequent
Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854, a watershed document for the UK
state that was said to represent ‘the greatest single governing gift of the
nineteenth to the twentieth century’ (see Islam 2016, p. 238) in estab-
lishing the meritocratic, professional civil service. Indeed, the influence of
China’s administrative tradition remains evident in the informal styling of
senior civil servants as ‘mandarins’.
The British Empire foisted upon much of the world an administrative
philosophy that, today, manifests in the Commonwealth as ‘the Westmin-
ster’ system. The shared governing philosophy laid the groundwork for
common administrative approaches. For example, in the post-war period
British colonial administrators perceived a need to promulgate the policies
of Empire Britain, and so commissioned the publication of Corona: The
Journal of His Majesty’s Colonial Service, a monthly journal of ‘policy and
practice’ distributed to the colonial administrators across the globe. In the
foreword to the first edition of Corona in February 1948, the Secretary
of State for the Colonies Arthur Creech-Jones (February 1948) explained
how the Colonial services across the Commonwealth could no longer
perform their duties independently of one another:

we must exchange our information and pool our ideas; we must profit
from the experience of others in avoiding the pitfalls which lie in front of
us, and appreciate how our own actions may create difficulties elsewhere
to the detriment of the common task. (Cited in Kirk-Greene 1999, p. xii)

In this era of colonialism, learning from the experiences of the cohort of

colonial administrators across the British Empire posed only a challenge
of timely information-sharing, and a regular pan-empire bulletin collating
such lessons represented an efficient means to do so. I will quote another
telling section, taken from an editorial, that reflects the breadth of Empire
as much as the enthusiasm to introduce policy learning:

[The Coronet’s] backbone has always been the wish, for example, of the
Forestry man in Tanganyika to know how his opposite number is getting
 INTRODUCTION xvii

on in British Honduras, or of the North Borneo Policeman to understand

the problems facing the Force in Sierra Leone. (XII, 404; cited in Kirk-
Greene 1999, p. xii)

Our diversion into the days of Britain’s controversial colonial past is not
simply to draw attention to the deeper historical roots of policy learning,
but to lay the basis of a broader claim about the institutional legacy of
these practices. First, the fact of the Corona’s establishment underlines the
centrality of cross-border learning to proper state administration. The use
of policy lessons elsewhere was not seen as ad hoc, but common practice. At
the other extreme, the residue of British administration can be detected
in the legal systems, governing practices, and democratic institutions of
Commonwealth nations, perhaps most clearly observed in the persistence
of the Westminster system. The most obvious and persistent structural
advantage to the UK conferred by the colonial era may well prove to
be the entrenching of the English language as the predominant mode
of communication in global political and economic intercourse. Strategi-
cally, it is the relationships forged with those English-speaking states with
comparable economic performance that has become pronounced amongst
what has been called the ‘Anglosphere’, a sometimes ambiguous term that
refers—at its broadest—to all English-speaking countries of the world, but
in its most common usage refers to a narrower group: Australia, Canada,
New Zealand, the UK and USA. This small cohort of states have a long-
standing historical military alliance, a common native language, shared
philosophies of the market, finance and commerce; cultural interchange;
common legal systems and, most of all, a sense of fraternity. As will be
explored here, these are dynamics that underpin institutional relationships
between the ‘Anglosphere’ states that drive mutual policy interchange,
collaboration and learning.

Policy Learning in Modern Public Administration

Policy transfer is embedded in the modern policy process. In the late
1990s/early 2000s, three influential UK Cabinet Office documents
actively encouraged policy learning from overseas: Modernising Govern-
ment (1999), Better Policy-Making (2001) and Professional Policy-Making
for the Twenty-First Century (1999). The latter argued: ‘The world for
which policy makers have to develop policies is becoming increasingly
complex, uncertain and unpredictable’ (1999, 2.3). The text continues,
xviii INTRODUCTION

claiming that a ‘fully effective’ policy process is outward-looking: ‘Policy

makers take account of influencing factors in the national, European
and international situation; draw on experience in other countries; and
consider how policy will be communicated with the public’ (1999,
Annexe A). The Modernising Government White Paper (1999, CM 4310)
was influential in this shift towards the ‘modernisation’ of policy and
policy-making. According to Better Policy-Making, modernisation entails
creating partnerships with overseas institutions:

The modernisation agenda demands that Departments change their

approach, and become truly joined-up. It calls for knowledge of value to
the civil service to be gathered, held and made available to those who
need it. It expects creativity, innovation, expertise and problem solving
ideas to be owned by the entire service. It expects Government to work
in partnership with people and organisations in the wider public, private
and voluntary sectors, as well as its counterparts in other international
administrations. (Bullock et al., Better Policy-Making, 2001, 13)

In its early days of online dissemination of best-practices, the UK Trea-

sury backed a ‘Policy Hub’ initiative which made available a downloadable
‘international comparisons in policy-making toolkit’, which stipulated the
following:

The use of international comparisons is an essential element of modern,

professional policy making. Looking abroad to see what other govern-
ments have done can point us towards a new understanding of shared
problems; towards new solutions to those problems; or to new mechanisms
for implementing policy and improving the delivery of public services.
International examples can provide invaluable evidence of what works
in practice, and help us avoid either re-inventing the wheel or repeating
others’ mistakes. We can also learn from the way in which other govern-
ments undertake the process of policy making itself (4th October 2006).

Policy officials’ engagement with overseas policy thus appears substan-

tial. Policy-makers clearly view modernisation and policy transfer as
intrinsically compatible; indeed, as the above texts show, ‘modernised’
policy-making warrants, perhaps even entails, the use of overseas policy.
 INTRODUCTION xix

Theorising Policy Transfer

The now dominant analytical framework of policy transfer was devel-
oped by Dolowitzand Marsh in the course of several articles: Who Learns
What from Whom: A Review of the Policy Transfer Literature (1996);
Policy Transfer: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, But
Why Red, White and Blue? (Dolowitz, Greenwold and Marsh 1999); and
Learning from Abroad: The Role of Policy Transfer in Contemporary Policy-
Making (2000). The framework they developed drew together upon a
family of related and intersecting concepts including lesson-drawing (Rose
1991), policy learning (Hall 1993), policy diffusion (Berry and Berry) and
policy convergence (Bennett 1991). Their definition of policy transfer is
the most widely cited by transfer theorists:

The process by which knowledge about policies, administrative arrange-

ments, institutions and ideas in one political system (past or present) is
used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements and ideas
in another political system. (2005, 5)

The transfer approach suggests that policy officials, amongst others,

are motivated by the prospect of using the benefit of overseas experi-
ence to resolve domestic issues. It further highlights how policy transfer
offers a range of benefits for the prospective adopter: overseas experi-
ence can be used to engineer rapid policy change, forestall the unin-
tended consequences of untested policies or enhance inter-state coopera-
tion. According to this scholarship, the lessons drawn can be negative as
well as positive; the policies drawn might be a direct copy, an emulation,
hybrid or ‘inspiration’; learning might occur at any stage of the (domestic)
policy process; and be initiated by elected officials, policy officials, policy
entrepreneurs, international organisations and NGOs, interest groups, or
any other suitably empowered actor (Dolowitzand Marsh 2000; Ladi
2005).
This concept, and indeed this definition, has informed a wealth of
policy analyses and forms the starting point of this research. Others,
notably Evans and Davies, have sought to develop the policy transfer
framework of Dolowitz and Marsh. In their original co-authored article,
Understanding Policy Transfer: A Multi-Level, Multi-Disciplinary Perspec-
tive (1999), they established an evolved model of policy transfer that was
rooted in Wendt’s deployment of structuration theory in International
xx INTRODUCTION

Relations theory. This model was subsequently used as the basis for a
collection of studies, Policy Transfer in Global Perspective (2004), edited
by Mark Evans, which ran various empirical case studies through the lens
of a ‘multi-level approach’. Policy transfer on this approach is regarded
a multi-level phenomenon, driven by agents, that occurs at and between
several levels, including local, regional, national, transnational and inter-
national (Evans and Davies 1999). Together, these two models of policy
transfer are the most concerted efforts to provide a theoretical structure
to underpin the policy transfer model (and these are critically examined
in Chapters 2 and 3).
Empirical research in policy transfer has followed governments’
increasing appetite for overseas ideas. This interest is perceptible across
a variety of disciplines and themes, with research exploring the role of
transfer on European integration (Bache 2000; Lavenex 2002; Hodson
and Maher 2001; Radaelli 2000), crime control (Jones and Newburn
2002; Newburn 2002), education policy (Nakray 2018) climate policy
regulation (Smith 2004; Jordan et al. 2003); transport policy (Timms
2011), higher education fees (Chapman and Greenaway 2003), land
registration (Lamour 2002), best-practice in healthcare policy (Freeman
1999; France and Taroni 2005; Greener 2002; and Jacobs and Barnett
2000), railway regulation (Lodge 2003), pension reform (Tavits 2003),
New Public Management (Common 1998; and see Chapter 4); and inter-
national institutions (Stone 1999, 2000; Ladi 2003). This eclectic mix of
cases reflects the wide-ranging interest in the phenomenon—however it is
framed—of governments adopting external ideas. Yet, lest it needs saying,
policy transfer is a process of in which ideas are exchanged, but they need
not be morally-sound ones. A declassified CIA cable, for example, reveals
how in the 1970s Argentine security agencies were instructing Western
agencies in the ‘management, administrative and technical aspects’ of
its anti-subversion policies and practices in the US-backed Operation
Condor, which was ultimately responsible for the deaths or disappearances
of tens of thousands of South Americans.

Representatives of West German, French and British intelligence services

had visited the Condor organization secretariat in Buenos Aires during the
month of September 1977 in order to discuss methods for establishment
of an anti-subversion organization similar to Condor.2
 INTRODUCTION xxi

The prospect that European and British intelligence agencies willingly

took policy advice from a murderous regime underlines the importance,
discussed in the opening chapter of this book, of situating the public
interest within policy transfer analysis.
The relevance and importance of policy transfer analysis to contem-
porary public policy students is apparent. Yet current frameworks are far
from complete. Some argue that policy transfer analysis is a redundant
exercise: ‘Researchers interested in conceptual, non-domestic or across-
time influences on policy-making need not restrict themselves to using
the “policy transfer” framework’, argue James and Lodge (2003, p. 185).
More fundamentally, their critique suggests: ‘it is hard to think of any
form of rational policy-making that does not, in some way, involve using
knowledge about policies in another time or place to draw positive or
negative lessons (2003, p. 181). This robust critique of the policy transfer
approach offers an unflattering indictment of the purpose and usefulness
of the framework’s development. James and Lodge’s critique is more fully
unpacked later in this book, but their admonishment of policy transfer
theorists is indicative of some fragilities in the transfer theoretical approach
that are yet to be fully addressed.
Indeed, two particular shortcomings of policy transfer approach are
the focus of this book. Firstly, the definition of policy transfer (devel-
oped by Dolowitz and Marsh) implicitly focuses on the process by which
policies are transferred. In emphasising process only, the policy transfer
approach has tended to neglect the influence and interplay of structures,
institutions and ideas. This is a generalised claim here, but it is more fully
elaborated in Chapter 3. Understanding the relationship between these
(as well as the ‘process’ of transfer) are critical to a sophisticated expla-
nation of policy transfer. Second, and relatedly, policy transfer analysis is
yet to develop a dialogue of ontology and epistemology. This is undoubt-
edly a debate that occupies academics more than practitioners, yet it is
one worth reflecting on since all public policy is implicitly or explicitly
predicated on a worldview that, unavoidably, is framed by ontological and
epistemological assumptions. This discussion is the focus of Chapter 3.
To move directly to the argument forwarded here, this book presents
policy learning as an emergent phenomenon. That is, it suggests policy
transfer does not occur by happenstance or the felicity of politics, but
emerges from deeper socio-political structures that are at once histor-
ical and cultural. This book advances an emergent theoretical framework
explaining policy transfer that is predicated on the claim that transfer is
not a phenomenon that describes a dyadic relationship, but rather is an
xxii INTRODUCTION

function of structure and agency. In this formulation, an emergent formu-

lation is more powerful, because it opens analysis up to a range of possi-
bilities of: why policies are transferred (and why sometimes they are not);
how the process both operates and is a product of structural mechanisms;
what outcomes are directly consequential, and whether important, subtle
policy outcomes can be attributed to transfer.

Collaboration and the Cross-Border

Administrative Dilemma
Notwithstanding its critics, the position I assert in the chapters that follow
is that policy transfer analysis matters for several reasons: first, the tech-
nologies of cross-border collaboration are only improving, and it seems
unlikely that the trend of multiplying opportunity structures for mutual
state learning and collaboration will reverse. Second, cross-border collab-
oration is the corollary of globalisation: if—as is widely claimed—social,
political and economic processes are transiting country borders with ease
(nominally as constitutive elements of globalisation), then any state regu-
lation of those processes must involve government officials working across
borders to adopt or cooperate on the resulting policy challenges. Third,
and relatedly, working across national borders introduces a public policy
dilemma. One of the longest-standing questions of political philosophy
is how we might determine the ‘common good’ (Bovens 1998; Flinders
2001; O’Toole 2006). The fundamental objective of the state, and its
administrators, is prompted by Cicero’s maxim, salus populi suprema lex
esto: Let the good (or safety) of the people be the supreme (or highest)
law. O’Toole suggests public service, in concept if not application, can be
understood thus:

[T]he idea is that those in official positions of public authority regard the
interests of the whole society as being the guiding influence over all public
decision-making, that their personal or class or group interests are to be
set aside when making decisions, and that they are public servants purely
out of a perceived duty to serve the public. (O’Toole 2006, p. 3)

Yet the brevity of Cicero’s maxim belies the considerable complex reality
of today’s state administration. Though we might welcome O’Toole’s
public duty ethic, as we might call it, there are good reasons to suspect
that it holds little purchase in reality since, today, there is a prima facie
 INTRODUCTION xxiii

case to argue that acting in the domestic public interest requires policy
officials to act in concert with international partners—sometimes state
officials, or at other times international organisations, or NGOs or think-
tanks (see Diane Stone; Stella Ladi)—to produce the domestic outcomes
sought. Such beyond-borders approaches are seen in public health agen-
cies managing epidemic or epizootic outbreaks—prior to the COVID-19
crisis of 2019 and 2020, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 fore-
warned of the possibility of a catastrophic global pandemic. Or working
across borders to produce shared cyber norms to tackle cyber attacks,
perhaps best illustrated by the 2017 ‘WannaCry’ ransomware virus that
crippled IT systems across the public and private sectors in an estimated
150 countries. The perils of international terrorism—most prominently Al
Qaida and the Islamic State—serve to underline the truly global nature of
some forms of religious or political violence, and the need for domestic
security agencies to collaborate with one another to mitigate or contain
the threat. Resolving these challenges, it might be said, is self-evidently in
the public interest, and it is equally self-evident that the nature of those
challenges is such that no individual state is able to produce a unilateral
solution.
So, cross-border collaboration is the option of first-resort for many
of these challenges, and cross-border networks have begun to emerge as
the states’ preferred modus operandi. Termed transgovernmental policy
networks (Keohane and Nye 1974; Eberlein and Newman 2008; Legrand
2015, 2016. See Chapter 3), these informal networks operate as coali-
tions of like-minded states with common challenges. States in networks
might be understood to share, or perhaps pool, sovereignty, resources,
and ideas. Yet, in acting through these networks to pursue the domestic
public interest, public servants surrender the opportunity for public trans-
parency and legitimacy. What is more, these transgovernmental networks
are becoming more active in their involvement in policy-making processes
and herein several of these networks are explored in the empirical cases of
the Anglosphere in Chapters 6 and 7.

Case Studies
Chapters 5 and 6 are extended case studies that explore how the dynamics
of policy transfer depicted above operate. Chapter 5 begins with an
overview of the context of welfare-to-work policy in the UK, USA and
Australia, emphasising the contribution of Third Way philosophy to the
xxiv INTRODUCTION

development of these policies . In doing so, it traces the dominant ideas

of welfare-to-work in each country, emphasising the common linkages
between all three. In this chapter, I have two ambitions: first, to trace
the ideational heritage/development of welfare-to-work, and, second, to
trace the importance of evidence-based policy-making in driving the
UK’s adoption of the US approach. I approach this by looking back at
the conditions that gave rise to the prevailing attitudes towards welfare
support during the 1990s in Australia, UK and USA. Most noticeable
within this period is the impact that Third Way ideas were having upon
government policy-makers, and the consequent rhetorical emphases on
‘rights and responsibilities’ which were packaged with renewed concep-
tions of community. The similarities in discourse and philosophy between
the three countries are striking and display a shared commitment to
projects of welfare restructuring in two directions: first, the political devel-
opment of the ‘workfare’ legislation in the USA (highlighting the strong
Republican influence over the policy); second, the development of the
New Deal in the UK with a strong emphasis on the introduction of the
welfare-to-work ideas. The introductory period is seen as crucial as it is
in this period that the influence of overseas policies is most apparent.
Finally, it addresses the development of two associated policy platforms
in Australia: the notion of ‘mutual obligation’ and its heavy parallels with
the Third Way and punitive welfare policies; and Paul Keating’s introduc-
tion of Working Nation. The chapter concludes by arguing that the philo-
sophical commitments of the three policy approaches exhibit remarkable
similarities. Such similarities, it is claimed, have formed the basis of mutual
learning amongst and between these countries.
The second case looks at this era of transformation in policy-making
from another perspective. It uses social policy change as an exemplar
of networked policy-making that was responsive to, and a product of,
the early technological changes of the Anglosphere institutions admin-
istering social policy initiatives. The case—named ‘the Windsor Confer-
ence’—was an informal network of Anglosphere public service mandarins
from Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA.
The Windsor Conference was originally formed with the intention of
exchanging ideas and experiences pertaining to social policy and labour
market policy. The inception of the network’s predecessor (the Five
Countries meeting) in 1989 coincided with the era in which informa-
tion technology was making its mark on state administration. Indeed, the
use and utility of IT in government were the first order of business for
 INTRODUCTION xxv

the network. The case represents a watershed for networking between

Anglosphere countries as it represents the first move by elite officials to
institutionalise and systemise informal, cross-border collaboration.
On the basis of the empirical insights gleaned from these cases, the
final section of the book develops a theoretical model of policy transfer
grounded in critical realist philosophy. It argues that, by characterising
policy transfer in terms of emergent properties (a key aspect of critical
realism), we can identify the unifying characteristics and outcomes of
policy transfers. Its two core aims are: (i) to provide policy transfer with
a theoretically-informed definition; and (ii) offer a nuanced character-
isation of the relationship between structures and agents. Theoretical
reflection on these case studies reveals a complex, and compounding,
structural interdependency amongst these states. Understanding how
these dynamics comport, and with what outcomes for the publics of the
Anglosphere, is crucial if we are to maintain a grounded perspective on
the condition of contemporary democratic decision-making.
Notes
1. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jun/14/australias-
reliance-on-five-eyes-for-covid-19-economic-strategy-excludes-top-trade-
partners.
2. See Uki Goñi, ‘European spies sought lessons from dictators’ brutal
‘Operation Condor’, The Guardian, 167th April 2019. https://www.the
guardian.com/world/2019/apr/15/operation-condor-european-spies-dic
tators-cia-documents. Accessed 21st May 2019.

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 Contents

1 Transnational Public Administration: Imperatives,

Dilemmas and Opportunities 1

2 The Global Laboratory: Approaches to Theorising

Policy Transfer 23

3 Theorising the Architecture of Transgovernmental

Policy Networks 71

4 Political-Cultural Propinquity in the Anglosphere 107

5 The Third Way and the Landscape of Welfare Reform:

Australia, UK and USA 129

6 Agents of Transgovernmental Policy Transfer 161

7 The Genesis of Transgovernmental Networks 193

Conclusion: The Architecture of Policy Transfer

in the Anglosphere—A Networked Present and Future 217

Index 229

xxxi
 List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 The bagatelle of questions 148

Fig. 1 Continuum of Anglosphere transgovernmental network
engagement 222

xxxiii
 List of Tables

Table 2.1 The policy transfer continuum 50

Table 2.2 The multi-level policy transfer analysis 53
Table 3.1 Transgovernmental model of policy transfer networks 99
Table 5.1 Constellations of welfare states (Scharpf and Schmidt
2000, p. 11) 132
Table 7.1 Transgovernmental policy networks of the Anglosphere 210

xxxv
 CHAPTER 1

Transnational Public Administration:

Imperatives, Dilemmas and Opportunities

The pursuit of the public interest is the sine qua non of public officials
in liberal democracies. This is no simple task: the modern state is beset
by a burgeoning array of domestic-global political, social and economic
influences. The task of the public servant, as much today as ever, is one of
plotting safe passage of domestic policy agendas through the forbidding
maelstroms whipped up by these uncertain forces. Yet it is recognised by
public administration scholars that we are witnessing a gradual shift from
the local to the global (Pierre 2013), and it is the global trends of that
attract the focus of this book, and three in particular. First, we live in
an interconnected world. There are, for example, few countries (if any)
that can truly claim to have full control of its currency, or a food supply
chain that is independent of overseas disruptions, or a labour market
policy that is not impacted by migration flows or fluctuations in avail-
able foreign investment. Second, managing the complexity of the state
is a matter of know-how, and never before have there been such prodi-
gious quantities of information available for decision-makers. This is, of
course, a product of today’s digital era. An abundance of policy-relevant
raw data is generated and assimilated by public and private information
systems with automated data-capture and matching, producing unpar-
alleled insights into societal and economic meta-trends—this is the age
of so-called ‘big data’. Information on the policy initiatives of other
jurisdictions is also made accessible by the connectivity of the Internet.

© The Author(s) 2021 1

T. Legrand, The Architecture of Policy Transfer,
Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55821-5_1
2 T. LEGRAND

The enterprising policy official merely needs basic web literacy to get a
schematic understanding of any given issue, yet this abundance of knowl-
edge can also become a burden. As far back as 1957, Herbert Simon
described how policy-makers, who were subject to a ‘bounded rational-
ity’, make suboptimal decisions when faced with a surfeit of information.
If this insight is accurate, then the abundance of data in the digital era puts
modern government in real trouble. Third, it is recognised that there is
a trend towards a gradual flattening of authorities, from hierarchical to
horizontal decision-making. This is evident in several respects, not least
in how government agencies form relationships with the private and non-
government sectors. It is also evident within governments as agencies turn
towards collaborations, perhaps urged forward by the zeitgeist of ‘joined-
up-government’. Finally, horizontal relationships are also visible in the
cross-border relationships forged with peers in partner governments.
It is in this context of local and global complexity that contem-
porary public policy scholars and policy practitioners are joined in a
common ambition to understand the circumstances, inputs and outcomes
associated with the processes by which policy ideas transfer from one
jurisdiction to another. For the former, this interest has manifested in
an expansive, and expanding, multidisciplinary policy transfer literature
that spans geography, law, business studies, political science, international
relations and public policy scholars. For the latter, it is clear that a series
of connected trends have substantially expanded the opportunities and
imperatives for government officials to learn from elsewhere: first, the
ubiquitous access to shared information via the Internet has entailed
fundamental changes in the way governments acquire, analyse and dissem-
inate information; second, the devolution of decision-making autonomy
has given individual policy officials greater licence to seek policy-relevant
information from overseas counterparts; and third, the growth in transna-
tional policy issues brings new policy challenges to the fore. Together
these trends form the backdrop to the modern state and the impera-
tives of transnational cooperation and collaboration. In the background,
though not explored here, is the cut-and-thrust of politics, what Ferdi-
nand Mount described as the ‘instantaneous, immediate, hot-and-strong
breath of public opinion’, in which policy-makers must march to an unfor-
giving rhythm set by a 24-hour print, television and online media in a
climate that tolerates little failure yet demands immediate action on the
emergent problems of the day.
 1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 3

Policy Transfer and the Public Interest

What drives policy officials to look overseas for new ideas? The lodestar
of policy-making in modern liberal democracy is the unrelenting pursuit
of the public interest. This is the imperative that all decisions, all state-
based actions and allocations of resources should be directed towards
serving the needs of the public, from whom all authority and legitimacy
derive. This is captured in Cicero’s maxim: Salus populi suprema lex esto,
the health of the people should be the supreme law. Yet how are such
interests divined? Jeremy Bentham stuck to a matter-of-fact view of this
question: ‘The interest of the community then is, what? – the sum of
the interests of the several members who compose it’. In Public Opinion,
Walter Lippman, the grandfather of public administration, sets aside three
chapters to reflect on ‘The making of the Common Will’, asking whether
it is possible for the public to collectively generate a common purpose,
given the ‘unmanageably complex’ and unique impressions individuals
have of their environment: ‘How are those things known as the Will of the
People, or the National Purpose, or Public Opinion crystallize out of such
fleeting and casual imagery?’ (1997, p. 125). John Dewey’s The Public
and Its Problems (1946) dedicates its opening chapter to ‘Search for the
Great Public’. There he argues that the pursuit of the public interest is one
contingent on time and place: ‘In no two ages or places is there the same
public. Conditions make the consequences of associated action and the
knowledge of them different’ (p. 33). On both views, the complexity and
contingency of the ‘public interest’ are manifest and underline the impor-
tance of learning, reflexive policy agents. Yet herein lies a fundamental
challenge: How is that ‘health’ to be determined?
Dewey frames the problem bluntly: ‘What is the public? If there is a
public, what are the obstacles in the way of its recognizing and articu-
lating itself? Is the public a myth?’ (1946, p. 123). Dewey’s puzzling is
typical of a problem that continues to express itself as a challenge that
requires us to first depict what or whom the ‘public’ is, and, second, as
an epistemological problem of how we determining the ‘real’ interests of
that public. Not least, we might worry whether it is possible to achieve
a meaningful understanding of ‘interests’ in aggregated form—i.e. once
two or more ‘interests’ are combined, are not both transformed? This is
not a trivial question: the corollary of a centred public interest is that
the state must have mechanisms and means of determining what its citi-
zens say is, or is not, in their interests and, to the best of its resources
4 T. LEGRAND

and administrative ability, it works towards those (van Deth and Newton
2016, p. 339). We use the term representative democracy to denote the
relationship between the public and those who make decisions on their
behalf: elections periodically install or reaffirm a government with a demo-
cratic mandate by approximating the expressed interests of the public
through a plebiscite. Between elections, it is a trickier matter. And so
it is imperative that a healthy democracy has an active media—a means
for the public to talk to amongst one another (which is why the advent
of social media has been transformative, or disruptive, depending on your
viewpoint)—and arrives perhaps by way of negotiation or attrition at a
series of more or less commonly held positions. It is also important that
the public have a means to represent their interests in input to decision-
making, via their local legislative representatives or by vehicles such as
interest groups, protest movements and so on.
The public interest is in the foreground of policy transfer, because
this is not a book just about how we understand the way policies are
borrowed and adopted across jurisdictions; it is a book about the trans-
parency of the decision-making process. The visibility of how decisions are
made, by whom and for what purpose is critical to the function of legit-
imate and trusted democratic institutions. How policy officials operate
beyond the state is therefore of importance to the legitimacy of decisions.
It is also for this reason that to understand how those policy officials
regard the provenance of new ideas is of vital importance. As we shall
see below, international dynamics and processes have steadily intruded on
the autonomy of all state, transforming the capacities and resources of
the state and its officials. In so doing, a class of transnational policy chal-
lenges has reared-up, provoking multiple states to forge policy responses
and widen the pool of available policy ideas for learning officials. Active in
the background of learning processes are implicit assumptions of provin-
cial validity: that is, a validity ascribed to ideas that originate from a priori
privileged sources. Chapter 4 unpacks this in detail, but in short the claim
pursued is that some sources of policy ideas are regarded more highly than
others: Specifically, in the case of English-speaking countries, particularly
those of comparable socio-economic status, the so-called Anglosphere
states place a premium on lessons from their peers.
 1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 5

Globalisation and Interdependency

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent
A part of the main
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
John Donne: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

The opening lines of John Donne’s often-quoted poem speak eloquently

to the principal themes of this chapter: global society and interde-
pendency. Alongside the public interest, these are two issues that are
unavoidable in our present discussion. It is easy to overlook the inter-
woven strands of state administration, private enterprise and public action
that contribute to the day-to-day functioning of life and livelihood of the
state and society. In the modern world, each of these strands is neither
isolated nor ‘entire of itself’. Rather, each is very much ‘a part of the
main’ in an internationalised and interdependent matrix of processes, link-
ages and dependencies between countless state, non-state and commercial
entities, from mining, energy and food production to financial trading,
communication networks and transportation.
The internationalisation of the state and society is almost taken for
granted today. But it is worth considering briefly its historic dimen-
sions, for these dimensions affect not only how contemporary governing
dilemmas emerge, but also how they are understood and managed.
Prominent International Relations (IR) scholars, writing in the 1970s,
called attention to the manifest codependencies between states in what
was labelled transnationalism. In two seminal papers, Transgovernmental
Relations and International Organizations and Power and Interdepen-
dence, Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye presented a critique of the
realist conceptualisations of world politics and the role of states as unitary
actors playing out their national self-interest. Developing a conceptual
position that relied on a disaggregated, rather than unitary, model of the
state, they argued that the interaction of states could not be adequately
explained without considering the role of ‘complex interdependency’
in the international system. They contended that emerging patterns of
societal international interdependency drive transgovernmental relations,
which play out in international organisations, in turn driving policy inter-
dependence (1974, p. 61). For Keohane and Nye, there is a resultant
6 T. LEGRAND

series of transgovernmental relations understood as ‘sets of direct interac-

tions among sub-units of different governments that are not controlled or
closely guided by the policies of the cabinets or chief executives of those
governments’ (Keohane and Nye 1974, p. 43).
These interdependency trends have manifested in political and scholarly
debates over the relative autonomy of the state in the face of transnation-
alising trends that now fall under the label of globalization. The early
debates of the 1990s centred on whether ‘the state’ was made redundant,
diminished, enervated or merely transformed by surging global markets
and emboldened corporate actors. The globalisation debate of the 1990s
was framed as head-to-head collision between the beleaguered state on
the one hand, and out-of-control global economic forces on the other.
Those championing the virtues of a qualitatively new form of globalisa-
tion vaunted the benefits brought by a bullish new breed of multinational
companies that had ‘carved out entirely new channels for themselves’
(Ohmae 1994), rendering redundant the nation state’s inefficient role
as a regulator. Others were more reticent and, whilst acknowledging
the strength of the nascent global forces, foresaw a moral peril in the
declining capacity of the nation state to rein-in private enterprises and
transnational processes that were ‘more powerful than the state to whom
ultimate political authority over society and the economy was supposed
to belong’ (Strange 1996; Falk 1999). For others, perhaps most notably
David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton,
the newly identified forms of globalisation, represent a continuation of a
series of ‘globalisations’ that have occurred over humanity’s longue duree
(Held et al. 2000). On this view, global interactions could be construed
as merely the latest form of globalisation. So, in contrast to scholars envi-
sioning a weakened nation state battening down the hatches to weather
the maelstroms of increasingly powerful global forces, Held et al. argue
that the state has been transformed: ‘Far from globalization leading to the
“end of the state”’, they claim, ‘it is stimulating a range of government
and governance strategies and, in some fundamental respects, a more
activist state’ (Held et al. 2000). Others, such as Paul Hirst and Graeme
Thompson, challenged the ‘conventional wisdom’ about the reach and
pace of globalisation, proposing that the economic, social and polit-
ical dynamics were something more akin to regionalisation of Europe,
North America and Asia Pacific (Hirst 1999). In later work, Hirst and
Thompson warn of the propensity of politicians to appeal to globalisa-
tion ‘to undermine any attempt to maintain or improve public services
and welfare standards’ (Hay and Rosamond 2002). They contend that
 1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 7

the concept of globalisation has ‘dangerous political side effects’ that, as

a concept, weakens policy-makers’ confidence in the governance capacities
of the nation state (Hirst 2000). According to these authors, the dimin-
ished confidence in the nation state is critical: ‘Without such capacities
there can be no effective foundations on which to build and to control
forms of international governance’ (2000, p. 58).

Imperatives of Global Governance:

Interdependency and Emerging Policy Challenges
In more recent years, the footing of the globalisation debate has shifted
somewhat towards the parlance of ‘global governance’. This term turns
on social, rather than economic, questions of how political classes can
manage a new set of transnational issues that have been produced by glob-
alisation and great shifts in demographies and lifestyles. Amidst a global
population boom, there is a ‘dramatic increase’ in global mega-cities
(Kraas 2007, p. 79): in 2018, the number of people with access to the
Internet passed 4 billion, 2.17 billion of whom had social media profiles
on Facebook1 and a rapidly digitising global news media.2 Around 4
billion people use air travel, a number expected to double by 2037.3
Economically, trade in services amongst OECD countries tripled from
$US1.49t in 2005 to US$4.5t in 2016.4 Thus, increasingly, we see refer-
ence to the permeability of state borders, the easy and largely unfettered
transit of finance across countries, the ubiquity of global digital media and
demise of local print media.
Against this backdrop of rising internationalisation and interdepen-
dency, a family of new imperatives for the state are emerging. Because
of the internationalisation of national economies, societies, cultures,
commerce and industry, crises that originate elsewhere on the world
can, and often do, spread rapidly to affect neighbouring and distant
states. The last thirty years have witnessed an unprecedented growth in
technologies that give rapid transit to ideas, information, goods, fuels,
services and people around the world. There is absolutely no doubt that
these technologies have invigorated the international economy—though
many states have benefited only marginally—and unlocked new vistas
of education, health care, economic development for developing and
developed countries alike. Yet a new set of transnational challenges tran-
scend sovereign borders to the extent that meaningful policy measures
require multilateral action, such as those posed by climate change and
8 T. LEGRAND

environmental pollution, economic instability, international terrorism and

organised crime, pandemics and asylum seekers, amongst others. These
are partly challenges exacerbated by modern technologies and patterns
of society. For example, the physical digital infrastructure that consti-
tutes the Internet has uncoupled geographical and temporal constraints
on communication. Global flows of information are only partly limited
by our social circadian rhythms and business working hours, though even
this impediment is to all intents and purposes irrelevant in sectors that
either automate processes round the clock, or use shift-workers to cater
to market demands in different time zones. The immediacy of informa-
tion and communication is exemplified in the use of online technologies
to communicate ideologies. Access to social media platforms has been
widely recognised as a crucial accelerant of uprising across the Middle
East during the Arab Spring, which saw several countries spiral into crisis
and conflict (Frangonikolopoulos and Chapsos 2012), while in the rise
of the Islamic State (IS) the use of social media was one of the prin-
cipal means to recruit supporters from across the world to travel to Iraq
and Syria. In global finance, meanwhile, the dynamics of interdependency
were loundly pronounced during the Global Financial Crisis; govern-
ments are now acutely aware of the inherent risks and instabilities in
integrated global financial markets—none more so than Iceland, which
saw all three of its principal banks collapse under the weight of debt
induced by over-enthusiastic lending practices in the USA. In the cyber
realm, the sovereignty of the state is in disarray. Online crime, committed
by individuals and groups overseas, occurs on an almost pandemic scale
beyond the physical and legal reach of law enforcement. The threat of
major disruption to banking, policing and defence agencies and industry is
now a daily reality: online credit card fraud, identity theft and intellectual
property theft are growing in scale and sophistication.
In addition to new technological dynamics, a host of public safety
threats are not only compounded, but are widened and accelerated by
global interdependencies, leading Uriel Rosenthal to observe that ‘The
growing interdependence and the increasing mobility and communica-
tion make each society and each policy domain ever more vulnerable to
crisis agents’ (2003, p. 135). For example, food supply chains now span
continents and introduce new vectors of risks. This was borne out in 2011
when fenugreek seeds imported from Egypt contaminated bean sprouts
grown on an organic farm in Germany with a harmful E.coli bacteria. The
contaminated bean sprouts were consumed across Germany and Europe,
 1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 9

causing the deaths of 53 people and another 3950 illnesses. As we have

seen with the mounting death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, inter-
national travel accelerates and widens the threat of pandemics, especially
with the advent of low-cost air travel opening up commercial markets
and tourist destinations to an increasing number of people in the West
and developing countries. The COVID-19 pandemic was presaged by the
infamous ‘swine flu’, H1N1 influenza, that spread across the world in
2009 killing between an estimated 151,700 and 575,400 people. Such
public safety threats amplify the urgency of cross-border learning, not
least because public policy decisions made in one state can impact directly
on the governments (and publics) of others. The regulation of nuclear
power station design in Soviet Ukraine and Japan had enormous reper-
cussions for neighbouring countries when Chernobyl and Fukushima
respectively failed in 1986 and 2011. Public health management in West
Africa, for example, was of keen interest to Western governments in the
midst of the Ebola outbreak of 2014.
These transnational tensions compound trends towards interdepen-
dency. Cities are beholden to thinly-stretched supplies of petrol and diesel.
Manufacturing, food production and transport are wedded to profitable
just-in-time production and delivery processes from aviation and maritime
transport routes. Businesses increasingly transfer their critical commer-
cial data to cloud-based servers located across any number of overseas
states, posing hitherto unresolved questions of legal jurisdiction and data
ownership. Increasingly, it seems, the distinction between interconnected
and co-dependent is diminishing, whilst the resolution of public-private
dilemmas is becoming increasingly urgent, as noted in the UK Parliament
in 2007.

The loss of critical infrastructure in one country has the potential to have
severe effects in another. The loss of power supply can hinder emergency
services or transport, for example, and these knock-on effects are able to
continue across borders. Following human error, an overload of the elec-
tricity transmission system in Germany in November 2006 resulted in some
50 million EU citizens losing power in Germany, Austria, France, Belgium,
Italy, Spain and Portugal. (House of Commons 2007: Column 1518, cited
in Aradau 2010)

These threats of transnationalism and interdependency represent a signif-

icant challenge to the autonomy of the state. Modern state officials now
face the dilemma posed by globalisation’s drivers: that beyond-the-state
forces have widened the state’s exposure to a host of threats whilst at
10 T. LEGRAND

the same time diminishing the capacity of domestic policy officials to

unilaterally prevent or mitigate such risks.

[T]he fragmentation of political agency and the diffusion of legal or

law-like arrangements at different levels and across different dimensions
of global governance have blurred the boundaries between the interna-
tional states system, the international community and transnational society.
(Brütsch and Lehmkuhl 2007, p. 1)

The Global Financial Crisis exposed not only the systemic vulnerabilities
and corruptions of a US-centric global financial system but also the extent
to which states’ economies had become interdependent. Whilst seemingly
invulnerable multinational banks foundered, interest rates soared, shell-
shocked bankers vacated their seemingly invulnerable institutions with
little more than a box of possessions and a sense of disbelief. The perils
of global interdependency can scarcely be better illustrated than by this
precipitous collapse of financial institutions and, with that collapse, the
loss of billions in retirement savings, evictions, job losses and the impo-
sition of what was euphemistically described as ‘austerity measures’ to
correct the budget losses. Thomas Piketty in his acclaimed book, Capital,
points out that experiences of ‘globalisation’ are far from equal:

These very different collective experiences of growth in the twentieth

century largely explain why public opinion in different countries varies so
widely in regard to commercial and financial globalization and indeed to
capitalism in general. In continental Europe and especially France, people
quite naturally continue to look on the first three postwar decades—a
period of strong state intervention in the economy—as a period blessed
with rapid growth, and many regard the liberalization of the economy that
began around 1980 as the cause of a slowdown. (Piketty 2014, p. 98)

These variegated national experiences of cross-border flows lead us to

the important debates around global governance: the question of how,
and with what authority, decisions can be made about the above-the-state
forces absent the constraints of nation states. This is a debate kick-started
by Rosenau, but remains very much alive amongst scholars. Indeed, the
terminology and debates of global governance are to be found threading
through the pages of this book. One thread in particular is relevant:
How is the public interest served by decisions made above the nation
state—whither the democratic legitimacy?
 1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 11

The ineluctable consequences of globalisation seem to come with few

stipulations about its regulation, if indeed that is at all possible. Doubt-
less, publics of the world are affected profoundly by the beyond-the-state
flows of capital, goods and finance. They are also affected by the decisions
of foreign governments, international organisations and multinational
corporations: Who is ultimately responsible for the decisions that, say,
alter prevailing interest rates, or the price of food, or the stability of
employment? In whose interests do these operate, and can they really
serve multiple public interests at once? Certainly, it is the poorest who
are most vulnerable. The globalisation-welfare state nexus (see Genschel
2011) is a worrying one: on the one hand, the caprices of international
finance create a volatility that unsettles long-term employment, requiring
states to fill in the gaps to sustain the labour market in transition. On the
other, the same global pressures systematically undermine the affordability
of doing so. The result is imbalance, as Stiglitz points out:

Globalization and technology both contribute to the polarization of our

labor market, but they are not abstract market forces that just arrive from
on high; rather, they are shaped by our policies. We have explained how
globalization—especially our asymmetric globalization—is tilted toward
putting labor in a disadvantageous bargaining position vis-à-vis capital.
(Stiglitz 2012, p. 347)

Towards Transgovernmentalism: Collaboration

and Cooperation in an Uncertain World
The outlook for an autonomous, sovereign state, then, seems unsteady at
best. If, echoing John Donne’s verse, we argue that society is embedded
in a global matrix of interconnected social, economic and political
processes, then state autonomy is no longer a viable concept, taken
literally, and is increasingly encumbered with a ‘global-local’ dilemma.
Pursuing the public interest, as we have already seen, is a complex
and contingent activity and is only made more complex by growing
global intersections. In an environment in which domestic outcomes are
shaped not only by local interventions but by the (often unintended)
consequences of actions in distant locations, it is far more difficult to
ensure a simple correspondence between politicians’ ambitions, actions
and outcomes (and the public interest).
12 T. LEGRAND

How have governments responded to this globalising environment of

policy-making? Returning to the early days of reflection on the nascent
global flows, Keohane and Nye posited the interdependency of states.
This structural perspective foreshadowed new forms of decentralised
cross-border collaboration: ‘As the agenda broadens’, they suggested,
‘bureaucracies find that to cope effectively at acceptable cost with many
of the problems that arise, they must deal with each other directly
rather than indirectly through foreign offices’ (1974, p. 42). In the
decades since Keohane and Nye’s interdependency claims, new tech-
nologies of transport and communication have accelerated the global
policy interdependencies, imperatives and opportunities for collaboration.
Recognising the multiplying cross-border interdependencies, policy offi-
cials are increasingly active in ‘transnational administration’: new venues
of informal decision-making involving non-domestic actors such as multi-
national corporations, NGOs, IOs and other states. We detect these
logics of international collaboration in policy-making frameworks. The
UK government expects officials to collaborate with ‘counterparts in
other international administrations’ (Bullock et al. 2001, p. 13), but
also advises policy officials: ‘The world for which policy makers have to
develop policies is becoming increasingly complex, uncertain and unpre-
dictable’ (Bullock et al. 2001, p. 15). So, all is not quite lost for the state.
Though emergent ‘uncertain’ transnational challenges cannot be staved
off nor ignored unilaterally, opportunities for multilateral, collaborative
action to address challenges that are common to multiple states offers
an obvious way out. This is the basis of the international system and
the principle of liberal institutionalism that underpins it. For Anne-Marie
Slaughter, the national sovereignty is indeed only meaningful within a
system of international interdependency:

However paradoxical it sounds, the measure of a state’s capacity to act as

an independent unit within the international system – the condition that
‘sovereignty’ purports both to grant and describe – depends on the breadth
and depth of its links to other states. (Slaughter 2004, p. 187)

The obvious corollary is to whom do states turn? From where do they

derive lessons and learning amidst the incredible digital availability of
information? In the Introduction to this book, I surveyed in brief the
influence of Chinese administration in the establishment of the UK’s civil
service. In The Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth (1832),
 1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 13

Francis Palgrave charts the evolution of the British state, its institutions
and constitution, for which his admiration is evident: ‘the political history
of England is, on the whole, more cheering than that of any state or
dominion which has hitherto existed’ (1832, p. 6). The virtues of the
English constitution, claimed Palgrave, was demonstrated by its adoption
(or, if not adopted, ‘earnestly desired’) ‘in the fairest and in the most
intelligent countries of Europe’. Palgrave’s belief in the preeminence of
the British model of government was fairly typical of its time. The early
years of policy transfer were inextricably linked to colonial rule. London’s
oldest university, Gresham College, was the training hub for budding civil
servant. It was so important that the college earned an explicit exemption
from the Seditious Meetings Act 1819, which otherwise forbade meetings
to discuss trade and manufacture and public grievances.
Today’s entrants to public services can expect to undergo a no less
professional training in the legal and institutional expectations of being a
modern official. To take just one example of how governments explicitly
incorporate lesson-drawing into the policy-making process, a UK Cabinet
Office report entitled ‘Professional Policy Making for the Twenty-First
Century’ found that:

Our evidence shows that looking at other countries’ experience can

contribute very positively to the policy-making process. The New Deal for
Lone Parents and the Single Work Focused Gateway Project (‘One’) both
drew extensively from experience abroad to inform their thinking. The
latter made comparisons with similar interventions in California, Maryland
and Wisconsin USA, Australia, New Zealand, New Brunswick, Canada and
the Netherlands and involved a practitioner from the USA in some of the
detailed work. (Strategic Policy Making Team, Cabinet Office 1999, 5.2)

In addition, this study placed a heavy emphasis on ‘learning lessons from

experience’. The authors argue that a more systematic procedure for
assessing the effectiveness of policies should be put in place to obtain
detailed information on the outcomes and effectiveness of policies. Such
a system, they claim, is especially necessary wherein: ‘The more policy
makers innovate, the less certainty they can have about achieving intended
results and the greater the need to assess policy impacts and be prepared
to change tack’ (2003, 10.5). This sentiment is reflected in Twelve Actions
to Professionalise Policy Making in which the UK Civil Service’s Policy
Profession Board called for government to ‘Identify learning from policy
failure/successes’.
14 T. LEGRAND

The Technological Revolution

Scholarly interest in the process of policy learning and transfer is corre-
lated with an increasing tendency of policy-makers to resort to transfer
and learning, especially between states that share similar administrative
traditions:

Straightforward a-to-b movements of policy occur almost on a daily basis

across Westminster style democracies and are rarely either underpinned by
evidence-based research or scrutinised by legislatures. (Marsh and Evans
2012, p. 480)

Indeed, analysts use this supposed increase in policy transfers as a ratio-

nale for the argument that ‘policy transfer’ requires further theoretical
and empirical attention: ‘as the body of literature associated with policy
transfer has grown it has become indisputable that political actors are
consistently engaging in the process’ (Dolowitz 1997, p. 23). But is this
quantifiably demonstrable?
Technological transformation is relevant to questions of why policy
transfer appears more prevalent than ever (see Annesley 2016; Bomberg
and Peterson 2000). In itself, determining the quantum of policy transfer
is not straightforward. Phillips and Ochs observe it is ‘extremely difficult
to quantify’ policy transfer (2003; see also Houlihan et al. 2010), though
certainly advances in modern technology and communications have
considerably deepened the pool of policy know-how available to govern-
ment officials. The modern state has had to evolve rapidly to accommo-
date administrative dynamics that were scarcely conceivable thirty years
ago. The arrival of the desktop computer into civil service offices in
the 1980s heralded a new era of administration in which the possibili-
ties seemed limitless. Recognising the possibilities, companies were asked
to develop laptop designs—or ‘kneetops’ as they were then dubbed—to
allow for mobile computing. In the 1990s, the networked interoper-
ability of computers allowed the construction of, and universal access
to, vast electronic government databases containing detailed and cross-
referenced personal information. Now, the rapid growth and evolution of
the Internet has profoundly changed the rules of engagement between
all sorts of political agents, from individuals to NGOs, to local authori-
ties, to governments, to international organisation—the world’s political
landscape now has a distinctively digital structure. Increasingly, new
and old information is digitised, indexed and made accessible through
 1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 15

the Internet, creating a rapidly expanding repository of policy-relevant

data that can be reviewed with limited effort for minimal cost (see, for
example, van Waarden and Drahos 2002, p. 931). Some commentators
have observed a concomitant increase in instances of policy transfer and
attribute this rise partly to the ease of access to overseas and domestic
policy information (Dolowitz and Marsh 1996, 2000; Evans and Davies
1999; Pierson 2003; Radaelli 2000). Reflecting on domestic political
changes, it is argued that increased policy transfer reflects: ‘the growth of
legislation and the pace of change is greater than ever before’ (Dolowitz
et al. 1999, p. 719). The almost ubiquitous access to shared information
via the Internet has entailed fundamental changes in the way governments
acquire, analyse and disseminate information. Systematic data collection
on consumer, economic, social and financial information has considerably
enhanced the possibilities (though perhaps not the capacity) for govern-
ments to interact with society in new ways and understand the impact of
policies.5
Mostly, however, the roots of policy transfer, or, at least, the increased
visibility of it, are linked to globalisation and the policy challenges that it
brings. On this perspective, global social and economic forces produce a
set of policy problems experienced by many countries at the same time,
and who share an incentive to locate and offer collaborative policy solu-
tions (Drezner 2001; Holzinger and Knill 2005). For Diane Stone, the
corollary of heightened global processes means that ‘States will remain
important mediators of globalisation but their capacities to react and
respond will differ substantially’ (2003, p. 17). Consequently, policy-
makers have become cognisant of: ‘the emergence of qualitatively “new”
policy problems that cannot be dealt with effectively through established
policy heuristic’ (1999, p. 53).
As a mode of policy innovation, lesson-drawing has also been endorsed
by international institutions. For example, whilst lacking the necessary
overt mechanisms of power and/or coercion possessed by the IMF
or World Bank (see Dolowitz and Marsh 2000), the OECD utilises
the ‘moral’ influence of its member states to facilitate policy learning.
Consider the following statements:

Democratic governments want policies that are in the best interests of

their citizens. But how can they –and their voters- be sure they are making
the right choices? One answer is by learning from the tried and tested
experiences of others […]
16 T. LEGRAND

A country seeking to reduce unemployment, for example, can learn

valuable lessons from its peers on what has worked and what has not. This
can save time, and costly experimentation, in crafting the best policies for
a particular country. (Pagani, 2002, p. 55)

There is also an internationalisation of policy best practice. The Centre

For Public Impact is a paradigm example: this is a think tank, established
in 2015—funded by the US firm Boston Consulting Group—that in 2017
launched a digital repository of public policy case studies, selected for the
salience as examples of successful or unsuccessful policy, drawing out the
key lessons for future policy work. Notably, the digital resource promul-
gates a western-oriented vision, or idea, of what public policy, who it is
for and how it should be done. Its audience is, further, global in its ambi-
tions: as part of its outreach, the Centre has hosted workshops in Mexico,
India, Estonia, the UK the USA, Singapore and beyond: it is, to all intents
and purposes, a broadcast channel of policy transfer.
The shifting dimensions of the international technological, economic
and political sphere give us cause to revisit some fundamental questions of
policy learning and diffusion: How do policy officials learn? From which
countries? What lessons? Why these lessons? Inevitably, research on this
topic is hindered by the opacity of policy processes, or what is sometimes
referred to as the ‘black box’ of policy-making, a product of the natural
reticence of officials to declare the source of their inspiration, negative
or positive. As a consequence, it is easy to see why there is relatively
little substantive knowledge of international policy learning networks (as
opposed to processes and outcomes, on which the policy transfer liter-
ature is very active) and why few transgovernmental policy networks,
especially those populated by elite officials, have been identified. In their
recent review of the policy transfer literature, Benson and Jordan argue:
‘In general, the more empirical question of why and when certain types
of transfer appear in particular settings and not others has still not been
fully addressed’ (2011, p. 370). As noted above, it is generally agreed that
policy transfer is an understood tool of public administration for policy-
makers seeking to navigate the ‘changing world of governance’ (Dolowitz
2003, p. 100). Thus, globalisation is seen as a double-edged sword: where
on the one hand economic forces create the imperative for policy co-
ordination, and on the other: ‘the rapid growth in communications of
all types makes exchange of ideas and knowledge much easier’ (Dolowitz
and Marsh 2000, p. 7). Yet, the question of provincial validity remains
 1 TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION … 17

unanswered. Are all sources of policy inspiration equally appropriate,

irrespective of provenance?
As a theory of cross-national policy movement, policy transfer analysts
naturally reference globalisation and its constituent dynamics. Two domi-
nant views have emerged in the literature concerning the impact that
globalisation has had upon the increase in instances and uses of policy
transfer, with it seen as either a useful by-product of global forces or
a developed response and corrective to the erosion of the nation state
by global forces. On both views, globalisation poses a new challenge
to contemporary policy-making. Policy-making, on this view, resorts to
policy learning and transfer from overseas because either:

i. There is a crisis of representative democracy in which the

rapidly increasing interconnectivity—economic and political—of
states means that policy-makers’ traditional policy-making tools are
incapable of meeting previously unencountered policy problems
brought on by globalisation. Thus, policy transfer is deployed defen-
sively as a means of ‘solving’ new policy problems; in this sense, the
coherence of the domestic policy agenda is challenged and policy
transfer is viewed as a way of re-empowering state actors by drawing
upon the methods employed by overseas actors to maintain control
over domestic policy in the face of exogenous forces.
ii. The increasing interconnectivity empowers the policy-making
process. Indeed, it is argued that: ‘The relevance of cross-national
policy transfer promises to increase, with advances in communica-
tions and the process of globalization’ (Mossberger and Wolman
2003, p. 429). On this view, the increasing technological capabilities
which are a feature of globalisation offer policy-makers a powerful
avenue to explore alternative policy-making methods used over-
seas. Accordingly, policy transfer reinforces the range of techniques
policy-makers can draw upon to meet domestic policy challenges,
thus augmenting the portfolio of policy-making tools.

Whilst assigning globalisation two very different causal roles, both views
adhere to the notion that adopting policies from overseas helps policy-
makers to realise their strategic goals. Yet, the role of globalisation has
not been adequately disaggregated. On a normative level, theorists have
emphasised the possible uses of policy transfer as a response to exogenous
18 T. LEGRAND

forces which threaten traditional modes of policy-making. On another

level, the technological and communication advances inherent in global-
isation facilitate successful policy transfer, enhancing the possibilities for,
and occurrences of, policy transfer.
These accounts of globalisation do not help us with the questions
posed at the outset of this chapter: How do we determine and serve the
public interest? Doing so is of primary, a priori, importance to the policy-
maker since she must first serve the domestic interest. There is little to
be gained from adopting, say, a well-respected model of primary educa-
tion from Scandinavia if doing so does not meet the needs of the local
population. In other words, the adoption of ideas from elsewhere should
never be a function merely of the performance of that policy in its orig-
inal setting, but a function of how well it marries with domestic needs.
And so we might assume ceteris paribus that policy transfer arises from a
belief—of a policy-maker, or institution—of parity between the interests
of the domestic and overseas constituencies. Determining how they do so
is the interest of the following chapters.

Notes
1. 2018 Global Digital Reports.
2. In 2012, there were just 5452 digital newspapers in circulation. In 2015,
this number had risen to 25,421. Source: PWC. A value increase of
US$950 million in 2012 to US$5.550 billion in 2018.
3. IATA: 2036 Forecast Reveals Air Passengers Will Nearly Double to 7.8
Billion. http://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2017-10-24-01.aspx.
4. OECD (2018), Trade in services (indicator). https://doi.org/10.1787/
3796b5f0-en (Accessed on 26 June 2018).
5. The UK Office for National Statistics Indices of Multiple Deprivation is a
case in point. Data on income, employment, benefit uptakes and so on, are
regularly collected across the UK and made openly available. The resolution
of the data is astounding: it is possible to view aggregated household data
at a street level for any given postcode in the UK.

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 CHAPTER 2

The Global Laboratory: Approaches

to Theorising Policy Transfer

Nevertheless, it can also be argued that transnational opportunity struc-

tures, unlike national ones, are not configured primarily by hierarchical
state structures, but by multilayered, quasi-anarchical, overlapping and
cross-cutting – transnational – political processes, including not only states-
in-flux but also transnational economic and transgovernmental linkages.
(Cerny 2009, p. 155)

As we have seen in the opening arguments of this book, and Philip

Cerny’s observation above, modern governments interact in complex
ways and do so globally permeating both the national and interna-
tional domains alike. Global challenges that transcend borders force
governments to coordinate, cooperate or learn from one another—the
economic, political, social and natural dimensions of the 2020 COVID-
19 pandemic illustrated conclusively how deeply interconnected those
domains are, and how important it was for policy-makers to seek out,
adopt, adapt and learn from others’ best practices in managing the local
effects of the global crisis. Policy transfer scholars have been at the
forefront of work to recognise that the dynamics of policy-making not
stop at the border, nor are they neat, linear learning processes. Diane
Stone refers to the need to emphasise ‘the messy processes of hybrid
policies emerging from multiple exemplars, and the messy interpretive
processes where importing countries translate and amend transferred poli-
cies’ (2020, p. 71). In spanning the domestic and state, it is argued, we

© The Author(s) 2021 23

T. Legrand, The Architecture of Policy Transfer,
Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55821-5_2
24 T. LEGRAND

must recognise both the increasing resonance of non-domestic influences

and the complexity of how policies are adapted and assembled, and adapt
our prevailing theories of domestic policy-making accordingly. Theo-
rising these dynamics is, therefore, a pressing concern, leading us to ask:
How does the ‘activity’ of transfer contribute to our existing models of
decision-making and political outcomes? A family of analytical approaches
contribute to policy transfer concepts, including most prominently lesson-
drawing (e.g. Rose 1993), policy diffusion (e.g. Simmons 2014), policy
convergence (e.g. Bennett 1991) and policy assemblage (e.g. Savage
2019). These analyses are overlapping in some areas and distinct in
others, with policy transfer acting as the umbrella term for lesson-drawing,
learning and diffusion. Separately and jointly, these approaches have
forged differing, but intersecting, perspectives on Cerny’s ‘transnational
opportunity structures’.
Largely, the analytical diversity explored below is a natural conse-
quence of the eclecticism of epistemology in the social sciences and this
chapter seeks to draw out the prevailing conceptual harmony and fric-
tion between these distinct approaches. The depiction of these models
here draws deliberate attention to the privileging of either structure or
agency in these approaches. Importantly, I suggest, models tend to repro-
duce a common methodological misstep: the burgeoning policy transfer
literature is largely theoretically informed by ‘successful’ cases of policy
transfer (but not always: see Stone 2020 for an exception), which are
used post hoc to derive the circumstances in which policy transfer is
thought to be most effective. This literature has tended to ask: ‘When
policy transfer happens, why did it happen?’ This methodological trend
has significant conceptual repercussions: first, it indicates that policy
transfer analysis is informed largely by isolated (or idiosyncratic) and
empirically-manifest cases; second, successful cases (i.e. the fact of osten-
sible successful outcomes is used—a selection on the dependent variable),
which are vulnerable to the post facto ergo sum logical fallacy. That is to
say, they do not ask: When policy transfer does not happen, why does
it not happen? The consequence of this trend is that theories of policy
movement operate only as indices of successful transfer happenstance,1 a
shortfall in our understanding of the agonist and antagonist inputs to
the policy cycle that prompt, or do not, policy transfer processes and
outcomes. Recent innovations in the policy mobilities and assemblages
literature (McCann and Ward 2012; Savage 2019) have pushed against
this wayward methodology by advocating an approach to understanding
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 25

the policy creation process as one that hinges on the interplay of identities,
subjectivities and circumstance, explored below.
The aim of this chapter is to situate the book within a critical position
on the empirics of policy transfer: here I suggest that it is not possible
to understand, much less explain, the phenomenon of policy transfer by
analytically divorcing ‘transfer’ processes from their embedding in the
broader political context of public policy development.
Policy transfer is as ambiguous as it is ubiquitous in contemporary
politics. It is an explicitly acknowledged component of contemporary
government which is often lauded as an important signifier of global polit-
ical convergence. For academics, the policy transfer framework offers an
opportunity to assimilate cross-disciplinary theories and apply these to the
study of contemporary policy-making, providing important explanations
of policy outcomes (successful and otherwise). Interdisciplinarity is seen as
both a strength and a weakness of policy transfer as a theoretical approach
to the analysis of past, present and future policy-making: it exemplifies the
compatibility of many existing theories, from the New Institutionalism to
Comparative Politics (Evans and Davies 1999). Against the backdrop
of the global interdependencies and availability of policy-relevant ideas
described in the previous chapter, understanding the circumstances in
which policies are appropriately adopted (i.e. implemented in accordance
with the public interest) is imperative.

Why Theorise Policy Transfer?

As the previous chapter showed, policy transfer analysis has evolved in
contemporary public administration to a point where it is established
as a bona fide instrument of policy-making. For its theoretical pioneers,
the value of policy transfer analysis was to be found in how it could be
integrated easily into prescriptive frameworks readily understandable by
and useful for policy-makers. In this vein, scholars such as Diane Stone,
David Marsh and David Dolowitz argued that policy transfer analysis
should provide policy-makers with guidelines on the appropriate means
of engaging in this form of policy-making.

Since policy-making is all about lesson-learning, two of the most impor-

tant lessons a policy-maker can learn are, first, that foreign political systems
often offer interesting laboratories of policy innovation, and second, that
26 T. LEGRAND

it is often possible to use the work done in these laboratories in the devel-
opment of policies within a policy-maker’s own political system. (Dolowitz
2003, p. 101)

For Stone, such enterprise is rooted in a concern for rigorous policy-

making; thus, ‘it is important to understand policy transfer to help prevent
it occurring in an indiscriminate manner on the basis of prevailing fashion’
(Stone 1999, p. 54). Mossberger and Wolman offer similar endorsement,
contending that policy transfer analysis should: ‘provide information and
guidelines to policy makers on how they should engage in policy transfer as
prospective policy evaluation […] as a means of improving their ability to
predict the effect of a policy before it is put in place’ (2003, p. 430,
emphases in original). In positing notions of ‘best practice’, itself a
term much transferred across the Western world of public administra-
tors, policy-makers are encouraged to follow precepts designed to enable
them to avoid ‘policy failure’ and encourage more efficient processes
of transfer. As such, these models are deployed, in part at least, to: (i)
firmly establish policy transfer as a tool of policy-making and (ii) increase
its effectiveness where it is used. In so doing, policy transfer occupies
both an analytical and normative status. It is not only firmly implanted
into the policy-making process, but, more importantly, it is framed as a
legitimate contributor to contemporary governance insofar as social scien-
tists ‘can aid decision-makers in the processes of policy transfer’ (Stone
1999, p. 58). Indeed, Bomberg and Peterson note that: ‘As a method of
policy-making, policy transfer may well ‘strengthen the state’, or at least
enhance the autonomy of national officials to learn – or refuse to learn
– lessons arising from best practice elsewhere’ (Bomberg and Peterson
2000, p. 14).

Policy Learning, Transfer and Diffusion

The steadily expanding literature on policy transfer has attracted interdis-
ciplinary interest for its conceptual accessibility and the relative ease with
which it accommodates different empirical approaches. As shown in the
previous chapter, the policy transfer framework developed by Dolowitz
and Marsh drew from a range of early work by, inter alia, Rose (1993)
and Bennett (1991) to posit a heuristic for policy transfer researchers
that sought to capture and link the dynamics of how policy agents with
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 27

structural forces promote the diffusion of policy ideas. The policy transfer
heuristic regards policy transfer as:

a process in which knowledge about policies, administrative arrangement

several elements of policy as potentially transferable between jurisdic-
tions: policies, administrative arrangements and institutions. (Dolowitz and
Marsh 1996, p. 353; see also Dolowitz 1997)

For Dolowitz and Marsh, the process by which this occurs is contin-
gent on gradations. These include a power relations gradient of volun-
tary to coercive transfer that underpins the motivations of a policy
transfer; a policy content gradient of the extent of adoption of ‘policy
goals, structure and content, policy instruments or administrative tech-
niques; institutions, ideas, attitudes and concepts; and negative lessons’
(Dolowitz and Marsh 1996, pp. 349–350); and a policy locus that ranges
from domestic political systems to other countries with ‘ideological and
resources similarities’ (1996, p. 353).
In more recent years, the theoretical assumptions of early policy
transfer analysts have come under sustained scrutiny. McCann and Ward’s
(2012) notion of a relational interconnectedness between actors raises a
timely question of the networked relationship between policy regimes.
To date, the policy transfer literature has held a relatively weak concep-
tion of the role of policy networks in the transfer process, specifically
as policy transfer has been depicted by some of its key theorists as an
impromptu process. Mark Evans describes policy networks involved in
transfer as: ‘an ad hoc, action-oriented policy-making structure set up
with the specific intention of engineering rapid policy change. They only
exist for the time that a transfer is occurring’ (Evans 2004, p. 22). This
perspective echoes his earlier work with Davies, which disclaimed the
coalition-building aspects of policy transfer networks:

Conversely, policy transfer networks are an ad hoc phenomenon set up with

the specific intention of engineering policy change and thus no extensive
process of bargaining or coalition building external to the transfer network
is usually required. (Evans and Davies 1999, p. 376)

Rose (1993) and Bennett (1991) are considered to be the forbearers of

the theoretical approach that is consolidated by the work of Dolowitz and
Marsh 1996, Dolowitz et al. 1999 and Dolowitz and Marsh 2000 and,
more recently, Evans and Davies (1999) and Evans (2004).
28 T. LEGRAND

Understanding Policy ‘Transfer’,

‘Learning’ and Related Concepts
Policy transfer is not a standalone concept; rather, it is the sum of a
range of contributing models brought under the aegis of transfer. To
start with a broad brush, they can be understood as allied concepts with
a concern with the following: (1) they have a common interest in policies
that are transported beyond their point of genesis (geographical, institu-
tional or, indeed, temporal); (2) they have a common desire to tease out
the possible patterns and processes that lie behind/impel such movements
of policy. There are six concepts that meet these criteria outlined below
in two sections that focus on their underlying meta-theoretical posture:
structural and agency-focused approaches.
Structural approaches

• Policy convergence: The process by which countries become increas-

ingly alike through policy learning , transfer, or international struc-
tural imperatives.
• Policy diffusion: The study of how similar policy arrangements spread
amongst and between states.

Agency-focused approaches

• Policy learning (or lesson-drawing): Considers where and how

policy actors draw ideas about policy problems and solutions for
domestic policy from foreign sources.
• Policy transfer: The process by which policymakers adopt (volun-
tarily or otherwise) policies, or related components and institutional
arrangements, from overseas.

Ancillary approaches

• Policy assemblage: Examines how policies ‘move’ between coun-

tries, and are produced in an uncertain combination of political,
institutional and environmental context.
• Transgovernmentalism : Concerned with groups of government
actors working collectively in informal-above-the-state networks to
develop collaborative responses to transnational issues.
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 29

The development of these approaches has occurred separately in some

instances, jointly in others, with most ‘borrowing’ insights into a process
of cross-fertilisation. In this context, the following is divided into three
sections: the first section of this chapter examines the principle structural
theories that have contributed to the concept of policy transfer, specifically
the approaches of policy convergence and diffusion theorists. The second
section explores the agency-centred approaches, such as the concept of
policy learning and lesson-drawing and the factors that impel policy-
makers to engage in this process. Here, I discuss the impact these theorists
have had on recent attempts to theorise a policy transfer model by two
sets of authors, Dolowitz and Marsh and Evans and Davies. Finally, the
third section of this chapter expands the theoretical perimeters of policy
transfer by engaging with two connected literatures on policy assemblages
and transgovernmentalism.

Part I: Structural Explanations of Policy Mobility

Policy Convergence
Policy convergence is a macro-political analysis. Its primary aim is to
describe increasing national conformity to uniform international policy
models. This might occur through various mechanisms of policy transfer,
policy diffusion, epistemic communities and so on, but policy conver-
gence is distinct from these insofar as it is outcome-orientated rather than
process-oriented. As such, the main concern for convergence theorists is
to explain the significance of convergence as the outcome of an ensemble
of policy processes. In this vein, it is the trajectory of various national
policy environments which is important. Originally a sub-field of compar-
ative public policy, policy convergence research has since evolved into
a distinctive research field in its own right, drawing together strands of
economics, political science, sociology and law (Bennett 1991, p. 217).
Whilst its origins lie in 1960s and 1970s studies seeking to explain
societal similarities in terms of industrial-economic development, a refo-
cusing upon public policy occurred in the work of Inkeles (1980, 1981)
whose detailed analysis of the various forms of societal convergence led
to a clearer typology of the forms of convergence. The work of Kerr
(1983) provides one of the first specific empirical studies of convergence.
Kerr identified the seemingly increasing tendency of societies to grow
more alike through the adoption of similar industrial infrastructures. As
30 T. LEGRAND

one of the earliest attempts to systematise the study of state convergence

in this way, this is taken as the standard definition of convergence: ‘the
tendency of societies to grow more alike, to develop similarities in struc-
tures, processes and performance’ (Kerr 1983, p. 3; see also Drezner
2001, p. 53; Knill 2005). On this view, it is the process of ‘becoming
more alike’, rather than being alike, which provides the central concern
of convergence theory. In other words, similarity alone is not a basis for
convergence; it is the movement, or trajectory, towards a common point
which is the crucial component of convergence theory. This forms the
basis of convergence theorists’ criticism:

Birds sometimes sing and sometimes they don’t. In a similar vein, national
policies sometimes converge and sometimes they don’t. Speaking very
generally and somewhat cynically, this is the key insight to be derived
from several decades of studies on the convergence of national policies.
(Lenschow et al. 2005, p. 797)

As we saw in the previous chapter, debates on globalisation remain

ongoing. Explanations of its key drivers are numerous. For material-
ists, globalisation has been fuelled by flows of finance and economic
interdependence (Ohmae 1990, 2000) whilst, for sceptics of that posi-
tion, globalisation was better understood as an ideational phenomenon,
constructed upon and through dominant discourses about ‘inexorable’
global processes underpinned by the putative material successes of neolib-
eralism (Hay and Marsh 2000; Held 1999; Held and McGrew 2000).
Others, meanwhile, have disputed the empirical claims of the hyperglob-
alisation thesis, arguing that efforts to coalesce regional groupings of
states—‘regionalisation’—in institutions such as NAFTA, APEC or the
EU have been mistaken for global economic interdependence (Hirst
and Thompson 1996). It is important to note that these disparate
claims about globalisation have been mirrored in convergence literatures.
Indeed, as Drezner argues: ‘According to these theories, globalization
increases the number and power of factors and actors that inexorably
promote policy convergence’ (2005, pp. 841–842). The material claim
this implies is one that stands at odds with those who instead argue that
globalisation is, as it were, in the eye of the beholder: that policy officials
who accept the thesis that globalisation is a material constraint on their
action will act accordingly and, what is more, in so doing may produce
the effects attributed to globalisation.
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 31

Convergence Through Penetration

Here, convergence is driven by coercion; so, countries are compelled,
by an external actor, in some way to adopt, conform to, or harmonise
with, a policy or set of policies. Yet, this does not necessarily involve an
overt display of coercion, since countries may require a certain policy as a
prerequisite of obtaining the benefit of an external process. For instance,
membership of some economic communities necessitates acceptance of
certain policies. Indeed, membership of the WTO requires an entire set
of liberalising reforms based upon the principles laid out by the founding
member states. In this sense, convergence through penetration is partially
an institutional form of convergence. DiMaggio and Powell (1983)
describe institutional convergence in similar terms to Bennett, differen-
tiating between three forms of ‘institutional isomorphism’. In their view,
institutional convergence can result from any one of three stimuli: coer-
cive; mimetic; and normative. DiMaggio and Powell understand coercion
principally in terms of the pressure institutions experience from citizens
and clients to change. Mimetic convergence occurs when institutions face
a lack of direction and, thus, look to others for ideas and models for
reform, and ‘normative’ convergence is driven by shared professional
values (Page 2000, p. 7). To an extent, there is overlap between the
ideas of Bennett and DiMaggio and Powell. There is clear similarity
between Bennett’s notion of elite networking and policy communities and
DiMaggio and Powell’s description of normative convergence. Likewise,
emulation and mimetic convergence both describe a process in which an
institution or country is inspired by the models of reform developed by
others.

Measures of Convergence
Whilst theorists broadly agree on what policy convergence is, there
is considerably less agreement over how it should be studied. As a
consequence, the policy convergence literature has, as it were, diverged.
Nonetheless, there have been recent attempts to unify the literature and
restore theoretical clarity in the field of Europeanisation and globalisation
(see Knill 2005; Heichel et al. 2005; Drezner 2005; Holzinger and Knill
2005) and I return to this literature below.
Policy convergence involves an analysis of outcomes, rather than
processes, utilising (political) time (Heichel et al. 2005, p. 829), (polit-
ical) space and (political) institutions as key variables. It is located in
an international terrain in which governments are the key actors and
32 T. LEGRAND

globalisation the universal, and inexorable, context (Drezner 2001).

Yet questions remain of the analytical value offered by this approach,
according to Knill (2005):

• What explains the adoption of similar policies across countries over

time?
• Under which conditions can we expect that domestic policies
converge or rather develop further apart?
• Why do countries converge on some policies, but not on others?
• What is the direction of policy convergence?
• Do national policies converge at the regulatory top or bottom, and
why?

There are empirical (see Drezner 2001) and theoretical responses

(Heichel et al. 2005) to this question. I will expound both responses
briefly below. As noted above, globalisation plays a leading role in
many arguments about convergence theory. Yet we must be careful
to distinguish between globalisation as an inexorable and deterministic
phenomenon and globalisation as a result of agency and intentional inter-
action. Drezner notes that convergence theorists offer divergent responses
to the conundrums of state-agency versus global structural-determinacy
and whether the main driver of globalisation is material or ideational:
‘These divergences mirror the divisions among international relations
paradigms’ (2001, p. 55).
Theorists who assert the ability of governments to retain agency (albeit
an agency constrained by some structural forces) point to state coop-
eration over certain international regulatory arrangements. For these
theorists, the interaction and interdependence of policy regulation are
more accurately described as policy coordination, rather than policy
convergence: ‘Policy coordination implies some agreement on the accept-
able bounds of regulatory policies, but it does not mean that all states
implement identical rules or regulations’ (Drezner 2001, p. 57). Conver-
gence theorists are divided on the ‘source’ of convergence: economic
or ideational. Some argue that the primacy of capital in a globalised
world ‘pushes’ states in particular directions, so they modify their poli-
cies in order to retain competitiveness. On the other view, ‘states alter
institutions and regulations because a set of beliefs has developed suffi-
cient normative power that leaders fear looking like laggards if they do
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 33

not adopt similar policies’ (Drezner 2001, p. 57). An example of this

debate plays out in global tax regulation. Legrand (2018) explores the
link between the Australian federal government efforts to tighten the tax
regulations governing MNCs with emerging norms in the UK’s ‘Diverted
Profits Tax’ (DPT) legislation and the G20/OECD Base Erosion and
Profit Shifting (BEPS) initiative. The case demonstrates the interplay of
opportunity structures and imperatives in the production of both global
standards and selective policy learning. Legrand finds that:

policy transfer is a product of the contingent interplay of learning agents,

ideas and structures that interact to generate conditions which: produce
imperatives for policy action; privilege specific countries’ experiences;
elevate policy ideas that resonate with prevailing paradigms; and limits the
available opportunities for action (2018, p. 238).

Despite disagreements over the causal mechanisms that generate policy

outcomes (and their relative convergence/divergence), convergence theo-
rists agree that the state not only matters, but is pivotal to explanation:

The governments are the agents reacting to problem pressure, experience

gained elsewhere, pressure of powerful external actors, economic pressure,
and legal obligation. Thus, governmental programmes are what count.
(Holzinger and Knill 2005, p. 776)

Methodologically, this position embraces a plurality of independent vari-

ables causally leading to convergence as the dependent variable. For
example, policy convergence may be the outcome of, amongst other
things, mechanisms of policy transfer, lesson-drawing, emulation, elite
networking or international policy promotion. Importantly, its growing
significance is attached to increased interest in globalisation and interna-
tionalisation. The process of globalisation, and the state interdependencies
that this is thought to bring, is the principal theoretical driver of policy
convergence studies. Yet, perhaps because of the different disciplinary
interests of particular theorists, the literature identifies a disparate range
of causal mechanisms associated with convergence (Holzinger and Knill
2005, pp. 775–776). The differing analyses of globalisation are legion,
and the attachment of policy convergence to these analyses has come
at the cost of theoretical cohesion. As a result, as Holzinger and Knill
argue: ‘Notwithstanding these enormous research efforts, it is generally
34 T. LEGRAND

acknowledged that we still have a limited understanding of the causes and

conditions of policy convergence’ (emphasis added, 2005, p. 775).
While convergence studies seek to investigate policy harmonisation,
little attention has been paid to unifying the convergence analytical frame-
work itself. Drezner argues that this problem has significant repercussions:

This problem leads to a certain redundancy in theory building, as disci-

plinary boundaries prevent ideas spreading across fields. This hinders
accumulating knowledge. In the long run, the lack of accumulation is
dangerous; without rigorous reviews of such arguments, policymakers
are prone to accept misperceptions of globalization that are politically
expedient. (Drezner 2001, p. 54)

Nonetheless, there is growing realisation that this disharmony demands

attention. Holzinger and Knill (2005) were amongst the first to address
this, noting that: ‘theoretical and conceptual heterogeneity poses impor-
tant restrictions on the comparability of the empirical findings gained in
different convergence studies’ (Holzinger and Knill 2005, p. 776). To
address the theoretical and conceptual shortcomings of the policy conver-
gence literature, they derive three key indicators of policy convergence
from the variables identified by convergence theorists:

1. The degree of convergence.

2. The direction of convergence.
3. The scope of convergence.

From these three indicators, they claim, it is possible to isolate the causal
mechanisms of convergence.2 Their aim in identifying these mechanisms
is: ‘to develop testable hypotheses with respect to degree, direction,
and scope of cross-national policy convergence for each mechanism’
(Holzinger and Knill 2005, p. 786).
There is a fundamental limitation of policy convergence which is
rooted in its guiding ontology. Insofar as policy convergence involves
a study of political outcomes and trajectories, it is predicated upon
a conception of time and space that is two-dimensional. So, time is
presented as a discrete category; there is a chronological past, present
and future. Similarly, what is deemed to be politically similar is based
upon an arbitrary set of values that can be rendered empirically compa-
rable; thus, only political values that are comparable and epistemologically
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 35

accessible are included in the analysis. The result of this is that time is
adopted as the constant variable, and the relative variability of (empiri-
cally comparable) political values is measured. Given this view, it seems
commonsensical to observe that, at any given moment in a chronology of
political time, states are either converging or diverging (to some degree).
For example, Heichel et al. argue (2005, p. 829): ‘The basic approach to
operationalize the time-frame in genuine convergence studies would be
to establish the initial degree of policy similarity between the observed
units in t1 , and compare it to a second measurement at point t2 ’.
Here, I want to draw attention to this underlying theoretical basis of
convergence theory. Measurements taken in this way, synchronically, are
subject to some empirical limitations: (i) they fail to capture fluctuations
in changes between the two time-points; (ii) the arbitrary selection of
the start-point and end-point of analysis introduces ‘selection bias’. There
might be qualitatively different outcomes with an altered time frame; and
(iii) only political values/outcomes that can be expressed empirically are
included.
Theoretically, the juxtaposition of convergence with divergence is a
binary opposition with ontological implications, insofar as it introduces
a conception of the ‘real’ world a priori into its findings. It is also an
ontological position which underpins particular empirical measures. Thus,
the convergence theorist states that at x point in time, y countries are
becoming more, or less, alike in terms of their political configuration. Or,
the convergence theorist might say that between time-points a and b,
countries i, ii and iii are converging on point z, moving away from point
x. The notion that the ‘real’ world displays two-dimensional attributes of
convergence/divergence is based upon several questionable ontological
and epistemological assumptions. Further, and crucially, it replicates the
oft-cited criticism of realism that the state is treated as an unvarying base
unit of analysis. Finally:

So far, there has been no attempt to think more systematically about the
range of domestic structures – cultural, institutional and economic – that
might affect the process of ‘import’ and about their relative importance
with respect to the nature of the diffusing ‘object’ in question. (Lenschow
et al. 2005, p. 799)
36 T. LEGRAND

At best, convergence theory can offer some heuristic insights into political
homogeneity. At worst, it offers an analysis based upon a two-dimensional
scale that stipulates a misleading process of ‘becoming more/less alike’.
This carries important implications: foremostly, it signals the primacy of
assessing and predicting political verisimilitude above all else.

Policy Diffusion

Diffusion of innovations refers to the spread of abstract ideas and concepts,

technical information, and actual practices within a social system, where the
spread denotes flow or movement from a source to an adopter, typically
via communication and influence. (Wejnert 2002, p. 297)

The literatures on policy convergence and policy diffusion share three

important common features: (1) both look to explain the impact that
international macro-political structures have on domestic policy environ-
ments; (2) both view policy transfer and policy learning as contributory
processes leading to convergence and diffusion, respectively; and (3) they
both privilege the importance of outcomes over process.
Diffusion is not a process that occurs as a result of the actions of state
actors; rather, it is a term used to describe a mechanistic process (although
diffusion authors would disagree with that terminology) without agency.
If it seems unfair to stress the ‘agent-less’ nature of diffusion theory, then
it ought to be noted that actors feature analytically, but do so only as
rational-actor units.
The overwhelming concern of diffusion theorists has been to illumi-
nate the patterns of policy diffusion in an international matrix. Diffusion
theory is not solely rooted in policy studies. Wejnert (2002, p. 297) traces
diffusion theory back to a 1903 study of the dissemination of farming
innovations and it is widely accepted that the diffusion of ‘innovations’
(technological or social) underpins the research interest in this area (see
Berry and Berry 1990; Berry 1994). In fact, the feature common to the
dominant strands of diffusion theory is the role of communication:

The degree of vertical integration in the international system – the exis-

tence of transnational communication channels – is crucial for the course
of policy diffusion […] Such channels increase the prospects for policy
diffusion. (Tews et al. 2003, p. 572)
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 37

Diffusion theorists concentrate upon three features of policy innova-

tion: its internal determinants; regional diffusion; and national interaction
(Berry 1994). Internal determinants are understood as those impulses,
imperatives or decisions that occur in isolation from the international
context that gives rise to certain policy innovations; that is, in such a
case of diffusion only domestic influences are at work. Regional diffusion
refers to the gradual uptake of a policy innovation based on the prox-
imity of one country to others: in this form of diffusion, the likelihood of
policy being adopted increases the more other countries adopt that policy.
National interaction is, by contrast, a more proactive notion of diffusion,
whereby the number of interactions between different state policy officials
is seen to be proportional to the likelihood that one or more policies will
be exchanged.
Although these factors are acknowledged to exist separately, in practice
the second two, regional diffusion and national interaction, are elided
and seen as the same process with slightly differing emphases. For the
former, the passive spread of policy poses an ontological problem of
explaining policy change without referring to the actions of intentional
actors. Methodologically, they are left with a process without subjects.
The ‘national interaction’ approach, on the other hand, overcomes this
problem through its emphasis on agential interaction which eases the
methodological headache by explaining policy diffusion without agents.
The ‘internal determinants’ approach attracted criticism for adopting
binding assumptions about the way in which the nation state creates
policy. As Berry notes: ‘An implicit assumption of the pure internal
determinants model is that the states’ policymaking processes are fully
independent, so that no state is uninfluenced by any other’ (emphasis
in original, Berry 1994, p. 442). Thus, Berry and Berry (1990, 1992)
argued that an alternative means of studying state policy innovation was
necessary and developed their model of event history analysis. This model,
it is suggested, is a more appropriate method for the study of policy inno-
vation because it: ‘permits the empirical testing of models incorporating
both internal determinants and diffusion effects’ (Berry 1994, p. 443).
Authors tend to use the terms convergence and diffusion interchange-
ably. Indeed, as Lenschow et al. argue:

The literature on policy convergence shares the conclusions of those socio-

logical diffusion studies emphasizing the importance of resonance between
the exported ‘object’ and the cultural and institutional setting of the
potential importer. (2005, p. 799)
38 T. LEGRAND

Yet, whilst policy convergence analysis seeks to explain trajectory as a

result of policy, policy diffusion analysis looks to the stage prior to trajec-
tory: the spread of policy itself. Interestingly, whilst convergence is seen
as a potential outcome of both diffusion and policy processes (such as
policy learning, transfer and networks), diffusion is also seen to caused by
those same policy processes. Thus, diffusion might be viewed as an inter-
mediary phenomenon, which may, or may not, occur in a given policy
area and give rise to certain types of convergence.
For diffusion theorists, policy transfer represents an integral process
involved in diffusion. The links that lead to transfer opportunities are
viewed as differentiated ‘channels’ through which diffusion occurs:

Economic, political and societal linkages between nation-states offer chan-

nels for the transfer of policies across countries. These channels differ with
regard to the dominant mechanism by which policy transfer occurs. (Tews
et al. 2003, p. 572)

In this schema, policy transfer is viewed as a mechanism of diffusion,

rather than as, say, a representation of underlying agential motiva-
tions. Such underlying motivations are seen as qualitatively separate
from the mechanism insofar as transfer mechanisms are triggered for
differing reasons. One of the reasons, according to diffusion theory,
that transfer mechanisms are triggered is because states may often be
anxious to be seen as progressive and as ‘up-to-date’ as its contempo-
raries (Drezner 2001). This ideational approach to diffusion is developed
through accounts of international institutions that endorse certain policy
agendas. In this vein, international institutions are seen as primary propo-
nents of diffused policies, especially in policy areas of collective interest,
such as the environment: ‘Ideational competition may become the driving
force of policy emulation following the establishment of environmental
protection as an internationally accepted and shared norm’ (Tews et al.
2003, p. 575).
The classic illustration of ideational competition may be found in the
OECD’s peer review mechanism. In peer reviews, the policy field (under
review) of a country is scrutinised by fellow OECD member countries
to help: ‘improve its policymaking, adopt best practices and comply with
established standards and principles’ (Pagani 2002, p. 2). As such, moral
pressure is the key driver behind this policy-learning process. For March
and Olsen, this represents a channel for international institutions, and
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 39

specifically the OECD, to insinuate themselves into the policy discourse

of public officials:

Whether a similar program can accomplish a similar integration at an inter-

national level is certainly in doubt, but when organizations such as the
OECD call attention to differences between ‘‘leaders’’ and ‘‘laggards’’
among countries in terms of their willingness and ability to adopt what is
defined as a modern, democratic, and economically efficient public sector,
they modify the reference groups of national bureaucrats, their aspirations,
and their behavior. (March and Olsen 1998, p. 961)

Compare the insight of March and Olsen above with the stated aim of
the OECD peer review mechanism:

Whatever the subject under consideration, or the type of review, such exer-
cises [peer reviews] are carried out on a regular basis, and each one results
in a published report that assesses such accomplishments, spells out short-
falls and makes recommendations. So if one review of a country’s economy
expresses concern about inflexible labour practices, or rampant inflation,
the next exercise will examine whether the state has acted on the advice
given by its peers and whether the situation has improved. (Pagani 2002,
p. 55; See Legrand and Vas 2014)

For diffusion theorists, the empirical evidence of the ideational influ-

ence of international institutions is overwhelming. Yet, whilst ideational
motivations play a leading role in many diffusion analyses, others are
careful not to ignore what they see as the structural imperatives resulting
from globalisation and increased political interdependence. For some,
retaining economic competitiveness leads directly to diffusion outcomes:
‘National policymakers may be forced by considerations of competitive-
ness to adopt the innovative policy measures of pioneers in order to
avoid significant economic or administrative adjustment costs’ (Tews et al.
2003, p. 575).
Here, the parallel with convergence theory is clear: the increased
interdependence of economic and political decision-making leads to anti-
isolationist discourses emphasising mutual policy aims and outcomes.
Environmental regulation provides the obvious example here, because
the policies of each country contribute to a shared outcome. The notion
of shared aims and outcomes is the focal point of both policy diffu-
sion and convergence analysis. Where there are shared interests, shared
40 T. LEGRAND

policy approaches are deemed to be more likely. The process of sharing,

however, is a direct function of the levels of communication that exist
between states and actors, a point asserted by Tews et al.:

Political and societal interlinkages between nation-states and actors within

and across states offer channels of diffusion which enable the transfer of
problem perceptions, ideas and policy innovations across countries and to
the level of international organisations. These may function as multipliers of
knowledge dissemination and/or ideational catalysts of policy convergence.
(Tews et al. 2003, p. 575)

Earlier, it was noted that diffusion theory is, essentially, a theory which
struggles to comfortably accommodate the role of agency. This requires
qualification. We have seen how diffusion theorists emphasise the impor-
tance of communication and shared interests. Clearly, these are roles
that must be filled by agents with appropriate decision-making capacity.
Accordingly, agents matter in this analysis. However, the decision-making
capabilities imputed to these actors are nominally those of rational actors:
policies have greater diffusion potential where the two sets of policy offi-
cials (importer/exporter) are rational utility-maximisers. That is, they are
cognisant of the appropriate options, have access to appropriate expertise
to make them aware of the ‘problem issues’ and, thus, make informed—
read ‘rational’—decisions accordingly.3 March and Olsen summarise the
two views of agency:

On the one side are those who see action as driven by a logic of anticipated
consequences and prior preferences. On the other side are those who see
action as driven by a logic of appropriateness and senses of identity. (March
and Olsen 1998, p. 949)

Diffusion theory is clearly rooted in the notion that actors formulate deci-
sions on the basis of ‘anticipated consequences’. This point will be more
extensively explored later; here, it is important to emphasise that agents
in the diffusion schema are seen as rational actors. As such, their role
in diffusion is responsive, rather than reflexive. As rational actors, their
decisions are determined by the structured environment in which they
find themselves. Accordingly, the stimulus for diffusion is extrinsic to the
actor and intrinsic to the context. Thus, the diffusion of policy occurs
as a function of the structural characteristics of the state (or ‘internal
determinants’, to use the diffusionist term) and the regional context.
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 41

Part II: Agency

Policy Learning and Lesson-Drawing
The notion of lesson-drawing was developed by Rose in response to tradi-
tional rationalist accounts of policy-making (James and Lodge 2016) as
a mean way of explaining the dynamics that policy-makers encounter in
formulating policy solutions. Rose argues that policy-makers take advan-
tage of both negative and positive experience gained in one area and apply
the value of that experience in other areas of policy development. He puts
it simply: ‘If the lesson is positive, a policy that works is transferred, with
suitable adaptations. If it is negative, observers learn what not to do from
watching the mistakes of others’ (1993, p. 4).
The process of lesson-drawing is, as it implies, an intentionalist one
whereby policy-makers actively seek out policy solutions from appropriate
sources. Rose sees lesson-drawing as a deductive, and not an inductive,
activity (Evans and Davies 1999, p. 366), in so much as policy-makers
are tasked to research, identify and develop models of practice based on
the experiences of other countries: ‘Lesson-drawing creates a compara-
tive advantage from the empirical observation that countries deal with
common problems differently and differ in the degree to which their poli-
cies are deemed successful’ (Rose 2002, p. 5). There is a clearly defined
linearity to lesson-drawing as a process which involves identification of the
problem, active research to find potentially helpful experiences elsewhere
and then utilisation of this experience to inform/shape a policy solution.
Yet, the level and extent of lesson-drawing is contingent (1993, p. 6).
The local and cultural settings of the importing country complicate
direct reproduction of a policy; therefore, policy-makers often must act
reflexively to extract components of a policy to ensure that it may be
transplanted from the exporting to the importing country successfully:
‘The object of lesson-drawing is to adapt and adopt in one’s own country
a programme already successful in another, and thus reduce future differ-
ences in achievement’ (Rose 1993, p. 5). According to Rose, there are
several degrees of lesson-drawing in this sense: copying, or direct repro-
duction of a policy; emulation, in contrast to ‘copying’, ‘accepts that a
particular programme elsewhere provides the best standard for designing
legislation at home, albeit requiring adaptation to take different national
circumstances into account’ (1993, p. 21); a hybrid conjoins elements
from two different programmes to create a new model; synthesis, simi-
larly to hybrid, harmonises familiar components of existing programmes;
42 T. LEGRAND

and inspiration (Rose prefers to label this ‘speculation’ rather than lesson-
drawing), where a policy-maker witnesses the effects and potential of
a programm without studying its mechanics and thus draws inspiration
(1993, p. 22).
Lesson-drawing in this respect is oriented towards the implementation
of public policy. In contrast to diffusion and convergence theory, it looks
specifically at the processes associated with agential decision-making in
public policy arenas. Perhaps it is for this reason that references to policy
learning and lesson-drawing are more common in guidance written for
public policy-makers in central government and international institutions
alike. Such guidance is seen to provide a transparent decision-making
process which avoids the determinacy—and inexorability—involved in the
ideas of convergence and diffusion.
At this point, it is worth making clear the distinction—albeit a small
one—between policy learning and lesson-drawing. For Rose, lesson-
drawing is predominantly about policy-makers’ gleaning knowledge from
the experiences of policy-makers overseas. Policy learning, however, is
not rooted in any particular political strata: policy learning occurs at
all socio-political levels and is thus regarded as a tool of policy-making
removed from domestic/overseas factors. In this respect, policy learning
has benefited from its widened applicability and has recently informed
developments in policy implementation. Dunlop and Radaelli identify
four types of policy learning: a form of reflexive learning by policy actors
seeking to deepen their policy knowledge; the policy learning that occurs
in epistemic communities (outlined below); policy learning that occurs
between policy actors as an ‘unintended product of dense systems of
interaction’; and learning that happens with constraints in the ‘shadow
of hierarchy’ (2013, pp. 603–604). Dunlop and Radaelli’s typology
broadens the learning concepts by recognising the structural influences
of bureaucracy in the learning process. Crucially, policy learning can not
only be recognised as a form of policy transfer, but it also captures a wider
array of learning sources and types, including those that do not involve
other jurisdictions (see Dunlop 2017).
There is also a close association between policy learning and policy
implementation. Indeed, as an indication of the importance placed
upon implementation, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK)
commissioned a seminar series to this effect: ‘Implementing Public Policy:
Learning from Each Other’ (2004). Others argue that the implementa-
tion of policy is all about learning—for example, Schofield and Sausman
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 43

(2004) argue that policy implementation is not an automatic process.

Rather, public policy managers undergo reflexive learning processes to
understand how best to translate stated policy goals to actual policy
outcomes (2004, p. 284; see also Sabatier 1986; O’Toole 2000).
If Rose’s conception of policy learning provides the basic theoret-
ical framework of policy learning, it is Peter Hall’s discussion of policy
paradigms that adds the necessary nuance. For Hall, the notions of policy
learning and policy change are inextricably linked. Policy change occurs
as a result of agents’ interventions, but they do not act arbitrarily. Ideas
are seen as key drivers in shifting the direction and aims of policy. Yet
there is an important distinction to be made: ‘Policy’ implies a singu-
larity of design, purpose and function. Hall argues that, to understand the
impact that policy learning can have on policy change, we must differen-
tiate between the forms policy can take: ‘In order to do so, we can think
of policymaking as a process that usually involves three central variables:
the overarching goals that guide policy in a particular field, the techniques
or policy instruments used to attain those goals, and the precise settings
of these instruments’ (Hall 1993, p. 278).
In distinguishing between forms of policy, Hall introduces his main
concern: the forms that learning and change may take. To do so, Hall
utilises Kuhn’s conception of scientific paradigmatic change to argue that
policy shifts can be conceptualised as first-, second- or third-order change
(1993, p. 279). Before we examine this central thesis, however, we need
to recognise that, for Hall, policies are products of prevailing institu-
tional cultures and discourses. The prevailing institutional climate gives
content to policy-makers’ conception of policy priorities, policy goals,
policy implementation and so on. However, the ideas that exist in the
prevailing climate are not necessarily in harmony and may constrain the
development of certain ideas, as: ‘the terms of political discourse privilege
some lines of policy over others, and the struggle both for advantage
within the prevailing terms of discourse and for leverage with which
to alter the terms of political discourse is the perennial feature of poli-
tics’ (1993, pp. 289–290). So, crucially, policy decisions are made in a
pre-structured, asymmetric, policy process. Change in policy direction,
then, occurs through the insinuation of ideas into this policy climate; for
Hall such ideational change is synonymous with learning: ‘Learning is
conventionally said to occur when individuals assimilate new information,
including that based on past experience, and apply it to their subsequent
actions’. (Hall 1993, p. 278)
44 T. LEGRAND

Indeed, the argument that ‘In order to understand how social learning
takes place, we also need a more complete account of the role that ideas
play in the policy process’ (Hall 1993, p. 279) places Hall firmly at
odds with policy convergence and diffusion theorists. For, in denying the
predominance of socio-economic structures in the policy process, Hall
prioritises agency (and its associated structuring effects) because, for him,
it is the ideas of agents themselves who create and recreate their structured
discursive context.
This background configuration of ideas and discourse underpins Hall’s
analysis of paradigmatic change. In discussing his three orders of change,
Hall claims that:

First and second order change can be seen as cases of “normal policy-
making,” namely of a process that adjusts policy without challenging the
overall terms of a given policy paradigm… Third order change, by contrast,
is likely to reflect a very different process, marked by the radical changes
in the overarching terms of policy discourse associated with a “paradigm
shift”. (Hall 1993, p. 279)

To clarify this further, Hall’s principal concern is to demonstrate the effi-

cacy of shifts in ideas and ways of learning within institutions. Shifts in
policy, however, do not occur in a learning vacuum. Policy-makers hold
specific ideas about the task of specific policies. Many of these ideas are
institutionally ‘given’:

More precisely, policymakers customarily work within a framework of ideas

and standards that specifies not only the goals of policy and the kind of
instruments that can be used to attain them, but also the very nature of
the problems they are meant to be addressing. (Hall 1993, p. 279)

On Hall’s view, the accumulation of information in a learning process

lies at the very centre of policy change. This accumulation constantly and
directly informs agents’ conceptions of what is achievable:

Therefore, we can define social learning as a deliberate attempt to adjust

the goals or techniques of policy in response to past experiences and new
information. Learning is indicated when policy changes as the result of
such a process. (Hall 1993, p. 278)
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 45

It is this claim that locates the process of policy learning within institu-
tions and places it at the centre of policy change. For Hall, the magnitude
of policy changes can be minor and leave the overarching policy paradigm
intact. First- and second-order change, for example, retain: ‘the broad
continuities usually found in patterns of policy’ (1993, p. 279). By
contrast, third-order change is a ‘more disjunctive process associated with
periodic discontinuities in policy’ (1993, p. 279). At this level, the rhythm
of governance is interrupted and ‘marked by the radical changes in the
overarching terms of the policy discourse associated with a “paradigm
shift”’ (1993, p. 279).

Institutionalising Policy Learning

At this point, our concern is less with the implication of paradigm shifts,
and more with the way in which ideas are injected into the discourse
of policy learning (although the notion of third-order change will be
returned to later). Hall’s theory restores agents to their institutional
context and explains how policy discourses influence the resonance of
certain ideas:

The principle contribution of a social learning perspective is to draw out

attention to the role of ideas in politics. It reminds us that state-society
relations can not adequately be described entirely in terms of the ‘pressures’
that each exerts on the other, whether through parties, organized interests,
administrative organs, or policy networks. (Hall 1993, p. 289)

What does this add to our understanding of lesson-drawing and policy

learning? Whilst Rose’s conception of lesson-drawing indicates the moti-
vation of policy-makers in looking elsewhere, and perhaps offers an
insight into some of the benefits, his analysis does not account explicitly
for the institutional context. In addition, it is the role of the institu-
tion and ideational change which adds a valuable theoretical nuance to
policy learning. The agents that ‘matter’ in any given process of lesson-
drawing are not solely those involved as lesson-drawers. Hall’s framework
demonstrates that agents who are involved in the policy discourse of an
institution are as important in defining ‘what counts’ and, thus, have
indirect influence over the veracity of competing ideas, whether from
endogenous sources or elsewhere. For Lenschow et al., the part played
by ideas in the policy process creates its own environmental structure:
46 T. LEGRAND

Similar to the literature on policy convergence, analysts of policy learning

perceive the process of change as a culturally and institutionally pre-
structured process. Actors’ choices with respect to following, adapting
or ignoring foreign examples are influenced by dominant ideas (policy
paradigms or even more general views of the world) and institutional
structures at home. (Lenschow et al. 2005, p. 800)

In this sense, intentionalism qua policy learning is tempered by the

ideational context. It is not clear whether this sort of structure is ‘deter-
minate’, rather than ‘influential’ for Lenschow et al., but this criticism
suggests a more fundamental issue at the heart of both lesson-drawing
and policy learning which stems from their overwhelming emphasis on
intentionalism. In both concepts, the underlying stimuli for policy change
are entirely based on agency. Neither contextual factors, imperatives nor,
indeed, contingency are understood as sources for policy change:

[W]hile the approach [lesson-drawing] is important to our understanding

of the nature of the process of transfer, it has shortcomings (due to the
limited reflection on the role of exogenous forces in processes of lesson-
drawing) in explaining why policy transfer takes place in the first place.
(Evans 2006, p. 482)

With this in mind, it is appropriate to turn to the use that policy transfer
analysis has made of policy learning and lesson-drawing. In the following
section, I locate the insights of lesson-drawing and policy learning and
outline the nuance applied by policy transfer theorists.

Policy Transfer
Dolowitz and Marsh define policy transfer as: ‘[T]he process by which
knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and
ideas in one political system (past or present) is used in the development
of policies, administrative arrangements and ideas in another political
system’ (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000, p. 5). This definition emphasises the
transfer of knowledge vis-à-vis ideas, rather than direct adoptions of the
technicalities of policy instruments. Indeed, it is knowledge about poli-
cies rather than the policies themselves with which Dolowitz and Marsh
seem to be concerned. This is a relevant insight into our understanding
of policy, since policies are, in some ways, the marriage of ideas and
action. As Pressman and Wildavsky comment: ‘The word ‘program’…
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 47

can be conceived of as a system in which each element is dependent on

the other… Policies imply theories… Policies become programs when,
by authoritative action, the initial conditions are created’ (Pressman and
Wildavsky 1984, cited in Dolowitz and Marsh 2000). Clearly, it is impor-
tant to differentiate between the underpinning ideas of policy and the
practical strategies they embody to realise their goals.
Dolowitz and Marsh incorporate the lesson-drawing identified by Rose
into a more sophisticated model of policy transfer, distinguishing between
voluntary adoption of policies and coercive policy transfer. They argue
that ‘coercive’ transfer is an important facet of transfer, given that coun-
tries, institutions and organisations often have the capacity to force a
country to adopt a certain policy—for example, NGOs who make loan
arrangements conditional on the adoption of certain policies, termed
‘conditionality’.
Their conceptual model of policy transfer has been developed incre-
mentally over several articles and is arranged around seven key questions:

• Why do actors engage in policy transfer? (1996)

• Who are the key actors involved in the policy transfer process?
(1996)
• What is transferred? (1996)
• From where are the lessons drawn? (1996)
• What are the different degrees of transfer? (1999)
• What restricts or facilitates the policy transfer process? (1996)
• How is the process of policy transfer related to policy ‘success’ or
‘failure’? (2000)

Dolowitz and Marsh look to develop their conceptual framework in rela-

tion to these seven questions. In their view, actors engage in policy
transfer for any number of reasons. Principally, they claim: ‘as tech-
nological advances have made it easier and faster for policy-makers to
communicate with each other, the occurrences of policy transfer have
increased’ (2000, p. 6). In addition, they suggest that globalisation has
compelled nations to emulate the economic policies of countries who have
been successful in navigating the neoliberal environment (2000, p. 6).
This international dimension is reinforced by the expansion of interna-
tional institutions capable of orchestrating common regional policies, such
as the OECD, the EU or the IMF.
48 T. LEGRAND

They identify nine categories of actors likely to become involved in the

policy transfer policy: elected officials, political parties, bureaucrats/civil
servants, pressure groups, policy entrepreneurs and experts, transnational
corporations, think tanks, supranational governmental and nongovern-
mental institutions and consultants (2000, p. 10). This exhaustive list
embraces almost every sort of actor likely to get involved in any polit-
ical process and thus reinforces Dolowitz and Marsh’s assertion that
policy transfer is an endemic feature of modern governance. Nonetheless,
Dolowitz and Marsh problematise the distinction between ‘borrower’ and
‘lender’, suggesting that nations are seldom solely importers or exporters
of policies. They similarly point out that the difference between volun-
tary and coercive transfers is far from a simple one, since nations that find
themselves in a situation where they are forced to, say, adopt a particular
policy approach as a condition for assistance from the IMF often retain the
choice of which consultancy to use, and not all consultancies will recom-
mend the same policy solution (2000, p. 11). In this sense, Dolowitz and
Marsh delineate a space for agency within the parameters of coercion.
Central to their concept of transfer is, of course, the substance of what
is transferred. More than anything else, this feature of the Dolowitz and
Marsh model lends itself to ambiguity through its catholic definition of
what may be transferred. In their view, ‘policy goals, policy content, policy
instruments, policy programs, institutions, ideologies, ideas and attitudes
and negative lessons’ (2000, p. 12) can all be transferred. However,
identifying instances of ideological, ideational and attitudinal transfers
and, especially, negative lessons is difficult. To take ‘negative lessons’ as
an example, unless such a transfer is explicitly acknowledged, the onus
is placed upon a researcher to prove negative; that is, a nation didn’t
implement a particular policy because of what occurred elsewhere.
Dolowitz and Marsh contend that lessons may be drawn from the
international, national and local levels of governance (2000, p. 12). In
so doing, they stress that policy transfer can be insular or domestic as
well as an international process whereby actors look within their political
system for possible policy solutions. Finally, they argue: ‘Policy transfer is
not an all-or-nothing process’ (2000, p. 13). For Dolowitz and Marsh,
the gradations of Rose’s lesson-drawing serve as a convenient typology,
although they slightly change one or two categories:

• Copying : direct and/or complete policy transfer.

• Emulation: a transfer of the underlying ideas of a policy.
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 49

• Combinations: a fusion of two or more policies.

• Inspiration: ‘where a policy in another jurisdiction may inspire a
policy change, but where the final outcome does not actually draw
upon the original’ (2000, p. 13).

As Rose stresses, the process of transfer is a contingent one, driven by

instrumental actors seeking to derive suitable policy solutions from the
number of case examples available to them. Dolowitz and Marsh further
note that the type of transfer likely to occur is subject to a number of
preconditions, such as the actors involved in the process, the resources
and time they have available to them, the nature of the ‘problem’ they
face and the point within the transfer process at which the transfer occurs
(2000, p. 13).
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of policy transfers is the circum-
stances under which transfer occurs. Dolowitz and Marsh argue that
policy transfer is a process initiated either voluntarily or coercively. Volun-
tary mechanisms of transfer parallel Rose’s notion of lesson-drawing.
Yet, the voluntary mechanisms of transfer are subject to agents’ percep-
tion and knowledge of their environment. In this sense, voluntary policy
transfer is understood to be an intentionalist process whereby strategic
agents look to overcome structural obstacles to import policies that match
their own preferences. The extent to which they are able to fully compre-
hend the contextual factors of transfer, however, is acknowledged to be
potentially imperfect. Thus, rationality and bounded rationality play a key
role in the model of voluntary policy transfer that Dolowitz and Marsh
describe. They argue that paucity of information, incomplete knowledge
of transfer mechanisms and inaccurate assessments of the ‘real’ situation
affect policy-makers’ decision-making (2000, p. 14). Most policy-makers,
they argue, ‘act with limited information, within the confines of ‘bounded
rationality’ (2000, p. 14). Coercive mechanisms, by contrast, imply that
a power relationship exists whereby one country is forced to import and
apply a particular policy. There are two related points here. Firstly, policy
transfer in this sense does not necessarily imply an export/import rela-
tionship between two countries. Indeed, the imported policy may not
necessarily have been implemented anywhere else before at all. Secondly,
this form of transfer is distinct from policy transfer which results from
some imperative, domestic or otherwise. Coercion clearly describes a two-
way relationship where an agency/institution/country A has the ability
and resources to force country/agency/institution B to adopt a certain
50 T. LEGRAND

policy in one form or another. To reinforce this argument, Dolowitz and

Marsh cite examples where international institutions have been able to
enforce ‘conditionality’ on a developing nation, whereby economic aid
is withheld until certain domestic reforms or policies are adopted (2000,
p. 11). Table 2.1 summarises the continuum from voluntary to coercive
transfer.
Dolowitz and Marsh argue that policy transfers often fail for one of
three reasons: uninformed transfer; incomplete transfer; and inappropriate
transfer:

1. Uninformed transfer refers to a transfer in which the adopting

country has failed to fully collate information about the way a policy
should be implemented and how it operates.
2. Incomplete transfer describes instances where the adopting country
fails to import components crucial to the success of the policy itself.
3. Inappropriate transfer stresses that some policies are incompatible
with the institutional, political or economic environment of the
adopting country, thereby leading to failure (2000, p. 17).

Table 2.1 The policy transfer continuum

Why Transfer?
Continuum

Want to …………………………… Have to

Voluntary Mixtures Coercive
Lesson Drawing (Perfect Lesson Drawing (Bounded Direct Imposition
Rationality) Rationality)
International Pressures
(Image)
(Consensus)
(Perceptions)
Externalities Pressure Groups
Conditionality Political Parties
(Loans)
(Conditions attached to
Business Activity)
Obligations Policy
Entrepreneurs/Experts

Source Table taken from Dolowitz and Marsh (2000, p. 9)

 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 51

To illustrate these facets of policy failure, Dolowitz and Marsh focus

on one example taken from the transfer of Child Support policy from
the USA to the UK. In other papers, Dolowitz and Marsh have similarly
undertaken analyses of US-UK transfers in employment policy (Dolowitz
1997), electoral strategy (Dolowitz et al. 1999) and welfare provision
(Dolowitz 1997).
The Dolowitz and Marsh model presents a comprehensive list of the
fundamental questions that face researchers in policy transfer. In demar-
cating the ‘who, what, where, when’ of policy transfer, Dolowitz and
Marsh have consolidated an orthodoxy of policy transfer that has served
as a roadmap for subsequent researchers in associated disciplines. It
also operates as a staging post for their own empirical examinations of
instances of transfer between, particularly, the UK and the USA (Dolowitz
1997). As noted above, significant components of their framework have
been used in analysis of transfers in areas, for example, anthropology
(Stubbs 2005), criminology (Jones and Newburn 2002), constitutional
reform (Furlong 2001) and European policy (Annesley 2003). It has,
however, been developed by others, notably Evans and Davies, whose
work is discussed next.
Rose’s notion of lesson-drawing argues that the policy process is often
affected by the way in which policy-makers draw on the experiences
of other countries, both negative and positive. Rose claims that this
process is partially driven by policy advisors who: ‘assume universality,
treating their favoured policies as completely fungible’ (2002, p. 3).
In a response to such ideas, Rose sets out what he considers to be
the salient preconditions of lesson-drawing and offers a typology of the
lesson-drawing in its various forms. Yet, whilst Rose’s analysis of policy
formulation views lesson-drawing as simply one of the vehicles used in
creating policy, Bennett’s analysis is outcome-oriented. He argues that
orthodox perspectives on state convergence are inflexible and narrowly
defined. Accordingly, Bennett delimits four forms of convergence that
may be independent or congruent and, most importantly, are seen to be
operable within a range of theoretical frameworks. In this sense, Bennett
does not view his categories as a theory or framework in their own
right, merely viewing his work as an adjustment to the rigid typologies
previously offered.
The policy transfer framework established by Dolowitz and Marsh
represents the first serious attempt to assimilate the disparate analyses of
the forms of policy-making that draw on international policy content.
52 T. LEGRAND

The ‘Dolowitz and Marsh Model’ is framed by open reference to the

work of both Bennett and Rose, subsuming some of their concepts into
their overall framework. Importantly, Dolowitz and Marsh introduce a
continuum of transfer—distinguishing between notions of ‘voluntary’ and
‘coercive’ transfer. In recent work, they have applied their framework to
analyses of the relationship between policy-makers in the USA and the
UK. However, their framework has been used to underpin work in Euro-
peanisation and Integrationism in general (see Annesley 2003; Page 2000;
Radaelli 2000; Wessels 1997).

Connecting Structure and Agency: The Multi-level Approach

The multi-level approach (hereafter the MLA) deploys a wide range
of analytical approaches as a conceptual framework for policy transfer,
including epistemic communities (Haas 1992), policy networks (Marsh
and Rhodes 1992), policy paradigms (Hall 1993), the international
institutional approach (Stone 1999), lesson-drawing (Rose 1993) and
organisational learning (Common 2004). This model of policy transfer
was originally forged by Mark Evans and Jonathan Davies (1999) and has
been updated more recently by Evans (2004) in Policy Transfer in Global
Perspective.
Evans and Davies argued that whilst policy transfer analysis had an
advanced understanding of policy learning and change, it remained beset
by a number of conceptual problems:

(i) Contemporary policy transfer has failed to consider the questions

of ‘to what extent and why policy transfer has become widespread
throughout western democracies in the course of the past two
decades’ (1999, p. 365).
(ii) Although the literature on policy transfer discusses the impact that
macro-level variables have had on process of transfers, the link
between state structures and agency remains ‘underdeveloped’.
(iii) Policy transfer analysis needs to account for the role played in
precipitating policy transfers at an interorganisational level; policy
network analysis and the epistemic communities approach both
offer the potential for filling this vital conceptual gap (1999,
p. 365).
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 53

(iv) The delineation of the ‘policy transfer’ boundaries is overly

tenuous. Its theoretical approach is too ‘all-embracing’: ‘it is
necessary to classify the phenomenon by scope’ (1999, p. 366).

These conceptual problems signpost the directions which Evans and

Davies argue that policy transfer should take. Critically, points (ii) and
(iii) serve as the theoretical underpinnings of their approach. On the one
hand, the conceptual focus of the MLA is upon ‘policy networks’ and the
way in which policy-makers acquire knowledge. The policy network is: ‘an
ad hoc, action oriented policy-making structure set up with the specific
intention of engineering rapid policy change. They only exist for the time
that a transfer is occurring’ (Evans 2004, p. 22). On the other hand, the
ambition of the MLA is to reconcile competing micro-level and macro-
level explanations within a unified analysis. Indeed, they seek to create: ‘an
approach that allows for a multi-level empirical investigation of the rela-
tionship between structure and agency’ (Evans 2004, p. 22). In so doing,
their overarching objective is to increase the explanatory capacity of policy
transfer analysis that allows for ‘the investigation of the role of global,
international and/or transnational forces; state-centred forces; the role
of policy transfer networks in mediating policy change; and, micro-level
processes of policy oriented learning’ (Evans 2004, p. 22) (Table 2.2).

Table 2.2 The multi-level policy transfer analysis

1
Global, International and Transnational Structures
Economic, technological, ideological and institutional structures constrain but do not
determine the behaviour of state actors at levels 2 and 3
2
The State Project (e.g. the UK Competition State)
The state has some autonomy from structural forces (economic, technological,
ideological and institutional) at the level of strategic selectivity
3
Meso-Level: the Policy Transfer Network
A network of indigenous and exogenous agents in resources dependent relationships
with some level of autonomy from structural forces at the level of options analysis and
implementation in processes of policy transfer. Events at level 3 can often be explained
by reference to the interaction of 1 & 2

Source Taken from Evans (2004, p. 23)

54 T. LEGRAND

On Evans and Davies’ view, policy transfer is able to capture

phenomena not otherwise explained by other approaches. In his later
work, Evans notes that policy transfer: ‘is best concerned with discernible
and remarkable features of contemporary policy change’ (2004, p. 26).
Yet, the explanatory capacity of policy transfer is enhanced by delimiting
its parameters:

1. Following Rose, Evans and Davies argue that: ‘Policy transfer is a

theory of action oriented policy change’. It is thus characterised by
intentional activity.
2. ‘policy transfer must seek to identify and classify remarkable
phenomena not otherwise explained’ (2004, p. 26).
3. ‘when remarkable intraorganizational transfers occur it is likely to
be extraorganizational factors which are remarkable, rather than the
intraorganizational process of transfer’ (2004, pp. 26–27).
4. ‘investigating the dynamics of international policy transfer falls
outside the frameworks of normal forms of policy-making’ (2004,
p. 27) five different transfer pathways: international, transnational,
national, regional, local.

For Evans and Davies, policy transfer has emerged as a remarkable facet of
policy-making as a consequence of three processes: (i) global or interna-
tional processes; (ii) changes in statehood; and (iii) organisational activity.
In terms of the first of these, the MLA is predicated upon a partic-
ular view of the international political-economic climate, specifically: ‘no
serious scholar would deny that patterns of increased internationalization
have occurred and that these have posed significant constraints on the
ability of most nation states to forward independent national economic
strategies’ (Evans 2004, p. 29). However, there are two sides to this
coin. Increased internationalisation has imposed constraints on the nation
state, yet also imbued policy-makers with increased technological capa-
bility to increase their knowledge of policy-making elsewhere. Moreover,
the growth of international institutions—the IMF, World Bank, WTO and
OECD amongst others—has increased not only ideational battles over the
meaning and utility of globalisation, but also the ‘potential opportunity
structures’ for transfer of policy (1999, p. 33). International institutions,
through either ideational endorsement of certain policy approaches or
‘conditionality’, operate as agents of policy transfer, promoting neoliberal
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 55

ideas and ethics. Against this background of globalisation and interde-

pendency, the emergence of policy transfer is seen as entirely explicable.
Policy transfer is the corollary of both economic interdependence and
ideational competition amongst international institutions.
If globalisation provides the exogenous stimulus for policy transfer,
changes in state systems provide the endogenous stimulus. For Evans,
policy transfers may result from fundamental alterations to state struc-
tures, specifically ‘systems change (electoral, institutional, and ideolog-
ical), historical legacies and the sharing of similar problems’ (Evans 2004,
p. 33). Changes in government bring opportunities for new ideas and
the sharing of ideas with similarly-minded overseas governments. In
Chapter 4, I expound this possibility through consideration of the prac-
tices and logics of New Public Management in the 1980s and 1990s, and
then further in Chapter 6 by considering the ideological links between
New Labour and the New Democrats under Clinton as a typical case.
Other processes can also contribute to the introduction of opportunity
structures. Evans argues that the ‘hollowing-out’ of the state seen in
Europe can create gaps in the provision of services and government
which policy transfers may fill (2004, pp. 34–45). The ‘new gover-
nance’ to emerge from the ‘hollowing-out’ (Rhodes 1994) of the state
has contributed to the emergence of policy networks capable of gener-
ating solutions to governmental problems by coordinating and pooling
resources in public policy-making. As such: ‘In times of uncertainty
policy-makers at the heart of networks will look to the ‘quick fix’ solution
to public policy problems that policy transfer can provide’ (Evans 2004,
p. 35).
Thirdly, at an organisational level, Evans claims that the emergence
of policy transfer can be linked to frustration with the performance of
existing policy systems. Where existing policy frameworks do not meet
the needs or ambitions of policy-makers, opportunity structures for policy
transfer emerge (2004, p. 35). Such opportunity structures may occur
because additional expertise or better experience with a particular policy
‘problem’ is needed.
Partly constituted by state and non-state actors, policy transfer
networks are seen to be the fourth source of policy transfer. According
to Evans, actors from a range of backgrounds come together with the
specific intention of engineering policy change:
56 T. LEGRAND

Policy network agents can act as agents of globalization or counteragents

to globalization, for agents of policy transfer are often carriers of particular
policy belief systems (e.g. new public management, privatization etc.) and
use their membership of formal and informal international policy networks
to disseminate international policy agendas. (2004, p. 36)

These networks may be hosted by international institutions or think tanks

and use their reputation of policy expertise as a tool to disseminate their
sets of ideas. Countries with little expertise in particular policy areas—
a ‘knowledge gap’—may call upon these institutions and networks to
address their policy ‘problem’, thus increasing the opportunity structure
for policy transfer.
In sum, the MLA is distinctive from other approaches insofar as it
disaggregates, as shown above, the levels of transfer. The analysis is fixed
at three levels: the macro, meso and micro. These levels are applicable to
the three arenas of policy (global, state, local), and, putatively, events at
one level can help to explain events at either of the others. Following
Hall, Evans argues that policy is not a homogenous concept. Rather,
there are first, second and third orders of policies. First-order policy refers
to the settings and nuances of policy instruments used to realise policy
goals. Second-order policy refers to the policy instruments themselves:
‘the development of new institutions and delivery systems’ (2004, p. 38).
Third-order policy refers to the ideological ambitions that are embedded
in policy and systems of policy. In layering the processes of transfer,
Evans and Davies create a tiered model which attempts to accommo-
date multiple processes at simultaneously: ‘In this sense policy transfer
networks provide a context for evaluating the complex interaction of
domestic and international policy agendas forced through the interaction
of state and non-state (transnational and/or international) actors’ (Evans
2004, p. 24).

Part III
In this final section, we explore two ancillary approaches to under-
standing cooperative or collaborative endeavour in policy-making: policy
assemblage and transgovernmental policy networks.
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 57

Policy Assemblage: Problematising Policy Transfer

Within an emerging geography literature (spanning political, social and
economic geography), the concept of policy assemblage offers a sort
of spatial analysis lacking in the mainstream policy transfer literature. It
emerges from a body of work exploring policy ‘mobilities’ and ‘mutation’,
which broadly seeks to understand ‘how policies move, mutate and mani-
fest in particular spaces and times, in a context of intense transnational
flows of policy ideas and practices’ (Savage 2019, p. 2).
McCann and Ward suggest policies should be understood as
‘unbounded, dynamic, relational assemblages’ (2012, p. 327; see also
Temenos and McCann 2013; Baker and McGuirk 2017). Importantly,
the assemblage literature offers substantial analytical insights into policy
transfer theorising by drawing attention to both the fact policies are
created, assembled and evolve from multiple sources, and that the process
in which policy assemblage occurs is simultaneously (but not equally) a
social, political and spatial one (e.g. see Ward 2006). That is, the assem-
blage approach emphasises the subjective dimensions of policy-making:
‘actors, practices, and representations that affect the (re)production,
adoption and travel of policies, and the best practice models across space
and time’ (Temenos and McCann 2013, p. 345).
The assemblage literature represents a challenge to the parameters and
powers of the policy transfer approach, as demonstrated in an interchange
between David Benson and Andrew Jordan (2011, 2012), Mauricio
Dussauge-Laguna (2012), Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward (2012),
and Dolowitz and Marsh (2012). Without rehearsing with the multiple
strands of argument, I would draw attention to one of the McCann and
Ward’s critiques of the mainstream political science conception of policy
transfer:

the traditional literature retains a problematic separation between the

domestic and the international which does not acknowledge that urban
policy actors can act globally in their own right, meaning that policy
regimes of various sorts are relationally interconnected. (McCann and Ward
2012, p. 327)

Relatedly, Prince (2017, p. 335) draws attention to the ongoing chal-

lenge to policy mobility literature of the local-global dualism: ‘the
difference between what occurs ‘in here’ and what comes from ‘out
there’. According to Savage, there are three core theoretical precepts
58 T. LEGRAND

of assemblage theory: (i) ‘relations of exteriority and emergence’; (ii)

‘heterogeneity, relationality and flux’; and (iii) ‘attention to power, poli-
tics and agency’ (2019, p. 3). The ontological underpinnings here, taken
from the work of Manuel DeLanda, are of particular interest to the next
chapter’s exposition of Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism. Savage’s precepts
draw a close link between critical policy studies and policy transfer by
situating the policy process explicitly within an institutional and political
analysis. On the first precept, policy assemblage is framed as a process
that is non-linear and complex. The outcomes of policy, it is argued, are
an uncertain product of its context:

The particular ways in which components are brought together will deter-
mine the properties and effects of any given policy or agenda; and if the
very same components were to be arranged differently, or new components
were introduced or excluded, then different properties and effects would
be produced. (Savage 2019, p. 8)

As a corollary, the second precept rejects the notion of policy as a static

or complete entity, rather ‘are always subject to multiple and evolving
interpretations, enactments and (very often) reforms or discontinuation’
(Savage 2019, p. 8). Third, the assemblage approach is critical of the
fundaments of orthodox policy studies: ‘the state is akin to one player in
a dynamic game of power, with power flowing in and out of the state,
and across political territories, in complex and non-linear ways’.
Policy assemblage concepts offer a foundational theoretical challenge
to policy transfer. By drawing directing on critical policy studies, assem-
blage invigorates the political and institutional dynamics of the policy
process and elevates uncertainty over determinism in the analysis. These
critical developments hint at the need for a wider contextual grasp of the
processes by which policies move and mutate, in terms of time and space
and power.

Transgovernmental Policy Networks

Whereas policy transfer addresses the process by which policies are trans-
mitted between jurisdictions, transgovernmentalism is concerned with
groups of government actors working collectively in non-state-based
networks to develop collaborative responses to transnational issues. This
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 59

is a model we explore in greater depth in Chapter 3 but, in brief, trans-

governmentalism emerged amongst 1970s IR scholars seeking to turn
away from the dominant ‘state as a unitary actor’ position and unpack
the state into its constituent parts (Slaughter and Zaring 2006, p. 212).
For the chief protagonists of this literature, Keohane and Nye, transgov-
ernmental relations were ‘sets of direct interactions among sub-units of
different governments that are not controlled or closely guided by the
policies of the cabinets or chief executives of those governments’ (1974,
p. 43). Subsequent scholars posited a surge in global government collab-
orations to manage the global trade challenges presented by increasingly
unfettered international private enterprise: ‘These new relationships were
principally horizontal, relatively informal, and driven by the basic need
of government officials in one country to interact with their counter-
parts in another to regulate increasingly mobile and global private actors’
(Slaughter and Zaring 2006, p. 215). Anne-Marie Slaughter, writing in
her formative work A New World Order, describes emergent transgov-
ernmental policy networks that are closely associated with changes in the
make-up of the state. Slaughter contends that ‘Government networks are
a technology of governance that are probably both cause and effect of
[the disaggregation of the state]’ (2004, p. 31).
Against a backdrop of increased state interdependence, it is said
that transgovernmental networks have emerged as ‘informal institu-
tions linking actors across national boundaries and carrying on various
aspects of global governance in new and informal ways’ (Slaughter and
Zaring 2006, p. 215) and are concerned with the ‘governance prob-
lems that arise when national actors and issues spill beyond their borders’
(Slaughter 2004, p. 16). These are not ad hoc, transient linkages, but
networks of functionally equivalent regulators that are purposively estab-
lished ‘loosely-structured, peer-to-peer ties developed through frequent
interaction’ (Raustiala 2002, p. 5). On this view, functional interdepen-
dence of domestic institutions promotes transgovernmental activity. This
is an attractive option for domestic officials, who prefer the informal
and reversible forms of cooperation available via TGNs compared to the
stultifying constraints of formal international agreements and treaties.
In an attempt to conceptualise the background conditions under
which TGNs emerge as a ‘preferred instrument of governance’, Eilstrup-
Sangiovanni (2007) suggests TGNs are likely to emerge where: (i) there
are small groups with harmonious preferences; (ii) time horizons are
short; (iii) there is uncertainty surrounding the behaviour and preference
60 T. LEGRAND

of other states and uncertainty around the nature of real-world problems;

(iv) there are domestic political divisions; and (v) states seek to form
‘clubs’ to initiate agreements and forge dominance over policy areas at
the exclusion of ‘spoiler’ states (2007, pp. 8–10). The outcomes of trans-
governmental policy networks have potentially considerable significance
for domestic institutions insofar as they permit common solutions to be
agreed, bypassing the traditional bureaucratic processes of formal negoti-
ations of inter-government agreements through the informal relationships
formed in these policy settings (Slaughter 2004, p. 49).
Presently both the policy transfer and transgovernmental literatures
emphasise the importance and influence of IGOs in channelling and
shaping transnational policy communication. Yet both literatures face a
prevailing challenge of explaining how specific configurations of inter-
governmental linkages emerge, independently of IGOs. This is not a new
problem for policy transfer theorists, who acknowledge that policy transfer
has failed to consider the questions of ‘to what extent and why policy
transfer has become widespread throughout western democracies in the
course of the past two decades’ with the result that the link between state
structures and agency remains underdeveloped (Evans and Davies 1999,
p. 365). Seeking to escape the intentionalist position evident in much of
transfer scholarship, Evans and Davies argue that policy transfer occurs in
a structured context which shapes the ‘context, strategies, intentions and
actions of the agents’ (1999, p. 370).
Despite this attempt to ‘structure’ policy transfer, progress towards
understanding the patterns and channels of policy transfer remains in
its infancy. Policy transfer networks, for these authors, are held only to
be ‘ad hoc, action-oriented phenomenon set up with the specific inten-
tion of engineering policy change. They exist only for the time that a
transfer is occurring’ (1999, p. 376). So, for this literature, the prospect
of state-based actors coalescing in established and ongoing policy transfer
networks remains unexplored.
Likewise, recent transgovernmental scholars have drawn attention to
the failure to articulate the differential constitution of TGNs. Bach
and Newman, for example, posit that ‘no effort has been made to
systematically explain network membership patterns’ (2014, p. 2). This
literature maintains an uncertain position on how, beyond their imme-
diate functional orientation, networks coalesce. Though disaggregation
and the emergence of transnational policy issues feature as the central
explanation of the rise of TGNs—i.e. the exogenous conditions under
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 61

which TGNs arise—neither explains the subsequent form and patterns of

TGN. Eilstrup-Sangiovanni (2007) claims that prevailing explanations of
the transgovernmentalism phenomenon are ‘indiscriminate’ and though
they offer a general explanation of why TGNs have proliferated, fail to
adequately specify why we see such variation across policy domains and
member states. She asks: ‘why do we see seemingly see a proliferation of
TGNs? Why among some states and not others?’ (2007, p. 7). In this
sense, these scholarly concerns about how transgovernmental networks
are forged echo the concerns of assemblage scholars about the structural
conditions in which policy transfer relationships emerge.

Discussion
If the foregoing tells us anything, it is that tracing the pathways of influ-
ence that shape the adoption, assemblage, transfer, evolution, diffusion
or convergence of policy is a multidisciplinary endeavour. Diane Stone
affirms policy transfer a useful non-discipline-specific concept which draws
together contributions from different discipline under one banner: ‘The
divide between IR and [Comparative Public Policy] can be bridged, to an
extent, by frameworks such as policy transfer’ (Stone 1999, p. 53). Evans
and Davies similarly view policy transfer as a concept which can be used
across social science: ‘policy transfer analysis can provide a context for
integrating common research concerns of scholars of domestic, compara-
tive and international politics’ (Evans and Davies 1999, p. 362). Indeed,
Stone notes that ‘(t)he policy transfer concept problematises the division
between the domestic and the international’ (1999, p. 53), a distinction,
she claims, that has become ‘increasingly meaningless’ (1999, p. 53).
In his ‘Policy-makers Guide to Policy Transfer’, Dolowitz refers to a
‘changing world of governance’ in which policy-makers have realised that
‘policy transfer can be an important tool in the policy-making process’
(2003, p. 1). Similarly, Stone refers to ‘the emergence of qualitatively
‘new’ policy problems that cannot be dealt with effectively through estab-
lished policy heuristic’ (Stone 1999, p. 53), whilst Dolowitz et al. refer
to a world environment in which ‘the pace of change is greater than ever
before’ (1999, p. 719). The clear implication of all these comments is that
the contemporary environment is somehow qualitatively different from
the past and that policy transfer has recently evidenced itself as the most
utilitarian response to these changes. What is more, there is an implicit
assumption that countries ‘in the past’ have never had to contend with
62 T. LEGRAND

‘new’ policy problems and thus had little need to recourse to transfer.
Clearly, this thesis is not easily sustained: as explained in the introduc-
tion to this book, Britain’s public administration model was founded on
a radical policy transfer from China, whilst its rank-and-file of colonial
administrators leaned heavily on learning from shared experiences.
Nevertheless, the policy transfer framework is a novel and deployable
concept for public policy analysis. It draws in a variety of disciplines from
across the academic spectrum, unified only by a common interest in how
policies are developed. In this sense, policy transfer is a catholic concept.
It suffers, however, from the inherent difficulties of demonstrating what
components of a particular policy originate from where. Linked to this
is the difficulty of evaluating the extent to which a policy achieves its
targets—a necessary signifier of the impact of policy transfer. Foreshad-
owing perhaps the work of policy assemblage theorists, Page argues that:
‘Knowledge of the objectives behind a programme or set of practices are
especially hard to determine – as we know, goals are vague, contradictory
and confused. Moreover, different people, even senior people in the same
organisation, have different goals and they may change substantially over
time’ (Page 2000, p. 10).
Page argues that another difficulty with the policy transfer framework:
‘is in unravelling the precise contribution of one strand – that provided
by the practices observed in another country or other countries – in
the complex mixture of ideas, issues, compromises and practices that
go to make up ‘policy’’ (Page 2000, p. 4). In addition, it is this ques-
tion of separately describing factors that initiate policy transfer which has
been inadequately addressed. Dolowitz and Marsh have shown that policy
transfer can be voluntary, coercive or a mixture of the two. DiMaggio
and Powell offer ‘mimetic’, ‘coercive’ and ‘normative’ as three poten-
tial stimuli for convergence amongst institutions which could well be
applied to transfers of policy between and within countries. Similarly,
Bennett offers emulation, elite networking, harmonisation and penetra-
tion as four types of convergence. Yet, despite these causal typologies of
transfer and convergence, explanations of why transfer is triggered, and
from where transfers are drawn, remain a weakness in the policy transfer
framework. As a result, it struggles sufficiently to address the question of
causality4 and fails to draw in the wider ideological structures that frame
policy-makers’ understandings of the policy process (Hay and Rosamond
2002).
 2 THE GLOBAL LABORATORY: APPROACHES TO THEORISING … 63

Conclusion: Towards Transgovernmentalism

Addressing the question of ‘why’ and ‘from whom’ is the focus of my
next two chapters, but the work reviewed above underlines the widening
interest and utility of this field of research. Evans and Davies (1999) argue
that: ‘The multi-organisational setting in which policy transfer tends to
take place, coupled with the multi-disciplinary nature of its study, has
inevitably meant that we have to juggle with a range of concepts in
order to deepen our understanding of the phenomenon and sharpen the
research questions we need to pose’ (1999, p. 362). To achieve this,
they propose an ‘ensemble’ of concepts can contribute to this deep-
ening of knowledge: ‘international structure and agency and the epistemic
community approach, domestic structure and agency, policy network
analysis and formal policy transfer analysis’ (1999, p. 363), which is the
approach adopted by the analysis that unfolds over the next few chapters.
Specifically, it is proposed that our insight into policy transfer identities
reveals much more than merely the provenance of policy ideas, but indeed
reveals a broader structure of transnational power relations. The critical
approach of policy assemblage theorising signals the need to better under-
stand the broader situational context of policy transfer. Specifically, it
suggests we can achieve a clearer understanding of the prevailing political
and institutional imperatives that inform how policies are adopted, from
where and with what consequences for the policy implementation. They
have urged greater critical attention to the underpinning institutional
contexts in which policy ideas are adopted and developed, and empha-
sise that such activities occur in a (often global) political context replete
with pre-existing orthodoxies, ideas and political agenda. This widening
of the policy transfer aegis is, I suggest, revelatory as it captures potentially
important global political dynamics. That is to say, policy transfer can act
as a barium meal, illuminating the pathways of global power relations in
ways that are not otherwise readily apparent.
To trace these pathways, and affirm the multidisciplinary approach
adopted here, we can draw from the work of IR transgovernmental
scholars. As we have touched on above, these scholars have taken strides
towards revealing how governmental relations above the nation state
coalesce and persist. If we are to trace the power relationships underpin-
ning policy transfer, then theirs is a valuable framework to commence
with since, as above I have argued, transgovernmentalism scholarship
has already demonstrated the extraordinary collaboration occurring above
and beyond the state in the global governance realm. Chapter 3 explicitly
draws together the threads of this argument.
64 T. LEGRAND

Notes
1. ‘Apparent’ insofar as they are tangible instances; this includes both
successful and unsuccessful outcomes of transfer.
2. As a proviso, they add, ‘mechanisms interact. It is thus an important area of
future research to develop hypotheses and to undertake empirical research
on the interaction effects of all potential causal mechanisms’ (ibid., 794).
3. Following this vein of thought, agency is removed from agents insofar as
policy-makers are imputed to always choose the most rational choice out
of a range of possible outcomes. This point, of course, has been exten-
sively debated elsewhere. For example, see Hay, C. (2004). Theory, Stylized
Heuristic or Self-fulfilling Prophecy? The Status of Rational Choice Theory
in Public Administration. Public Administration, 82(1).
4. In this sense, causality does not imply a positivist ‘If A, then B’ linearity,
but merely a coherent approach to examining the factors that stimulate
policy-makers into engaging in transfer.

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 CHAPTER 3

Theorising the Architecture

of Transgovernmental Policy Networks

Introduction: Theorising
Transnational Policy-Making
The question of the influence of ‘above the state’ decision-making
processes on the nation state is at the centre of contemporary public
policy debates. In recent years, public policy theorising has undergone
a ‘turn’ to the transnational sphere and, increasingly, borrows from the
toolbox of constructivism to better account for values, ideas and norms.
As noted in Chapter 2, the conceptual language of ‘global governance’
has gained currency with the growing recognition of the steady diffu-
sion of decision-making processes that are directly or indirectly beholden
to the determinations of a multitude of non-domestic interests, such as
private enterprise, civil society groups, IGOs, neighbouring states and
international standards committees. This is now described by Diane Stone
as the global ‘agora’ (2015) in which the fates of publics around the
world are increasingly determined not by locally-elected officials, but by
ambiguous politicking and bargaining in international fora.
Yet it remains poorly understood by those publics. In their volume,
Global Governance and Democracy (2015), Wouters et al. argue that ‘we
have yet to achieve a deeper and more comprehensive understanding
of how governance as an empirical phenomenon actually varies across
and between issue areas of world politics’ (2015, p. 2), and so they
call for a multidisciplinary dialogue to adequately map the dynamics of

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T. Legrand, The Architecture of Policy Transfer,
Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55821-5_3
72 T. LEGRAND

global governance. Likewise, recent work in policy studies has urged

the discipline to develop a ‘forensic understanding of multilevel gover-
nance problem structures’ (Coen and Pegram 2015, p. 417). On this
theme, Diane Stone and Stella Ladi have called on their fellow scholars
to ‘recognize the interconnectedness of different hierarchical and network
structures of both a public and private nature at the transnational, interna-
tional and /or global levels’ (2015, p. 839). To do so, Finnemore advises
us, requires a shift in focus ‘from discrete actors to relationships among
actors’ in transnational spaces (2014, p. 223).
Policy transfer theorists are well positioned to answer this call for two
reasons. First, policy transfer scholars are drawn from a broad pool of
disciplines. Contributions from law, geography and sociology are just as
common as those of a political science and public administration. Second,
policy transfer scholars have been at the forefront of the transnational
turn, urging greater attention to be paid to the ideational transactions
that occur across borders, between political institutions and between like-
minded policy-makers. Third, because of its concern with detecting the
patterns by which certain policy ideas become dominant, policy transfer
analysis offers a useful staging post from which to approach questions of
global governance and legitimacy.
Though these are good reasons to be optimistic for the usefulness of
the approach, policy transfer is far from a complete analysis. Minkman
et al. (2018) have recently concluded that, of the reviews of policy transfer
models in the recent few years, ‘none of them systematically documented
the factors that influence the policy transfer process and thereby the
outcomes of this process’ (2018, p. 223). They further claim there are
methodological concerns that remain unanswered: ‘Existing research is
limited to one or a few cases or uses deductive approaches to investigate
limited elements of the transfer process’ (2018, p. 222).
Here, I offer a remedial theoretical exploration of policy transfer,
avoiding the deductive trap that Minkman et al. caution against, by induc-
tively developing a theoretical framework from the case study set out in
later chapters. The first part of the chapter sets out my theoretical ‘stall’
as it pertains from a philosophical approach to social sciences known as
critical realism. It is (necessarily) dense with theoretical discussion and,
whilst this is important, the impatient reader might wish to skip to the
subsequent section of the chapter where I operationalise the theoretical
perspectives built here within a substantive context. In Part II, I explore
the emergence of policy networks on the global stage before, in Part
 3 THEORISING THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL … 73

III, turning to how theorising transgovernmental relationships provides

a stable basis from which to make sense of this landscape.

Part I: Theoretical Underpinning

in Critical Realism
Critical realism has for some time performed an under-labouring role
for the social scientist. By nature a philosophical approach, or ‘general
platform, capable of underpinning various social theories’ (Archer 1995,
p. 136), critical realism does not offer any sort of praxis or schema for the
social scientist to blindly copy. Rather, it stipulates a philosophical alter-
native to the empiricist and heuristic traditions, postulating, on the one
hand, the existence of immutable mechanisms that generate lived expe-
riences and insisting, on the other hand, the irreducibility of events to
discourse or ideas.
Fundamentally, the critical realist position rests on an ontology of
depth. There are three components or layers to this ‘depth’ ensemble
that relates to the social world: (i) the empirical realm; (ii) the actual
realm; and (iii) the real realm. Roy Bhaskar argues that social phenomena
emerge from, and through, these layers whereby underlying (real) mech-
anisms and structures generate (actual) events and outcomes. Because
these events are rendered visible only to the limits of our (empirical)
ability to perceive them, he claims that we must be careful of committing
what he calls the ‘epistemic fallacy’, where how we acquire knowledge
(epistemology) is conflated with the belief of what knowledge there is
to acquire (ontology). Thus, Bhaskar rejects the empiricist equation of
cognition with reality.
For the natural scientist, the structures or laws which govern the opera-
tion of physical events can be abstracted and understood independently of
their effects. For social science, however, structures do not exist indepen-
dently of the activities they govern. Whilst natural laws exist throughout
time and space separate from our knowledge and, indeed, experience of
them, the same is not true of social structures. These are intrinsically
tied to the social sphere insofar as social structure and agents are mutu-
ally constitutive: one does not exist without the other. Importantly, the
contingent nature of social structures also means that they do not operate
as social laws (in the sense that their mechanisms and outcomes are, all
other things being equal, always the same). This point is reinforced by
noting that social actors can be aware of social structures and are able to
mitigate or take advantage of their operation:
74 T. LEGRAND

the social sciences deal with a pre-interpreted reality, a reality already

brought under concepts by social actors, that is a reality already brought
under the same kind of material in terms of which it is to be grasped.
(Bhaskar 1979, p. 27. Emphasis in original)

So, critical realism offers these ontological insights into the task of social
research:

i. There are underlying structures and mechanisms that we cannot

access directly.
ii. However, the existence of these structures is imputed from their
expression in certain events at an actual level.
iii. These events are experienced and understood, empirically, via our
cognitive frames.

Yet, Bhaskar is also careful to situate the individual within his conception
of social structures:

For social life always occurs in a context which is pre-structured and differ-
entiated, in which socially differentiated individuals act (that is articulate
and apply) their various (and potentially or actually antagonistic) ‘forms
of life’ in the processes of social interaction and material mutation that
reproduce (and transform) the totalities of internally related fields of force
that comprise societies. (Bhaskar 1979, p. 194. Emphasis in original)

There are significant theoretical implications for social science in

employing critical realism. If it is accepted that there are ‘real’ underlying
mechanisms which generate events, and, in turn, the lived experiences of
the social, then, according to Bhaskar, we understand these through theo-
retical frameworks. But what are theoretical frameworks and how does the
critical realist conception of these differ from others? To fully answer this
question, we must return to the ontological basis of critical realism itself.
As explained above, critical realism is predicated upon the understanding
that the underlying mechanisms of the ‘real’ are not material objects;
rather, they are the sets of principles which may, or may not, obtain at
the level of events. In other words, that which actually occurs at a phys-
ical level does not reflect the entirety of what could occur since there may
be mechanisms that, for example, obtain only within a certain configura-
tion of events. As such, ideas about what the ‘real’ constitutes may only
 3 THEORISING THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL … 75

partially account for what has occurred at the level of the actual; alter-
native mechanisms might emerge within different configurations of the
actual means that our understanding of the real is necessarily contingent:

Scientific ‘laws’ are therefore not understood as well-corroborated,

universal empirical regularities in patterns of events, but as statements
about mechanisms. (Sayer 2013, p. 124. Emphasis in original)

In this nomenclature, then, tendencies replace laws. Establishing laws

requires a complete, and ontologically impossible, understanding of every
possible event or configuration of events. Tendencies, however, refer to an
understanding of certain configurations of particular events at a contin-
gent level: ‘The effects produced…at the empirical level depend upon
contingently related conditions, including those produced by other mech-
anisms which are sometimes called ‘counteracting tendencies’’ (Sayer
2013, p. 125). It then follows that theory building becomes an inductive,
contingent exercise whereby the theory is an approximation, not a direct
representation, of the ‘real’. When we accept that our understanding of
the ‘real’ is partial, theory becomes a tool to characterise rather than delin-
eate. The implications of this should be clear: (i) critical realists privilege
flexible theory (i.e. theory subject to revision and redundancy) over inflex-
ible theory; (ii) theory is an interpreting device; and (iii) theory is time
and space contingent.
As we have seen in the previous chapter, the creation of policy transfer
is partially the result of the abstraction of certain parts of the policy
process. The critical realist understanding of theory that we have arrived at
above emphasises the ontological problem that natural sciences encounter
when isolating one material process from the ‘open system’ in a ‘closed
system’ of laboratory conditions: in so doing, it denies itself a wider
understanding of how such processes interact with ‘real-world’ processes.
Policy transfer analysis has replicated this problematic by, firstly, defining
precisely what does and what does not constitute policy transfer and,
secondly, in so doing treating policy transfer in its abstracted form as if it
were a discrete material process with discrete material outcomes. This is
simultaneously an empirical and a theoretical puzzle.
76 T. LEGRAND

Emergence
The notion of emergent properties stems from the interactions of mecha-
nisms and elements across each strata of reality. Specifically, it is a concep-
tualisation of how interactions and relationships generate ostensibly ‘new’
prima facie features of reality. Here, I draw from the theoretical exposi-
tion of emergence from the critical realist approach, but acknowledge the
common interest expressed in the policy assemblages literature (see the
previous chapter section on Policy Assemblage).
The idea of emergence denotes that when particular elements combine
(these can be social or physical), the combination can produce character-
istics or properties that are distinguishable from the constituent elements
themselves (McAnulla 2005, p. 34). This insight corresponds with the
idea of stratification insofar as combinations of events or processes at
one level may generate new objects, at another level, with distinctive,
and qualitatively different, properties: ‘In emergence, generally, new
beings (entities, structures, totalities, concepts) are generated out of
pre-existing material from which they could have been neither induced
or deduced’ (Bhaskar 1998, p. 599). Thus, the constituent elements
(and their intrinsic properties) cannot necessarily be ‘read off’ from the
properties of the constituted object.
As indicated above, the concept of emergence is derived from critical
realism’s view of the stratification of reality. It is a concept of complexity
whereby observed outcomes and/or experiences are the manifestations
of an indeterminate number of events at higher strata. Consider the
example of the relationship between employer and employee. Both indi-
viduals have their own set of a priori properties. When constituted in the
dynamic between an employee/employer, however, two modifications of
properties occur: (i) the relationship itself displays properties in virtue
of the constitution, and (ii) the properties of each individual may be
modified as a result of the constitution.1 For example, the constitution
of the employee/employer relationship gives rise to a power relation in
which the employer has (partial) control over the actions of the employee.
The result of this power relationship may be to modify (temporarily)
the, say, capacity of the employee to do as she wishes on a day-to-day
basis. The intrinsic properties of the employer might similarly be modi-
fied (perhaps enhanced) by virtue of the constituted relationship. These
properties, however, make sense only in the context of higher-level strata:
capitalism and employment law, for example. As a result, we may speak
 3 THEORISING THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL … 77

of such relationships not only in terms of their manifested activities and

the attendant emergent properties, but, as importantly, in terms of the
higher-level strata from which such relationships derive? Douglas Porpora
puts this point succinctly: ‘In short, the power that explains whatever
behavior patterns we observe is rooted in social relationships. It is for this
reason that I say the relationships are analytically prior to the behavior’
(my emphasis. 1998, p. 349).
That such emergent features are produced is not pre-determined.
Indeed, ‘As reality comprises a set of related sub-systems or domains
that are not combined mechanically, critical realists argue that the cause
of events may only be revealed partially because of their complex co-
determination’ (Downward et al. 2002, p. 483). In other words, the
co-determination of events and outcomes is not a linear causal rela-
tionship in ‘if x then y’ schema. Rather, co-determination refers to the
contingent formation of relationships (and the attendant manifestation of
different sub-properties) in an indeterminate open system of structures
and agents:

In a multi-determined, multi-levelled, multi-linear, multi-relational, multi-

angular, multi-perspectival, multiply determined and open pluriverse, emer-
gence situates the widespread phenomena of dual, multiple, complex and
open control. (Bhaskar 1998, p. 602)

The concept of emergence introduces critical realists’ understanding

of the relationships between structures and agents. Although based
upon an immanent critique of ‘closed systems’ natural science method-
ology, critical realists argue that emergence in ‘open’ natural systems is
homologous to ‘open’ social systems. Indeed, Archer notes that: ‘it is
quintessential that society is an open system: and not in the milk and
water terms of those methods’ textbooks warning about the difficulties
of ‘controlling for extraneous variables” (1998, p. 190). Crucially, the
interplay of structures and agents, qua emergence, cannot be explained
merely by reducing one to the other. Whilst structures are identifiable
through their effects, they are not merely the sum of their effects, or, as
Collier explains: ‘the explicability of the mechanisms of the upper strata
in terms of those of the lower, and the irreducibility of the upper to
the lower strata, provides a coherent and well-exemplified general theory,
of which base/superstructure stratification can be seen as an instance’
78 T. LEGRAND

(Collier 1998, p. 271). Stratification, then, offers a means of organising

the social realm into its constitutive structures, events and mechanisms.

Agency and Contingency

Critical realism recognises the centrality of contingency to political (social)
outcomes. Now, contingency does not simply refer to ‘accidents’ and
chance. It also refers to the reflexive understanding attached to agency.
Individual behaviour is ‘conscious’, in that agents, according to Bhaskar,
are sentient, aware, attentive, reflexively self-aware, attentive and articulate
and occupied in planned (controlled deliberate, integrated), reasonable
(intelligent, well-grounded, responsible) collective, coordinated or mutual
activity (Bhaskar 1998, p. 411).
As sentient and social beings, agents cannot be analytically understood
as fixed, determinate components of the intransitive domain. Indeed,
Bhaskar argues (1998, p. 411): ‘in our transformative causal agency,
mobilising pre-existing structure, we endow the world with consequences,
realizing (or not) our purposes in it, and conferring meaning upon
it,… reproducing or transforming those structures in the course of our
agency’.2 The human praxis denies the possibility of ‘law-like’ deter-
minacy in an open system of structures and agents. This being the
case, inductive and deductive methods, in looking to posit systemic
regularities and connections, preclude explanation of irregularities and
non-connections; both of which, in Bhaskar’s analysis, are possible (and,
indeed, likely) corollaries of human praxis. Thus, where we look to
unpack and identify the open-system context of the social, stratifica-
tion (and its attendant realisation of the interplay of mechanisms and
agency) illustrates the problem of empirical realism. For the contingency
attached to agential interaction militates against the possibility of defini-
tive identification of causal mechanisms. For Downward et al, interacting
mechanisms do not play out as fixed constants: ‘These are not manifest as
predictable or universal event regularities because of continual interplay
between (intrinsic) reflexive human agency and structure’ (Downward
et al. 2002p. 483).
The critical realist framework performs an under-labouring role for the
study of policy transfer by furnishing a set of concepts that have the
advantage of analytical consistency: it renders explicit the background
assumptions that we rely on to talk about the empirical world. Just as
good practice in mathematics is to set out your working, so that errors in
 3 THEORISING THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL … 79

the calculation process can be easily pinpointed and remedied, it is good

practice in social science to reveal the full theorising process so that any
faulty assumptions may be remedied without discarding the entire process
of reasoning and argument. Above I have set out four macro-theoretical
dimensions that are important not only to the present study, but more
broadly to the discipline of social science. Together, these four theoret-
ical ‘legs’ undergird the substantive elements of the transgovernmental
architecture model, which is outlined below.

Part II: Conceptualising Global Policy

Networks: Towards Transgovernmentalism
Below I set out this book’s analytical framework, which is the central
theoretical contribution and the foundation of the empirical analysis. The
later chapters underline the relevance of these dynamics for future policy-
making as well as past, and draw on empirical work to show how and
why. Gaining analytical purchase is therefore of value to a wider set of
cases than those considered here. The analytical framework is assembled
here ahead of Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7, in which each ‘leg’ is articulated. My
overarching ambition is to draw out, and reconcile, the multiple structural
and agential dynamics of transfer that have been posited and described
in the previous chapter. On these questions, I develop three connected
insights for my analytical framework.
First, I advance the claim that the pre-existing alliances and relation-
ships carved out by the felicities of history bear strong relevance to policy
transfer. I draw out the claims of authors who suggest that prevailing
propinquity or value-driven preference drive cross-border policy engage-
ment. Here, it is claimed that prevailing institutional or national alike-
ness induces officials to gravitate towards or, at least, privilege lessons
emanating from the familiarity of like-minded states.
Second, I posit that this is a conditional propinquity; that is, officials
seek to draw from elsewhere when contingent circumstances provoke
the need and opportunity structures provoke the means to do so. The
opportunity structures encompass a range of new and old technologies:
from the Internet, and web reports to ‘contact’ networks, conferences
and professional networks. In a globalising world, these conditions are
becoming increasingly apparent, as outlined in Chapter 1.
Third, and finally, such learning must necessarily occur through agents,
who do so in a way that accords with prevailing professional activities
80 T. LEGRAND

around cross-government engagement in networks. Such networks are a

technology of governance conditioned by the practices of the NPM era
(as I argue in the Chapter 4), facilitated by information technologies of
the 1990s and prompted by the identified mutual benefits in the 2000s
(as the case study on welfare policy-making in Chapter 6 shows). These
insights, I argue, connect to provide a more complete analytical frame-
work to account for not only how policies are transferred, but how and
by whom. Being concerned with both structure and agency dynamics,
this is partly a meta-theoretical argument, but it is a grounded one (as
Chapter 4 continues to explain).
This theoretical framework connects four socio-political concepts. It
draws backwards from Chapter 2’s exploration of contemporaneous theo-
rising and forwards from empirical work in later chapters. The framework
is neither fixed nor predictive: the political realm is resistant to parsimo-
nious explanation, and perhaps the best we can hope is to determine
tendencies, trajectories or likelihoods. Its ambition is to identify the
strands of cooperative imperatives that, in combination, produce or
constitute the transfer outcomes that are apparent. Below I sketch out
these elements by bringing together separate strands of research.

Transgovernmental Networks and Policy Transfer

The analytical framework of this book proceeds in two stages. The first
stage emphasises the structural dimensions that are integral to explaining
policy transfer, yet all too often overlooked in analytical accounts. Here,
the analysis relies on critical realist accounts of the structure-agency rela-
tionship to furnish a theoretically-informed account of the overarching
phenomenon of knowledge (policy) transfer.

The Structural Context of Politico-Cultural Propinquity

The foundational conceptual level concerns the structural dimensions
of preferential policy learning. Chapter 4 gives detailed articulation of
this conceptual framing, but here we will summarise in brief its main
contours for the purposes of the discussion on policy networks below. As
scholarship on policy assemblage has found, the environment in which
policies move is always political and subjective: there are background
power dynamics that influence policy adoption/learning in non-obvious
but powerful ways. One way in which this happens, on the view expressed
 3 THEORISING THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL … 81

in Chapter 4, is within a sphere of propinquity, which includes shared

(national) identities, historical and cultural amity and institutional prox-
imity. For some authors, cross-border learning is already apparent in
ideological commitments to the economy: Simmons and Elkins refer to
‘distinctive clusters’ (2004, p. 171) of economic liberalisation amongst
states and suggest that ‘Cultural propinquity is a nonobvious yet highly
plausible explanation for policy emulation’ (2004, p. 175). Deepening
this view, we might draw from Alexander Wendt’s constructivist critique
of realism and rationalism. He proposes that sub-international systems
(or clusters, to use Simmons and Elkins’ terminology) are instrumental
in forging states’ collective identities, which produce ‘shared understand-
ings, expectations, and social knowledge’. Wendt’s work demonstrates
the role of collective identity formation in international politics, in which
collective identities and national interests emerge from structural contexts,
systemic processes and strategic practices. Further, Wendt suggests that
states acting in concert to address transnational policy problems cement
those relationships: ‘By teaching others and themselves to cooperate…
actors are simultaneously learning to identify with each other- to see
themselves as a “we” bound by certain norms’ (Wendt 1994, p. 390).
Collective identity formation becomes central to understanding the struc-
tural context of policy transfer, since following Wendt, we might posit that
policy officials’ learning is directed or shaped by these prevailing identi-
ties,—hinting at a hierarchy of whom they choose to learn from, in which
a subset of countries are deemed more attractive as prospective partners
in tackling common problems or as sources of policy lessons.
Together, these form the structural conditions of policy-making and,
in a global environment, collaboration. Already, the structural power of
national spheres of identity has gained a toehold in research on global
economics and trade. Spilker et al. (2016, for example, suggest that
culturally similar countries are more likely to engage in trade relationship
because of ‘psychological ingroup-outgroup feelings, national images,
and economic considerations’. The literature on business studies has
maintained a focus on ‘psychic distance’ as a variable to understanding
how businesses make decisions on entry to foreign markets. Jody Evans
et al. suggest psychic distance incorporates ‘language, business practices,
political and legal systems, education, economic development, marketing
infrastructure, and industry structure’ (2000; see also Ambos et al. 2019;
Dow and Karunaratna 2006; Håkanson and Ambos 2010).
82 T. LEGRAND

Such identities are not independent of a material context, which may

reinforce or push against the gravitational tendencies of national iden-
tity. Russia’s overlapping history, culture and language with Ukraine, for
example, is largely outweighed in the current conflict between the two
countries by material factors of sovereignty, territory and energy secu-
rity. In the case of the Anglosphere, however, a range of material
factors promote the structural proximity of these states. As the next
chapter details, this alliance of five countries—Australia, Canada, New
Zealand, the UK and the USA—have forged a relationship in matters
of foreign policy, intelligence and defence, and increasingly in matters
of domestic public policy. The era of New Public Management dawned
across the Anglosphere countries in the 1980s and 1990s and with it
came new modes of governing. Amongst these, policy networks emerged
as a tool of policy development, decision-making and implementation.
Chapter 1 has outlined how this was also the start of the information
technology revolution: it revolutionised communication and the capacity
for information-sharing with a scope and scale not previously possible.
Against the backdrop of pre-existing structural propinquity, described
above, emerged the institutional network relationships described later in
this book.

Emergent Policy Transfer Networks

What are the relationships in which policy-makers draw lessons? This
question is at the heart of debates around lesson-drawing, policy learning
and policy transfer, for the notion of relationship is central to the
dynamics between exporting and importing states. What does this rela-
tionship look like? Is it merely incidental or functional, or is it pre-existing
and enduring?
For the first wave of scholars exploring how cross-border learning
occurs, the tendency was to frame the learning relationship as a func-
tional one. Richard Rose’s conception of lesson-drawing outlined the
conditions under which policy-makers draw from the experience of other
countries. Yet, Rose is careful to differentiate between the various forms of
lesson-drawing that occur, arguing that policy-makers may directly copy
a programme, emulate the approach of policy-makers, conjoin elements
of two policies to create one or simply draw ‘inspiration’. However,
Rose’s approach focuses on the intentionalist aspect of policy-making
whereby policy-makers are tasked to seek out successful policies from
elsewhere that may be incorporated into domestic institutions. Dolowitz
 3 THEORISING THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL … 83

and Marsh evidently draw heavily from Rose’s initial description of volun-
taristic transfer, yet argue that policies are often not adopted voluntarily.
International institutions, they note, often impose ‘conditionality’ on
developing countries, forcing them to adopt certain policies as a condi-
tion of loan agreements. For Dolowitz and Marsh, however, transfer of
policy is seldom entirely either voluntary or coercive: different gradations
exist between the two poles on what they call a ‘Transfer Continuum’.
Most policies, they claim, contain elements of both voluntary and coercive
transfer. Similarly, they claim, policy-makers never have perfect knowledge
of the circumstances of transfers. They argue that ‘bounded rationality’
plays a key role in determining how the transfer occurs, which compo-
nents are transferred and how appropriate the transfer is. In addition,
they describe a number of factors that contribute to policy failure: unin-
formed, incomplete and inappropriate transfer. These factors, jointly or
separately, may precipitate policy failure after a transfer.
Despite this later attempt to focus upon one aspect of policy outcomes,
the Dolowitz and Marsh model still lacks a definitive explanation of how
policy transfers impact upon the domestic policy environment. This is
a deficiency shared by the literature as a whole and, perhaps, reflects
the literature’s relatively short history. As such, longitudinal studies are
needed to trace the effect over time that policy transfers have upon the
institutional environment into which they are transplanted. In addition,
research is needed to establish how policy-makers go about decon-
structing prior policies in preparation for receiving the new transfer and
whether this process itself has any impact upon policy success or policy
failure. Yet, as the methodology discussion above notes, policy-makers
themselves often struggle to establish criterion for assessing the success of
their own policies. Professional Policy making for the Twenty First Century,
for example, repeatedly observes how civil servants are keen to put in
place measurements of evaluations yet sometimes struggle to assess a
policy’s performance.
Equally, however, policy transfer has inherent flaws that constrain the
extent of its usefulness. James and Lodge highlight the insufficiently
developed notion of rationality and bounded rationality that Dolowitz
and Marsh assert as part of their transfer model. Moreover, they criticise
the Dolowitz and Marsh model on the basis of its shallow conceptuali-
sation and difficulty in explaining policy outcomes. These criticisms are
echoed by Page (1999) and Evans and Davies (1999) who, however,
84 T. LEGRAND

balance this criticism with the recognition that the policy transfer frame-
work is clearly capable of developing a sophisticated conceptualisation
of external and internal policy processes. Significantly, the notions of
coercive and voluntary transfers signify a move towards understanding
policy transfer as a tool of benign and belligerent modern governance.
Additionally, it offers a means of cutting into globalisation debates from
a policy analysis perspective, tracing policy from the local through the
international sphere.

Connecting Structure and Agency in Policy Transfer

In a globalising world, understanding the relationship between those who
learn (agents) and the environment in which they learn (structure) is
imperative. Evans and Davies’ multi-level analysis focuses upon the contri-
butions of agents and institutions at all stages of policy-making (public
servants, bureaucrats, policy entrepreneurs, state and non-state institu-
tions and so on) laterally and places their contributions in the context
of ascending orders of policy-making (domestic, international, transna-
tional) vertically. As a consequence, they claim that the MLA model
allows analysts to account for both structural and agential influences on
the policy transfer process. To characterise the relationship between struc-
ture and agency in theoretical terms, Evans and Davies rely on Alexander
Wendt’s development of structuration theory. Giddens conceived struc-
turation as a reconciliation of the dualism between structure and agency.
In a practical sense, the ‘dualism’ meant that social theorists explained
outcomes by reference to either structures or agents and, thus, either
structuralism or intentionalism. Structuration theory focused on both
structure and agency and on the interaction between them.
There are two immediate concerns that must be addressed at this point:
(i) Do the above criticisms of Wendt’s rendition of structuration theory
invalidate Evans and Davies’ deployment of structuration? (ii) Although
Wendt’s reading of structuration pulls away from Giddens’ conception,
might it give us some insight into how a Bhaskarian (critical realist) theory
of structure/agency in the international sphere might look? To address
the first of these concerns, it is useful to examine how Evans and Davies
envisage the use of structuration theory alongside a policy transfer frame-
work. They suggest that structuration can be operationalised by linking
the literatures they identify as integral to policy transfer processes, global-
isation, internationalisation and transnationalisation, with policy transfer.
They contend that these literatures are linked in three ways.
 3 THEORISING THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL … 85

Firstly, they claim, processes of globalisation, internationalisation and

transnationalisation act as facilitators of policy transfer by increasing the
opportunity structures for policy transfer. Secondly, policy transfer is
regarded as a contributor to the conditions of globalisation (e.g. by
aiding efforts towards integration within the EU project). Thirdly, they
suggest, it is necessary to measure the impact of these processes upon the
behaviour of the state. They argue that international regimes play a crucial
role in ‘processing’ policy ideas through ‘epistemic communities’. In turn,
these communities utilise their ‘knowledge resources’ to highlight global
‘policy problems and options’ (Evans and Davies 1999, p. 371). One
outcome of this arrangement, they claim, is increased policy convergence.
Evans and Davies take their understanding of ‘international regimes’
from Richard Higgott (1996):

Regimes are the practical functional application of governance in interna-

tional relations; for it is regimes that articulate the principled and shared
understandings of desirable and acceptable forms of state behaviour. (cited
in Evans and Davies 1999, p. 371)

In linking these concepts together, Evans and Davies generate what

they see as a key research question: ‘in what sense do these external
structures facilitate state behaviour with particular regard to processes
of policy transfer and how?’ Their response to this question is predi-
cated upon a particular conception of the state. For Evans and Davies, a
crucial component of political globalisation concerns the evolution of the
nation state into the competition state. According to Philip Cerny (1992),
this evolution towards a competitive state is evidenced in the recalibra-
tion of domestic and foreign policies to meet the demands of global
economic imperatives and, thus, remain competitive.3 A natural outcome
of the competitive state has been increased marketisation manifested
in economic neoliberalism: for example, the pursuit of deregulation,
restrained taxation and deflationary measures (see Campbell and Pedersen
2001). Evans and Davies argue that this manifestation of the competition
state has, in turn, precipitated a change in state administration:

In order to complete such an ambitious project, new forms of statecraft

have emerged and institutional structures and political practices reshaped
with the aim of enhancing the steering capacity of the state’. (Evans and
Davies 1999, p. 373)
86 T. LEGRAND

According to Evans and Davies, this reorientation of statecraft is displayed

in the shifting priorities of the state, particularly in the movement away
from notions of full welfare provision and employment, towards the
promotion of: ‘enterprise, innovation and profitability in both the private
and public sectors’ (1999, p. 373). Importantly, they argue: ‘the policy
agenda of the competition state is where we are most likely to locate
examples of policy transfer’ (1999, p. 373).
The evolution of the competition state is linked to the erosion of state
structures through the process of ‘hollowing-out’. First referred to by
Jessop (1993; and see also Rhodes 1994, 1996), the process of hollowing-
out refers to the (external) process by which global economic, political
and social forces have eroded the autonomy, and institutional structures,
of the state. Evans and Davies argue that it is within this macro-level
context that policy transfer becomes more likely as a result of changing
‘opportunity structures’:

At this level, therefore, it is further proposed that in a period of major

institutional change and under conditions of uncertainty, new opportunity
structures for policy transfer are likely to emerge. These opportunity struc-
tures may either be external to the government system or internal to it.
(Evans and Davies 1999, p. 374)

So, for Evans and Davies, the competition state has given rise to new
forms of governance under the constraints of external global forces.
Consequently, the uncertainty created by the transition towards alter-
native governing techniques has created the space for policy transfer to
flourish.
Yet, as outlined earlier, this is only half of the structure/agency equa-
tion. Whereas the rise of the competition state within the context of
global economic and political forces provides the structural context, policy
transfer provides the agency role. Since policy transfer is, for Evans and
Davies, a primarily agential (i.e. intentionalist) activity, the structural
context examined above provides the strategic terrain in which agents
operate. It is within this circumscribed terrain that Evans and Davies
locate their policy transfer network approach. A short reiteration of the
background to Evans and Davies’ multi-level approach might prove useful
here. Principally, they developed the MLA in response to the theoretical
shortcomings of initial work on policy transfer of Dolowitz and Marsh
(1996, 1998, 2000) and Common (2001). For example, focusing on the
 3 THEORISING THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL … 87

conceptual model developed by Dolowitz and Marsh to illustrate the span

between intentional and coercive transfer, Evans notes:

The weakest aspect of the approach lies in the presentation of a continuum

of policy transfer development in which rational/voluntary and non-
rational/coercive policy transfer activity may be found at each end of a
spectrum, with negotiated or obligated forms of policy transfer lying in
the middle of the axis… [C]oercive forms of policy transfer do not always
have to be non-rational. (Evans 2004, p. 21)

In addition, Evans and Davies claim that, whilst the initial model of
policy transfer offered definitional criteria sufficient to outline some of the
parameters of policy transfer, the overall operational framework embraced
too many facets of policy-making. Consequently, they argue, Dolowitz
and Marsh’s definition, ‘is far too broad to give the concept distinctive
analytical validity. It is extremely difficult to distinguish between their
theory of policy transfer and normal forms of policy development’ (Evans
2004, p. 21).
The corrective prescribed by Evans and Davies required policy transfer
‘to be adapted into a multi-level, interdisciplinary perspective on policy
change’ (1999, p. 374). Given their critique of Dolowitz and Marsh’s
overly broad policy transfer model, it is surprising that they contend
that the applicability of a distinctive policy transfer analysis should be
broadened in order to:

develop a conception of policy transfer analysis that allowed for the inves-
tigation of the role of global, international and/or transnational forces;
state-centred forces; the role of policy transfer networks in mediating policy
change; and, micro-level processes of policy oriented learning. (Evans
2004, p. 22)

Conceptually, this idea goes on to embrace an assortment of tools,

including: ‘international structure and agency and the epistemic commu-
nities approach, domestic structure and agency, policy network analysis
and process-centred policy transfer’ (Evans 2004, p. 22). Note that this
ensemble of conceptual tools represents an analytical funnel, tying the
macro-level to the micro-level and thus equipping the researcher with a
‘multi-level approach’. We have seen above how the international struc-
tural context features in the MLA; the concern here is to examine the
function of the materially ‘knowable’ level of their approach.
88 T. LEGRAND

Agency in Policy-Making Networks

The empirically accessible level available to researchers, and therefore the
focus of Evans and Davies’ research, is located at the network level where
decision-making occurs. Accordingly, their approach looks to equip the
research field with a specific means of cutting (conceptually) into the wide
variety of transfer mechanisms that range, inter alia, from government and
international organisations to think tanks (see Evans and McComb 2004;
Ladi 2004; Flores-Crespo 2004; Lana and Evans 2004). In particular,
the principal concern of the MLA is to develop a policy transfer network
approach, since:

policy transfer networks provide a context for evaluating the complex

interaction of state and international policy agendas forged through
the interaction of state, non-state, transnational and international actors.
(Evans and Davies 1999, p. 376)

Coupled with the policy network and epistemic communities approaches,

the policy transfer network is a conceptual assembly that, Evans and
Davies claim, promotes an appreciation of the cognitive and intentional
elements of policy-making:

[Evans and Davies] developed the concept of a policy transfer network to

depict an ad hoc, action oriented policy-making structure set up with the
specific intention of engineering rapid policy-change. They exist only for the
time that a transfer is occurring.4 (emphasis added, Evans 2004, p. 22;
Evans and Davies 1999, p. 376)

On their view, governments (from local, regional, national or supra-

national levels) choose to engage with these networks for a variety of
reasons. In so doing, Evans and Davies argue, such engagement reflects
an interaction between the following:

(i) ‘The need to satisfy objective policy problems;

(ii) gaining access to other organisational networks;
(iii) further relevant motivating values (regime-pull, discourse pull,
ideological factors); and
(iv) providing certain essential skills and knowledge resources’ (1999,
p. 376).
 3 THEORISING THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL … 89

Next, I wish to unpack the two separate concepts that lie at the heart
of the policy transfer network approach (hereafter PTNA): epistemic
communities and policy networks. PTNA delivers both a heuristic frame-
work and a research methodology. Theoretically, its tenets closely adhere
to the MLA’s structurational roots:

Thus through its emphasis on structural (organisational rules (cf. Call-

inicos) and imperatives) and interpersonal relationships (information and
communication exchange) within networks, together with an acceptance
of accounting for the structural factors exogenous to the network (e.g.
ideology, economy, technology and resource exchange) a method is
provided for understanding forms of policy development within a multi-
organisational setting. (Evans 2004, p. 24; Evans and Davies 1999,
p. 376)

If these are the ambitions for the PTNA, it is worthwhile to investi-

gate how far its constituent concepts are actually capable of meeting
the demands that Evans and Davies place upon them. A comparison
between the characteristics of policy communities, epistemic communities
and policy transfer networks. In the first chapter, the concept of epistemic
communities was examined only briefly. Yet, because of the centrality of
this concept, and of the policy networks approach, to Evans and Davies’
work, both need further consideration here.

Epistemic Communities as Global Policy Networks

The epistemic communities approach represents a crucial plank in Evans
and Davies’ multi-level approach. Conceptually, alongside policy network
analysis, it provides the pivotal explanation for the movement of ideas in
interorganisational settings. On their view:

the epistemic community approach provides us with a rich source for eval-
uating the role of knowledge elites as agents of policy transfer pushing
for new or changed international practices and institutions nationally,
transnationally and internationally. (1999, p. 365)

For Haas, an epistemic community is a: ‘network of professionals with

recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an
authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or
90 T. LEGRAND

issue area’ (1992, p. 3). The professionals who constitute the epistemic
community share a number of characteristics:

(i) They have shared norms and principles which give them a common
cause for ‘social action of community members’.
(ii) They have a shared understanding of the cause and effects of
common problems in their field of expertise and are able to jointly
articulate possible (policy) correctives to these problems.
(iii) They share the same benchmarks of evidence-based practice:
‘shared notions of validity’.
(iv) They have ‘a common policy enterprise’; within their area of exper-
tise, they have a common understanding of the problems they face
and a shared conviction towards resolving those problems for the
enhancement of ‘human welfare’ (Haas 1992, p. 3).

Prima facie, the notion of epistemic communities dovetails neatly with

Evans and Davies’ conception of the competition state and institutional
change. Haas argues that epistemic policy coordination prevails particu-
larly in circumstances of uncertainty and change. Furthermore, epistemic
policy coordination is seen as the outcome of a ‘causal logic’ (Haas 1992,
p. 4):

The major dynamics are uncertainty, interpretation, and institutionaliza-

tion, In international policy coordination, the forms of uncertainty that
tend to stimulate demands for information are those which arise from the
strong dependence of states on each other’s policy choices for success in
obtaining goals and those which involve multiple and only partly estimable
consequences of action. (Haas 1992, p. 4)

The dynamics under which epistemic policy coordination occur are

‘uncertain’ because of the advent of ‘qualitatively new policy problems’
which transcend national boundaries. Haas gives the examples of nuclear
proliferation and damage to the ozone layer, but might equally point to
increasing carbon emissions and international terrorism. The dynamics of
‘interpretation’ refer to the means by which experts process the infor-
mation available to them, which is: ‘thus neither guesses nor “raw”
data; it is the product of human interpretations of social and physical
phenomena’ (1992, p. 4). The dynamics are ‘institutional’ because the
 3 THEORISING THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL … 91

major discourses and idea-exchanges occur between recognised experts

and policy-makers within established state and non-state institutions:

To the extent to which an epistemic community consolidates bureau-

cratic power within national administrations and international secretariats,
it stands to institutionalize its influence and insinuate its views into broader
international politics. (1992, p. 4)

The space occupied by such networks is varied and usually transcends

national boundaries. As such, epistemic community members are not
bound by national interests, but adhere to the normative and profes-
sional precepts of their community. Because these communities operate
beyond national interests, they can act as conduits for policy coordination
between states through influencing how national interests are conceived:

Members of transnational epistemic communities can influence state inter-

ests either by directly identifying them for decision makers or by illumi-
nating the salient dimensions of an issue from which the decision makers
may deduce their interests. (1992, p. 4)

The epistemic communities approach represents a shift away from conven-

tional ways of defining state interests, whereby domestic or global
variables provided explanations of state interests. Conversely, as Haas
argues: ‘the epistemic communities approach suggest a nonsystemic origin
for state interests and identifies a dynamic for persistent cooperation
independent of the distribution of international power’ (1992, p. 4).
Whilst Haas’ conception of epistemic communities provides a robust
alternative to state-centric explanations of policy formation, the use of
epistemic communities by state actors is limited and, as such, their
engagement in the policy process is both contingent and arbitrary. The
first of these is the most important and the use of epistemic communi-
ties by decision-makers is contingent in three ways: temporally; spatially;
and politically. The operation of epistemic communities relies on access
to, and deployment of, specific forms of information. In addition, the
influence of epistemic communities qua epistemic communities is tied
inextricably to situations in which state actors perceive their interests to
be: (i) compromised; (ii) irremediable through the information, skills and
resources available to him/her/them; and (iii) potentially remediable by
the identified epistemic community. Temporally, the ability of epistemic
92 T. LEGRAND

communities to influence state interests and decision-makers is struc-

turally limited by events that are not within their control; they are only
called on at times when their resources are in demand. Spatially, epistemic
communities are tied in to the geographical, cultural, linguistic and/or
political environments in which their members operate. The parameters
of their influence are spatially delimited by the ‘demand’ of state actors
and the practical barriers to providing effective, and timely, advice.
The political contingency of epistemic communities is noted by Haas
and affects the activities of the communities on two levels. Firstly,
Ikenberry’s study of epistemic communities (1992) indicated that:

while the form of specific policy choices is influenced by transnational

knowledge-based networks, the extent to which state behavior reflects
the preferences of these networks remains strongly conditioned by the
distribution of power internationally’. (Haas 1992, p. 7)

In macro-political terms, the influence of epistemic communities is

considerably less than entrenched power relations. Yet, even at the micro-
level of policy-makers, the credence given to epistemic communities
remains secondary to political concerns. In the context of natural scientific
epistemy, Haas notes:

Despite the veneer of objectivity and value neutrality achieved by pointing

to the input of scientists, policy choices remain highly political in their
allocative consequences. (1992, p. 11)

Thus, there is a dependency on contingency at the very heart of the epis-

temic community approach. The influence of epistemic communities is
non-systemic; the format and extent of epistemic communities’ advice are
overwhelmingly based upon contextual changes which are almost impos-
sible to predict. Yet, for Haas, overriding power structures are absent in
specific circumstances and it is in these circumstances that the influence
of epistemic communities is at its most resonant, specifically: ‘in the face
of uncertainty, and more so in the wake of a shock or a crisis, many of
the conditions facilitating a focus on power are absent’. Moreover, Haas
argues: ‘poorly understood conditions may create enough turbulence that
established operating procedures may break down, making institutions
unworkable’ (Haas 1992, p. 14). To elaborate on the type of events that
might bring about such turbulence, Haas explains:
 3 THEORISING THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL … 93

Failed policies, crises, and unanticipated events that call into question
[decision makers’] understanding of an issue-area are likely to precipitate
searches for new information, as are the increasing complexity and technical
nature of the problem. (1992, p. 29)

Such circumstances create the space in which epistemic communities are

most influential. It must be emphasised, therefore, that the epistemic
communities approach has been predominantly rooted in ideas of contin-
gency and instability. It offers a potential explanation of policy choices in
times of crisis and uncertainty, but is not—on Haas’ view—explanatory of
policy choices made in circumstances of stability.
Whilst the emergence of epistemic communities might be characterised
as contingent, its adoption by policy-makers occurs arbitrarily. State actors
have preconceived ideas about what constitutes valid policy advice, knowl-
edge and evidence. Historical institutionalism (cf. Pierson and Skocpol
2002) provides insights into the role that prior ideas and prior deci-
sions play in the decision-making processes associated with policy-makers.
Moreover, state actors may select epistemic communities for reasons
of political expediency, rather than in objective search for ‘knowledge’.
Indeed, Haas acknowledges this:

[E]pistemic communities can help formulate policies. Their role in this

regard will depend on the reasons for which their advice is sought. In
some cases, decision makers will seek advice to gain information which will
justify or legitimate a policy that they wish to pursue for political ends.
(Haas 1992, p. 15)

Because Haas’ analysis focuses on the conduct of epistemic communities,

his approach sheds little conceptual light on the actions of policy-makers
per se. Instead, policy-makers become an independent variable within
his approach which is held constant; however, epistemic communities
are held to be the dependent variable within his analysis and gain reso-
nance and significance through crises and uncertainty. Indeed, they are
held to affect the state (and, therefore, state policy-makers) only through
‘defining state interests’ and this tells us little about how interest is formed
prior to the communities themselves.
The foregoing criticisms of Haas’ epistemic communities approach
might perhaps imply that these issues are unconsidered by Haas. Far
from it; in fact, these criticisms are implicit at least in Haas’ position. The
94 T. LEGRAND

aim here is merely to emphasise the contingent and arbitrary influence of

the communities. This is an important point in the context of the wider
critique of Evans and Davies since the epistemic communities approach is
crucial in the MLA in linking organisations to the policy transfer network
approach. The identification of the epistemic communities approach as a
non-systemic, contingent and arbitrary component of the policy-making
process undermines MLA on a conceptual level.
So, Evans and Davies claim that the epistemic communities approach
can supplement policy transfer analysis by augmenting our understanding
of transfer processes at the interorganisational level (1999, p. 365) via
international regimes. Specifically, they contend:

It is therefore further suggested that international regimes play a key role

in processing policy ideas through epistemic communities which attempt
to use their knowledge resources to promote global awareness of certain
policy problems and policy options. (1999, p. 371)

Here, we find an implicit tension between two integral concepts. Epis-

temic communities are held to operate in conditions of uncertainty and
crisis (Haas 1992) as well as acting as conduits that promote the policy
agendas of international regimes. Recall that the advice proffered by epis-
temic communities gains resonance as a result of crisis. Here, however,
Evans and Davies employ the concept in a markedly different manner;
the communities and their ‘knowledge resources’ are seen as serving
another agenda which, crucially, is rooted ideationally in the interests of
the so-called international regime. Clearly, the two identities of epistemic
communities cannot coexist conceptually: their role is either independent
of power structures, and thus responsive to changing conditions, or it is
part of the very conditions of change through the ideational construction
of interests or crisis.
So, having examined the conceptual elements of the MLA, we now
turn back to the theoretical structuration ‘scaffold’ upon which the MLA
is hung. Some of the most incisive critiques of structuration focus upon
the analytical dualism that Giddens (and associated authors) delivers
through ‘methodological bracketing’ and the specification of structures.
The essential interaction, as Evans and Davies see it, between structure
and agency occurs because globalisation can:
 3 THEORISING THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL … 95

increase the opportunity structures for policy transfer (for example, global
communications) and secondly, at the same time, policy transfer facilitates
processes of globalization (for example, political integration and conver-
gence in formations of governance through the creation of further oppor-
tunity structures, such as European Union (EU) economic development
programmes. (1999, p. 371)

Importantly, the interaction described by Evans and Davies refers to

two different types of structure. The activity they describe can be better
characterised by (the structural resource provided by) global telecommu-
nications à creates better conditions for à policy transfer à which facilitates
à political integration.

From Epistemic Transfer to Transgovernmentalism

So, for our purposes here, the key focal point is that Evans and Davies’
work builds a useful scaffold to understand the intersection of structures
and agents, but is yet to tell us much about the background conditions
which influence the cohering of policy networks. In their own words:

The application of a version of policy network analysis which incorporates

the strengths of the epistemic community approach is important because it
allows us to focus on the nature of intentional explanation with particular
reference to the role of agents in the process of policy transfer. (1999,
p. 376)

However, they limit their conceptual discussion of policy network analysis

to an assertion that they: ‘hold onto the importance of policy networks
as providing a crucial insight into the external a well as the internal
processes of “hollowing-out”’ (1999, p. 374). Conceptually, they claim
that, together, the epistemic communities approach and policy network
analysis may ‘provide us with the tools for understanding the nature
of interorganizational politics’ (1999, p. 374). In Evans’ later work, he
argues:

Meso-level concepts such as policy networks help us to map out the paths
through which political subsystems develop, they enable us to identify junc-
tions at which we can focus analytically while preserving the maximum
range of choices as to where to move next. (Evans 2001, p. 542)
96 T. LEGRAND

Insofar as Evans and Davies are looking to develop a meso-level concept

to address interorganisation relationships, this fits their framework. Yet
in spite of this attempt to ‘structure’ policy transfer, progress towards
understanding the patterns and channels of policy transfer remains in
its infancy. Policy transfer networks, for these authors, is held only to
be ‘ad hoc, action-oriented phenomenon set up with the specific inten-
tion of engineering policy change. They exist only for the time that a
transfer is occurring’ (1999, p. 376). So, for this literature, the prospect
of state-based actors coalescing in established and ongoing policy transfer
networks remains unexplored.

Transgovernmentalism and Policy Networks

The literature on transgovernmentalism offers a powerful remediation for
the problem of explaining how policy transfer networks persist. Above I
have argued that the networked dimension of policy transfer has yet to
be fully explored and articulated, especially with respect to the relation-
ships that are emergent between policy regimes. So far, there has been
a wide range of approaches to discerning transnational policy commu-
nities, including Haas’ epistemic communities framework, transnational
policy groups (Carroll and Carson 2003), transnational policy networks
(Norman 2001), advocacy coalitions and knowledge networks (Stone
2004, 2008, 2010). These approaches share a common feature in that
they absent a sovereign state; rather, they refer to a global web of relation-
ships across a cast of actors that includes governments, non-government
organisations, private enterprise, civil society groups, scientists, policy
experts and policy entrepreneurs, and more. In this context, above-the-
state policy-making is carefully negotiated and bargained by disparate
interests in an uncertain process.
Transgovernmentalism stands as a testament, however, to the enduring
power of sovereign states in addressing collective action or global policy
problems. Transgovernmentalism refers to a body of work situated within
the landscape of transnational policy politics described above, which
focuses on groups of government actors working collectively in non-state-
based networks to develop collaborative responses to transnational issues.
Transgovernmentalism emerged amongst 1970s IR scholars seeking to
turn away from the dominant ‘state as a unitary actor’ position and
unpack the state into its constituent parts (Slaughter and Zaring 2006,
p. 212).
 3 THEORISING THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL … 97

This group of scholars, led by Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane,

developed the conceptual basis of transgovernmentalism, which was
prompted by their observation of collaborative endeavours agreed in
networks of policy officials of neighbouring or proximal countries and
without the coordination of foreign or state departments (1971, pp. 330–
331). Keohane and Nye define transgovernmental relations as ‘sets of
direct interactions among sub-units of different governments that are
not controlled or closely guided by the policies of the cabinets or
chief executives of those governments’ (1974, p. 43). Yet others have
observed how such efforts at inter-governmental coordination have also
manifested in global regulatory endeavours: Anne-Marie Slaughter and
David Zaring, for example, argue that ‘Regulatory networks parallel and
comport with the disaggregated but powerful way that globalization has
actually happened’ (Slaughter and Zaring 2006, p. 218). Continuing,
Slaughter and Zaring found that:

These new relationships were principally horizontal, relatively informal,

and driven by the basic need of government officials in one country to
interact with their counterparts in another to regulate increasingly mobile
and global private actors. (Slaughter and Zaring 2006, p. 215)

In A New World Order, Anne-Marie Slaughter (2009) traces the emer-

gent transgovernmental policy networks and suggests that these represent
a recent ‘technology of governance’ arising from the disaggregation of
the state (2004, p. 31). As a consequence of disaggregation, the trans-
governmentalism literature identifies the emerging tendency of govern-
ment institutions to reach beyond their shores, acting without central
coordination (via foreign or state departments), to network with their
peers in parallel institutions overseas (Raustiala 2002, p. 3) with the
result that domestic policy-makers are increasingly becoming operators
in global governance. A paradigm case, explored by Slaughter, is the
Basle Committee on Banking Supervision, which since 1974 has been
populated by state central bank officials and operates as the coordinating
mechanism for global banking supervision between 28 jurisdictions (as of
2020). The BCBS describes itself as ‘primary global standard setter for the
prudential regulation of banks and provides a forum for regular coopera-
tion on banking supervisory matters’. Beyond formal transgovernmental
networks, Slaughter also traces the emergence of ‘spontaneous govern-
ment networks’, which are transnational networks that arise informally
98 T. LEGRAND

and independent of formal or legal inter-governmental agreements (2001,

p. 355; see also Slaughter and Zaring 2006). These are understood to be
self-organising networks which ‘comprise agreements between domestic
regulatory agencies of two or more nations’ (Slaughter 2001, p. 359).
Importantly, as they use voluntary agreements coordinated by national
regulators themselves, there is no requirement to seek legislative approval
from lawmakers. Rather, these networks rely on Memoranda of Under-
standing (MOUs), which coordinate their network activities without
coercion or cooption. Doing so is not only a means to avoid engaging
in detailed legislative bargaining, but is a means to speed up coop-
eration between jurisdictions. In doing so, they represent a low-cost,
high-benefit means of collaboration between national officials, but in
avoiding the need to seek political input, there is a risk of democratic
ambiguity, or as Slaughter puts it, it possibly represents ‘the removal of
issues from the domestic political sphere through deliberate technocratic
de-politicization’ (2001, p. 363).

The Qualities of Transgovernmental Policy Networking

Transgovernmental policy networks display a series of key qualities. First,
transgovernmental networks can be understood as ‘informal institutions
linking actors across national boundaries and carrying on various aspects
of global governance in new and informal ways’ (Slaughter and Zaring
2006, p. 215). Second, the objective of their work is to engage with
the ‘governance problems that arise when national actors and issues spill
beyond their borders’ (Slaughter 2004, p. 16). Crucially, these are not ad
hoc linkages, but instead form networks that are purposively established
as ‘loosely-structured, peer-to-peer ties developed through frequent inter-
action’ (Raustiala 2002, p. 5). It follows, therefore, that a prerequisite
of such interaction is parity between the policy portfolio and remit of the
participating domestic institutions. Fourth, the informal and reversible
forms of cooperation available via TGNs compared to the stultifying
constraints of formal international agreements and treaties.
Deepening these insights, we may draw from Eilstrup-Sangiovanni
(2007) who contends that TGNs are likely to emerge where: (i) there
are small groups with harmonious preferences; (ii) time horizons are
short; (iii) there is uncertainty surrounding the behaviour and preference
of other states and uncertainty around the nature of real-world prob-
lems; (iv) there are domestic political divisions; (v) states seek to form
 3 THEORISING THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL … 99

Table 3.1 Transgovernmental model of policy transfer networks

Level 1. Structural: Politico-cultural propinquity (Chapter 4)

In Chapter 4 I outline how the group of states known as the Anglosphere have
coalesced as not only a military alliance, but as a partnership of ‘like-minded’ entities
with commensurate values, beliefs and political aims. The strength of this affinity
articulates as a politico-cultural propinquity, in which policy officials (and the publics)
of those states identity and assign a priori legitimacy to one another, which manifests
in (in this case) preferred transnational collaboration relationships
Level 2. Emergent: Institutional-ideological networks (this Chapter)
Policy networks emerge in an environment structured by pre-existing preferences and
institutional relationships that make some policy ideas more palatable (ideologically),
and compatible (institutionally and politically) than others. These are the channels of
cross-border institutional learning and collaboration that are carved out by the
powerful forces of identity, culture, and history. That is, these exert a structural
influence on the preferences of agents and opportunities for policy transfer, through
which networks of cross-border collaboration emerge
Level 3. Agential articulation
Agents working within institutions that have established channels of preferential
learning and collaboration, as per epistemic communities fall into similar ‘geographical,
cultural, linguistic and/or political environments’, whether as network relationships or
bilateral, reinforce those channels

‘clubs’ to initiate agreements and forge dominance over policy areas at

the exclusion of ‘spoiler’ states (2007, pp. 8–10). The outcomes of trans-
governmental policy networks have potentially considerable significance
for domestic institutions insofar as they permit common solutions to be
agreed, bypassing the traditional bureaucratic processes of formal negoti-
ations of inter-government agreements through the informal relationships
formed in these policy settings (Slaughter 2004, p. 49) (Table 3.1).

The Latent Problem of Transgovernmental Network Formation

Presently both the policy transfer and transgovernmental literatures
emphasise the importance and influence of IGOs in channelling and
shaping transnational policy communication. Yet both literatures face a
prevailing challenge of explaining how specific configurations of inter-
governmental linkages emerge, independently of IGOs. This is not a new
problem for policy transfer theorists, who acknowledge that policy transfer
has failed to consider the questions of ‘to what extent and why policy
transfer has become widespread throughout western democracies in the
course of the past two decades’ with the result that the link between state
100 T. LEGRAND

structures and agency remains underdeveloped (Evans and Davies, 1999,

p. 365). Seeking to escape the intentionalist position evident in much of
transfer scholarship, Evans and Davies argue that policy transfer occurs in
a structured context which shapes the ‘context, strategies, intentions and
actions of the agents’ (1999, p. 370).
Likewise, recent transgovernmental scholars have drawn attention to
the failure to articulate the differential constitution of TGNs. Bach
and Newman, for example, posit that ‘no effort has been made to
systematically explain network membership patterns’ (2014, p. 2). This
literature maintains an uncertain position on how, beyond their imme-
diate functional orientation, networks coalesce. Though disaggregation
and the emergence of transnational policy issues feature as the central
explanation of the rise of TGNs—i.e. the exogenous conditions under
which TGNs arise—neither explains the subsequent form and patterns of
TGN. Eilstrup-Sangiovanni (2007) claims that prevailing explanations of
the transgovernmentalism phenomenon are ‘indiscriminate’ and though
they offer a general explanation of why TGNs have proliferated, fail to
adequately specify why we see such variation across policy domains and
member states. She asks: ‘why do we see seemingly see a proliferation of
TGNs? Why among some states and not others?’ (2007, p. 7). In this
sense, these scholarly concerns about how transgovernmental networks
are forged echo the concerns of assemblage scholars about the structural
conditions in which policy transfer relationships emerge.

Conclusion
Across the political science literature, the structure/agency relationship
remains central to how we conceive of political outcomes and especially
to understanding the pathway to those outcomes. Taking a critical realist
approach, as outlined above, renders a clear position on both the necessity
of recognising the importance of structure/agency dynamic and further
how we might operationalise its insights. Above I’ve argued that fixed,
predictive conceits of the socio-political sphere are unsustainable, and
that we ought to emphasise not merely the contingency of agency—that
actors are reflexive, purposes, strategic learners—but that contingency
exists within (indeed is shaped by) broader, deeper structural environ-
ment that is temporal (e.g. has histories) and spatial (e.g. has a geographic
and social expanse) and differentiated by types of structure, which might
 3 THEORISING THE ARCHITECTURE OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL … 101

be economic, social, political, cultural and so on. Such structures inter-

sect and are stratified and produce emergent phenomenon, within which
social and political relationships are formed. The case explored here—
Anglosphere policy networks—represents an ideal case to explore in this
respect, since it calls into being a series of questions that are at once struc-
tural—why do these five countries share so many common features?—and
emergent—how did these five countries come to share interests ?—and agen-
tial—why do policy officials from these five countries engage with one another
so readily?
Locating the structure/agency dynamics around network formation
has been of central importance here. Indeed, I have already briefly given
my answer to this question above, but let us repeat it here: Transgov-
ernmental networks do not form by accident, but are rather emergent
within a structural environment. This environment is saturated by states’
national identity and interests—which emerges from the intersections of
their politics, culture, language, history, institutions and traditions—and
primes their propensity for cross-border policy engagement (whether as
learning, cooperation, collaboration or otherwise) with some countries
as a priority above more than others in what Richard Rose has called a
‘propinquity’. This is the position hinted at by Slaughter when she labels
transgovernmental networks a technology that has resulted from changes
to the structure of the state: this is the focus of Chapter 4 (but to see the
model applied to the case study, skip to Chapter 7).

Notes
1. A further illustration of this might be the combination of hydrogen and
oxygen: the constitution of the two creates water, which has a distinctive
set of properties. Yet the constitution as water also modifies the properties
of the constituent elements; that is, as separate molecules (at room tempera-
ture, at sea level) oxygen and hydrogen are both gases. As a water molecule,
however, they lose this property and exist as a liquid. The intrinsic proper-
ties are not permanently modified, since they may return to their original
state under the right conditions, but their constitution as water temporarily
negates this property.
2. Indeed, this insight to the interplay of human reflexivity and structural
transformation forms the basis of Archer’s morphogenetic conceptualisation
of structure and agency.
3. For broader discussions of the impact of ‘global economic imperatives’, see
Hay and Rosamond (2002).
102 T. LEGRAND

4. This relates closely to our conceptualisation of ‘relationships’ between

actors. To say that the policy transfer network exists only for the time
the transfer ‘is occurring’ implies that the network is only incidental.
To contextualise this, consider a transaction between a shopkeeper and a
customer: to observe that a transaction has a beginning and an end is the
commonsensical position to adopt. However, the transaction is not a mate-
rial phenomena (except insofar as to say that goods are exchanged); it is a
property of the wider system of currency, value, exchange and ownership.
It is an emergent property of the wider structures.

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 CHAPTER 4

Political-Cultural Propinquity
in the Anglosphere

The Anglosphere is not only important as the central case of the book—
it also represents an unusually apt lens through which to explore the
structural dimensions of policy transfer. These structures are numerous
and stem largely from the shared history of these countries. Promi-
nently, these include ideological and administrative traditions such as
commitment to a mixed economy, legal systems based on common
law tradition, an open society, the values of liberal democracy and so
on. They share a common language in the English language and hold
to common cultural touchstones such as Judeo-Christian beliefs, holi-
days and rituals. And, most importantly, these countries have established
a military alliance—a tendency that has been cemented institutionally
through and after the Cold War in a surveillance alliance dubbed ‘the
Five Eyes’. What is more, the ‘Five Eyes’ is increasingly the five part-
ners: the array of institutional linkages within the Anglosphere is not
confined to security or defence partnership, but falls into domestic policy-
making processes too. Unpacking this dynamic is the intention of this
chapter, especially as it relates to our theoretical understanding of national
selectivity in policy transfer. One of the important contributions of the
policy assemblage scholars has been to draw attention to the impor-
tance of context and circumstance in influencing policy mobilities. More
specifically, this means we must pay closer attention to the environ-
ment which makes some sorts of learning and policy mobilities more

© The Author(s) 2021 107

T. Legrand, The Architecture of Policy Transfer,
Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55821-5_4
108 T. LEGRAND

likely than others. This chapter unpacks this proposition by exploring the
‘cluster’ of Anglosphere countries. Drawing on assemblage, constructivist
and transgovernmental perspectives, the chapter holds culture, values and
norms as critical to the coalescence of cross-border policy relations and an
important additional explanation of how transnational collaborative envi-
ronments emerge. These, it is suggested, facilitate (i) the transfer of policy
ideas to resolve domestic policy problems and (ii) establish collaborative
mechanisms to resolve transnational challenges. Consideration of these
novel public sector ‘assemblages’ deepens our empirical and theoretical
knowledge of the new spaces of transnational administration.

Cultural Propinquity and the Search for Ideas

What structural factors influence the transit of policies between juris-
dictions (and which jurisdictions)? In his 1991 article, What Is Lesson-
Drawing? Richard Rose laid the foundations of a research field that has
since been pursued by numerous public policy scholars. Rose’s depiction
of lesson-drawing is a voluntaristic, purposive process driven by policy
officials as a kind of Angewandte Sozialwissensch—‘applied social science’.
Rose dismissed the latent diffusion studies literature as embracing ‘a kind
of technocratic determinism’ rather than acknowledging the agency of
policy-makers. ‘Nearly all studies of the diffusion of measures’, he writes,
‘assume that not only are there common problems but also a common
response, regardless of partisan values or political culture’ (1991, p. 9).
For Rose, the weakness of diffusion studies was their emphasis on ‘the
sequence of diffusion, rather than concentrating upon what is transferred’.
Rather, for Rose, the background structural influence of agents’ subjective
preferences could not be ignored in the lesson-drawing process:

Subjective identification is more important than geographical propinquity

in directing search. Neighbours are not necessarily friends. Australia will
not turn to a poor neighbour for ideas but to Britain or the United States.
British government rarely looks for lessons in public policy to either of the
two countries nearest at hand, France and Ireland. (Rose 1991, p. 14)

Rose’s claim of ‘subjective identification’ becomes ‘social psychological

proximity’ in his later (1993) work and is broadly allied to broader
constructivist debates typically found in IR scholarship. Here, many
scholars attest to the powerful albeit subtle influence of endogenous
 4 POLITICAL-CULTURAL PROPINQUITY IN THE ANGLOSPHERE 109

cultural or ideational factors on not only inter-state relations, but intra-

state coalescence. Simmons and Elkins, for example, suggest that cultural
propinquity is a factor explaining how distinctive clusters of states
have transitioned towards economic liberalisation (2004, p. 171). Policy
emulation, they contend, can be plausibly attributed to underlying ‘non-
obvious’ cultural propinquity: ‘Cultural factors underlie economic and
financial structures to a greater extent than is often realized’ (2004,
p. 175; See also, Legrand 2018). The empirical evidence seems to point
in this direction too. Some diffusion analyses find signs of ‘an underlying
process of emulation linked to information flow and cultural similarity’
(Lee and Strang 2006, p. 903).
Unpacking the amorphous influence of ‘culture’ on state praxis has
recently been the preserve of constructivist work in International Rela-
tions literatures. Alexander Wendt (1994) is a stand-out figure here,
particularly his early work on collective identity formation which posits
how communities of states form at the international level. Wendt proceeds
from the view that states’ identities and interests are produced through
historically contingent interactions and not ‘exogenously given’. On
Wendt’s analysis, national status and interests are derived endogenously
from an aggregate social interpretation or understanding of those things
rather ascribing these an objective, material existence, which of course
is the primary analytical frame for orthodox realism, which only holds
‘emergent’ influence for Wendt. This is the basis of meta-theoretical
debates on the material-ideational relationship, viz. whether national or
agential interests can be derived from an objective assessment of the
outcomes of material processes and structures, or intuited subjectively
from our understanding of what material structures and processes signify
(Risse-Kappen 2016, p. 121).
For Wendt’s framework, in the international environment collective
identity formation is produced, but not predicted, by the mechanisms
of structural context, systemic processes and strategic practice. This is the
classic basis of constructivism, which stipulates that the state system of
relationships is structured not by material structures but is, rather, derived
intersubjectively:

Intersubjective systemic structures consist of the shared understanding,

expectations, and social knowledge embedded in international institutions
and threat complexes, in terms of which states define (some of) their
identities and interests. (p. 389)
110 T. LEGRAND

As suggested in the previous chapter, structures are not fixed and

immutable—the constant churn of global social, political and economic
practices means that they are structural in their consequence, insofar as
they facilitate or inhibit identity formation (Wendt, p. 390), but are far
from ineluctable determinants of state identity. Rather, Wendt identifies
two systemic processes of interdependence and transnational convergence
on domestic values as holding a more apparent impact on identity. The
former refers to the much-studied increased density of social or economic
global traffic, which produces the sense that ‘as the degree of common
fate increases, so does the incentive to identify with others’. On the
latter view, the gradual diffusion of social and cultural values, whether
as ideology or institutions, results in reduced differentiation between
nations: ‘As heterogeneity decreases, so does the rationale for identities
that assume that they are fundamentally different from us ’ (p. 390).
Finally, in strategic practice, Wendt claims agents are central to iden-
tity formation in the behavioural and rhetorical forms of interaction. By
cooperating with their peers in other states, agents are engaged in an
interactive behaviour that produces a shared identity and values:

By showing others through cooperative acts that one expects them to be

cooperators too, one changes the intersubjective knowledge in terms of
which their identities are defined. Second, through interaction actors are
also trying to project and sustain presentations of self. (p. 390)

The result of cooperative behaviours is to transform how the self and

other are understood and internalised: ‘actors are simultaneously learning
to identify with each other - to themselves as a “we” bound by certain
norms’ (p. 390). Finally, Wendt turns to rhetorical forms of interac-
tion. He argues that rhetoric can have similar effects as behaviour, but
are communicated as, inter alia, consciousness raising, dialogue, discus-
sion and persuasion, education, ideological labour, political argument
and symbolic action. These efforts represent a third-order conception
of power insofar as they can shape how others understand their own
interests. Crucially, Wendt suggests:

The goal of rhetorical practices in collective action is to create solidarity;

thus they may have an important expressive function independent of their
instrumental value in realising collective goals. (p. 391)
 4 POLITICAL-CULTURAL PROPINQUITY IN THE ANGLOSPHERE 111

There is a subtle but important structure-agency dynamic at play here:

agents are undoubtedly influenced by a pre-existing understanding of
their identity and interests, understood as their intersubjective structural
environment, but in cooperating with others they can transform how
other state agents understand their environment, changing the structural
environment.
Wendt’s work has been important to a range of literatures, not
least those concerned with the movement and translation of policies
between states, communities and regions, such as NATO (Risse-Kappen
1996, 2016), South America (Mesquita 2016; Santos 2015) and Europe
(Rumelili and Cebeci 2015; See Hebel and Lenz 2013 for a summary
of how identity manifests in foreign policy-making). Some insights are
instructive for the purposes of this chapter. First, collective identities are
not (necessarily) determined by geographic proximity, but are subject
to structural endogenous influences that coalesce inter-state groups that
emerge from shared identities, norms and values. Agents are embedded
in an intersubjective structural environment, but their actions are neither
determined by structure nor are the outcomes of agency inconsequen-
tial for the structure itself: structure and agency are mutually constitutive.
Second, the rhetoric of cooperation is just as important as the behaviours
of cooperation in reinforcing collective identity. That is, where relation-
ships are made tangible by collaborations, the coalescence around a shared
value and identity is cemented by rhetoric acclaiming that collaboration.
Notwithstanding the value of Wendt and associated constructivist
endorsements of identity formation, we might also express some reser-
vations. Though often accused of a ‘rump materialism’ (Blyth 2010,
p. 169), Wendt’s analysis is one that is forward-looking. Historical
configurations and relationships that prefigure collective identities do
not feature prominently. Yet, the dynamics posited by Wendt do not
become irrelevant in these examples, but indeed are ever more perti-
nent to explaining why historical alliances persist and/or deepen. Second,
there are few clues about the genesis of values that underpin cooperative
behaviour. From where do these emerge? And are some more powerful
than others? For many constructivists, national values, identity, norms and
interests are influenced by long-standing endogenous national dynamics
of policy traditions or social culture.
112 T. LEGRAND

Cultural Propinquity and Identity Consolidation

Understanding how national identities emerge is as much a matter of
historical, anthropological and social analysis as it is political, and here
we find not one but many possible literatures across the disciplines.
My concern here is not with the emergent processes that produce or
lead to hetero—or homogenous national identities, but rather with the
proposition that we can aggregate national identities and make these
discernible—perhaps imperfectly and certainly with disputes—by virtue
of some common frames of reference. Typically, national identities are
constituted by those who lay claim to that identity over time and usually,
though certainly not true of diasporas, situated against a place. Values
change, and they can change rapidly. The sorts of mainstream social
values that tabloid readers might not have blinked at in 1960s Britain
or Australia or USA, of casual sexism, homophobia or racial discrimina-
tion, for example, are abhorred today. Equally, the large-scale migration
of the same era widened the spectrum of ethnicities in those countries to
weaken any claims of ethnicity-based national identity (notwithstanding
the efforts of far-right nationalist movements). So, if social values trans-
form over time, are we to assume that national identities are unfixed
and mercurial, forever resistant to characterisation? Of course, the answer
is no: there are a great many persistent features of national identity, of
which history and mythology are almost always prominent, that produces
distinctive visages of identity(ies). Yet, the precise forms of and precepts
that make up national identities and claimed by subjects is not for this or
any other researcher to say, and not least because no two claims are likely
to be the same. Rather, and pursuant to a constructivist stance, we can
more readily claim that identity is something imagined and constructed
and reconstructed by subjects.
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities probes the question of
how nationness or nationality is produced. Nations, he suggests, can
be regarded as an ‘imagined political community’ and ‘cultural artefacts
of a particular kind’. On Anderson’s view, members of a community
internalise an ‘image of their communion’ shared with others in that
community, which exists as ‘a deep, horizontal comradeship’. There is a
distinct separateness between those of the community and those beyond it
(2006, p. 7). David Miller argues that ‘the story a nation tells itself about
its past is a selective one’ (2016, p. 448). That is to say, that discourses
of nationness matter very much in the process of forming widespread
and shared meanings of a cultural identity (cf. Wodak 2009). National
 4 POLITICAL-CULTURAL PROPINQUITY IN THE ANGLOSPHERE 113

identities are conjured by individuals, through shared dialogues, to the

extent that they internalise some set of criteria that give rough meaning
to ‘nationness’, which incidentally for individuals might include a sense
of belonging to one, multiple or no national identities; or that conflicts
may arise between competing depictions of national identify—amongst
Nordic countries, for example, Hansen suggests a ‘state nationalism’ rubs
up against a ‘cultural nationalism’ (2003, p. 2).
Given the imponderables, it would be reckless to claim there are fixed
criteria to identity; indeed, the criteria used may or may not be exclusive
to a community—a national penchant for tea might be as stereotypically
British as it is Chinese, Kenyan or Indian, for example—and it might
include psyche, geography, institutions, customs, religious beliefs, ethnic-
ities, a particular reading of the community’s history, language or dialect,
social norms and laws, and so on. How these criteria are rendered is a
matter of ongoing social construction, in which some narratives about
nationness are more persuasive, or otherwise appealing, than others. And
so, there emerge renderings of nationness that dominate more than
others, oftentimes irrespective of the veracity of the claims that constitute
them.
Taking the constructivist tack allows us, first, to acknowledge that
national identity is not intransitive, fixed object, but fungible and indeter-
minate (and therefore almost certainly unhelpful for the sorts of predic-
tions that positivist social science might seek). Second, it gives greater
licence to look at the use of national identities in politics; how national
identities are constructed, framed and deployed. Third, it provides a
stronger hint about how agents hold pre-existing ideas of alikeness or
affinities with states where the imagined elements of nationness overlap,
ally and/or correspond.

Towards Transgovernmental Propinquity

Uncovering shared or overlapping national identities is, I argue, central to
understanding the pathways and channels of cross-border exchange. This
is not a novel position: the world is crisscrossed by culturally-based inter-
state alliances that exist as the legacies of a colonial era, medieval conquest
or pre-Westphalian monarchical alliance. I have suggested elsewhere that
this is a form of cultural centripetalism (Legrand 2019). These inter-
state communities have proceeded not (always) from the convenience of
geographic proximity, of which the EU and ASEAN are examples, but
114 T. LEGRAND

shared socio-historical narratives of a shared or overlapping identity. The

Nordic countries are an instructive example. The contemporary Nordic
Council, ‘Norden’, represents the formal expression of political cooper-
ation that proceeds between the states, especially but not exclusively on
cross-border issues. The basis of the collaboration, as the name suggests,
is one born of the identity of Nordism and the culmination of centuries of
factions, fractures and friendship (cf. Hansen and Wæver 2003). Though
just 27 million, it is the 12th largest economy in the world. Certainly, this
is a geographic grouping, but it is a community that expresses a distinct
historical and cultural shared identity set against global forces:

Nordic co-operation promotes Nordic and regional interests and values in

a globalised world. Shared Nordic values make the Region one of the most
innovative and competitive in the world.1

Similar cultural coalescence is apparent amongst the ‘Visegrad group’ of

Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. The official Visegrad
website states that these countries ‘have always been part of a single
civilization sharing cultural and intellectual values and common roots
in diverse religious traditions, which they wish to preserve and further
strengthen’. Bordering Norden are the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania, which in turn collaborate via the Baltic Assembly, established
in 1990.
Looking farther afield, the Community of Portuguese Language
Countries—Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa—has steadily
expanded its membership since it was established in 1996, to include
Lusophone countries from four continents including Angola, Brazil, Cape
Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe,
East Timor and Guinea-Bissau. An artefact of the colonial era, this is a
multilateral collaboration of states that share a structural dependency of a
common language and a commitment to inter-governmental cooperation.
They explicitly aim to ‘Consolidate the national and multinational cultural
reality that confers upon the Portuguese-speaking countries an identity of
their own’. The CPLP is a not inconsiderable undertaking: in 2013, its
collective GDP was US$2.629 trillion and had a population of around
267m people,2 around half of the EU’s population of 508m and consid-
erably less than its GDP of US$18.03 trillion.3 These are some examples
amongst a range of inter-state alliances and contextualise the inter-state
cultural grouping of interest to this book: the Anglosphere.
 4 POLITICAL-CULTURAL PROPINQUITY IN THE ANGLOSPHERE 115

The Anglosphere
Amongst the numerous inter-state alliances that exist today, the Anglo-
sphere represents a prototypical example of shared or overlapping national
identity. It begins with the UK’s imperial history: arguably, no country has
benefited more from the colonial era than the UK. The British Empire
was the express carrier of the country’s putative ‘civilising’ values. At its
peak, it covered more than a quarter of the globe, dominating trade and
international politics. Though its colonial territories have almost all been
relinquished (with some notable exceptions, not least the Lagos Islands),
the strategies of colonialism included installing systems of education in
English and a comprehensive programme of establishing political institu-
tions as pastiches of Westminster. Though the withdrawal of the UK from
Africa, South and Central America and Asia was largely complete by the
1960s, more than half a century later a certain ‘stickiness’ of aspects of
the colonial legacy can be discerned. Politically, the Commonwealth of
Nations (‘the Commonwealth’) now exists as a community of Britain’s
former colonial territories. As with the Portuguese CPLP, colonial-era
artefacts remain important dimensions of Commonwealth national or
community identities, for better or worse. Immigration flows and educa-
tion systems conforming to historiocities reproduce, whilst changing, the
colonial relationship. The path-dependent costs of changing institutions,
systems and infrastructure are powerful deterrents to wholesale rescinding
of those artefacts, even assuming the existence of a political will to do so.
Against this backdrop, it is widely held that the institutions of the
colonial era retain a hand in the transfer of ideas between those juris-
dictions. Specifically, the legacy of a ‘Westminster’ system of government,
it is argued, promotes the commensurability (from the perspectives of
legal and administrative traditions) of policies. Peter Larmour has written
authoritatively on the transfer of the Westminster system across South
Pacific nations, which has occurred ‘almost irrespective of underlying
social and political conditions’ (2002, p. 39). Larmour’s claims are
structural and contingent: he concludes that ‘Westminster succeeds not
because of its internal virtues (which are somewhat arbitrary), or its appro-
priateness to local conditions (which may not matter). It succeeds because
it was there first’ (p. 53). Notwithstanding Larmour’s view of the relative
immutability of Westminster structures, Corbett and Veenendaal’s anal-
ysis of Pacific and Caribbean small states finds degrees of institutional
variability that suggest Westminster ‘is not a fixed institutional category’
116 T. LEGRAND

and ‘elite actors in particular have a considerable amount of discretion

over the direction in which political practices and institutional reforms
take’ (2015, p. 442).

The Anglosphere’s Historic Alliance

Notwithstanding the inter-state relationships maintained through
Commonwealth, it is a small cluster of ‘Anglo’ states that have engineered
the most enduring and intensive inter-state alliance. There are a number
of definitions of the Anglosphere available but Willetts puts it well: ‘At its
heart is the Special Relationship between Great Britain and the USA but it
includes New Zealand, Australia, Canada and, in interesting and compli-
cated ways, Ireland and India’ (2007, p. 60). The special relationship,
sorely tested under the Trump presidency, has been forged through peace
and war. For Jan Fichtner, the two countries share ‘deep common political
and socioeconomic roots’ which gives the footing for ‘Anglo-America’s
dominant structural power’ in finance (2017, p. 3). Duncan Bell depicts
a late Victorian ‘rapprochement’ which cemented the Anglo-American
alliance and secured the commitment of US troops to the Western Front
during World War 1 and paved the path for the proliferation of informal
transatlantic networks and institutions (2016, p. 197). The Anglo mili-
tary alliance, which in World War I included Australian, Canadian, Irish,
New Zealander troop commitments (and significant troop contributions
from across the wider Commonwealth), persisted beyond World War I
into World War II and recent military engagements in Afghanistan, Syria
and Iraq (see Holland 2020), and beyond.
John Halligan (2015) comments that this Anglo-American iden-
tity, which he finds is ‘historically formed and culturally supported by
language and heritage’, plays out in the cultural legacy and institutional
relationships between Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand:

Location and institutions also play a part. The antipodean countries of

Australia and New Zealand have closely linked pathways, and Canadian
development has reflected that nation’s proximity to the US, although
both pairings involve at least one significant difference in governance struc-
tures. The combination of federalism and Westminster has linked Canada
and Australia, whereas unitary government has produced a special bond
between Britain and New Zealand’. (2015, p. 61)
 4 POLITICAL-CULTURAL PROPINQUITY IN THE ANGLOSPHERE 117

The Anglosphere states institutional relationship has a shared historic

basis. Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce identify common roots of the
Anglosphere state relationship as ‘liberal, protestant, free-market, demo-
cratic and English-speaking’ (2016, p. 304). These emerge from the
colonial legacy from which path-dependent features have become estab-
lished and now cemented in their respective national identities and
interests. Amongst others, the Westminster facsimile state architecture
remains widely in place (with the USA as a notable exception), along
with commensurate liberal democratic institutions and common law
jurisprudence. Together, these operate as structural compatibilities that
facilitate, in the least, state relationships between these analogues and,
potentially, direct their global policy engagement towards one another.
Indeed, Keohane and Nye concluded ‘regularized policy coordination’ of
the British Commonwealth might operate as a precursor of ‘transgov-
ernmental elite networks’ which connect government officials ‘by ties
of common interest, professional orientation, and personal friendship’
(1974, p. 46).

The Anglosphere Today

In recent years, and especially during the querulous negotiation period in
the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in 2016, prominent neoconserva-
tive thinkers sought to equate the Anglosphere with a particular notion
of global stability and security. Lawrence Mead, for example, wrote the
following: ‘The Anglo nations - singly or in concert - have taken a special
responsibility for the world order. Somehow they are available to deal
with chaos and aggression abroad, as other countries are not’ (2005,
p. 1). As a consequence of this neo-conservative cheerleading, scholars
have been reluctant to embrace a concept with such strong connotations
of nineteenth-century colonialism and military interventionism, and so it
seems ‘The Anglosphere is unattractive as an analytical category because
it carries the burden of political and normative reappropriations’ (Vucetic
2011, p. 6).
In the international domain, Vucetic observes that the Anglosphere
operates as a ‘distinct international, transnational, civilizational, and impe-
rial entity within the global society’ (2011, p. 2). Further, within the
systems of public administration, there is an Anglo-Saxon state tradition
that ‘draws a clearer boundary between state and civil society; there is no
legal basis to the state; and civil servants have no constitutional position’
118 T. LEGRAND

(Bevir and Richards 2009, p. 10). Some of these traits can be regarded
as a priori; that is, they are independent variables from which others
emanate.

• A first-order legacy: the shared heritage of the colonial era. Colonial

heritage—exerted via British imperialism—precedes all else.
• Second-order structures might then be regarded as those derived
directly from the colonial era: English culture and language, reli-
gion, precepts of liberal democracy, legal philosophy, democratic
participation; mercantilism or capitalism, state infrastructure and so
on.
• Third-tier characteristics —related to policy—emerge from this
milieu: policy protocols, political partisanship, legitimacy and equity,
social justice norms and, indeed, perhaps elitism, class and gender
roles and so on.

New Public Management and Institutional

Alignment in the Anglosphere
‘New Public Management’ is a moniker retrospectively bestowed on a
series of government reforms that began sometime in the 1980s and
continued through into the 1990s. Though the precise criteria of NPM
reforms remain subject to debate, there is consensus that the core tenets
of marketization, managerialism and measurement were central to “goal-
centred and information-based approaches, including program budgeting,
[and] ‘management by objectives’” (Dollery et al. 2008, p. 13; see also
Duffy 2017, Bjørnholt and Larsen 2014). These were administrative tools
borrowed from the private sector that prima facie would produce public
services that were leaner, cheaper and allowed the end-user more choice
by new technologies of governing, such as arms-length management;
agencification; target-setting; and public-private partnerships. Though it
was right-leaning administrations that midwifed the NPM reforms, Hood
suggests ‘there seems to be no simple relationship between the political
stripe of governments (in so far as that can be gauged) and the degree of
emphasis laid on NPM’ (Hood 1995, p. 107).
The era of NPM induced a series of structural changes that were trans-
formative to many countries, but especially those of the Anglosphere.
 4 POLITICAL-CULTURAL PROPINQUITY IN THE ANGLOSPHERE 119

Yates, Woelert, Millar and O’Connor note: ‘Public administration reforms

that were inspired by NPM principles and ideas swept throughout the
Anglosphere from the 1980s onward’ (2017). Similarly, Common finds:
‘it appears that this particular global “revolution” in the public sector is
in fact confined to a small handful of English-speaking countries, notably
the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand’ (Common 1998, p.
X; see also Hood 1991; Krahmann 2003; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011;
Rosta-Miklos 2011). B Guy Peters and Jon Pierre contrast politicisa-
tion of ‘Anglo-American’ systems of administration with ‘‘Napoleonic’,
Scandinavian and Germanic traditions.

All of the Anglo-American systems have been affected heavily by the

ideas of NPM but the United Kingdom appears to have begun a
process of politicization well before those ideas became popular, and fully
implemented. (2004, p. 9)

NPM and Institutional Preconditions in the Anglosphere

Why did the NPM reforms sweep so quickly and specifically through
Anglo states? Pollitt and Bouckaert suggest that commonalities in exec-
utive government, administrative culture and ministers and senior public
service relationships can promote the uptake of specific configurations of
policy-related measures: ‘Thus, certain regimes look as though they are
much more open to the ‘performance-driven’, market-favouring ideas of
the NPM than others: particularly the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ countries, Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA’ (2011, p. 73). This is
affirmed by Finkelstein:

But the development of a common approach to issues of public manage-

ment is an altogether different matter. This agenda, which our fellow
Europeans are currently inclined to label as ‘Anglo-Saxon’, has a common
point of origin in attitudes towards state bureaucracies and a shared agenda
in the so-called ‘New Public Management’. (Finkelstein 2000, p. ix)

According to Pierre, normative and structural preconditions made the

adoption of NPM reforms easier to accomplish in some states more than
others: ‘particularly the Anglo-American democracies and the Antipodes
– than in others; a pattern which substantiates the role of democratic
120 T. LEGRAND

institutions in adapting global concepts of reform to national norma-

tive and structural preconditions’ (Pierre 2013, p. 121). The structural
preconditions and normative commitments specific to the Anglosphere
are explored above, but almost certainly include variables such as a
common language and ideological commitments commensurate with the
reforms sought. Christopher Pollitt makes a contiguous observation on
the dominance and decline of Anglophone public management models.
Pollitt suggests that as a topic public management is dominated by Anglo-
sphere countries; yet, whilst they have global prominence, due partly to
the endorsements of international organisations, this has not translated
into global dominance in the ‘international marketplace for ideas’:

In sum, we need to understand the dominance of Anglosphere public

management thinking in terms of a developing international network of
officials, consultants and academics who, with institutional support and the
immense good fortune of having the English language as mother tongue,
achieved a very strong position in the increasingly international marketplace
for ideas. (2015, p. 6)

The era of New Public Management is relevant here for three reasons.
First, in and of itself, the reforms themselves were forms of policy
transfer, but as noted by Finkelstein above, NPM emerged partly
from the shared philosophy of public sector management that already
prevailed in these states: that is, the structural and ideological condi-
tions in the Anglosphere states were instrumental (though perhaps not
outright determinants) in their adoption and implementation of New
Public Management reforms. As Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011) note, the
performance-driven and market-favouring approaches—structural condi-
tions—of these states facilitated the uptake of incumbent to NPM. For
other authors, the importance of national institutions and cultures is
affirmed by the converging tendencies arising from NPM precepts (Flynn
and Strehl 1996; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2000), and it is for this reason
that Newman suggests that NPM underwent more extensive develop-
ment in the Anglo-Saxon countries of Australia, Canada, New Zealand,
the UK and the USA than elsewhere (Janet Newman, p. 73). Against
this backdrop, it should come as no surprise that officials of the Anglo-
sphere states undertaken well-documented bilateral policy transfers in the
aftermath of NPM reforms (i.e. Daguerre and Taylor-Gooby 2004; Jones
and Newburn 2002; Legrand 2012; McGuire 2001) as it suggests that
 4 POLITICAL-CULTURAL PROPINQUITY IN THE ANGLOSPHERE 121

domestic officials naturally look to the experiences of counterparts in

managing the persistent artefacts of NPM. On this perspective, a policy
transfer approach indicates that policy officials are concerned not just with
inter-government collaboration, but with deriving the best lessons avail-
able from counterparts sharing a similar set of challenges and, crucially, a
shared mindset of what is possible and desirable in public administration.
Second, the institutional alignment through which NPM reforms
emerged also set the scene for a reconfiguration of the social contract
under the terms of the Third Way philosophy (this is the focus of the
next chapter).
Third, and the focus of the concluding section in this chapter, one
of the key products of this era was a change in the relationship between
the state and non-state providers of public services (indeed, it widened
the opportunities for non-state providers of public services) and between
agencies themselves and with the mode of policy-making and delivery
supplanted—or supplemented at least—by governing through networks
with greater decision-making autonomy granted to administrative leaders.

NPM and Networks as a Technology of Governance

One of the major consequences of New Public Management reforms
was to weaken forms of hierarchical and centralised decision-making and
introduce the era of network-based decision-making and implementation.
On the former, the loosening of political control by the executive sets the
scene for more autonomous forms of policy decision. Christensen finds
that ‘Formal changes give subordinate leaders and institutions increased
authority and there is often normative pressure to keep political executives
from interfering’. The downstream effect of this is that administrative
leaders have acquired greater authority and latitude to act (Christensen
2006, p. 458). R. A. W. Rhodes situates this dynamic in the Anglo-
governance model, which frames the rise of decentralised and fragmented
collection of decision-making and policy-setting organs in the 1980s and
1990s (Rhodes 1990, 1994, 1997; Marsh and Rhodes 1992)—the era
which entailed ‘a shift from hierarchy to markets to networks’ (Rhodes
2007, p. 1254). As the state’s own services were rolled-up, private sector
providers were given preferential access to bid for and deliver key public
services. Not only private sector but also community and not-for-profit
organisations were regarded as partners in the determination of policy
122 T. LEGRAND

settings, and their delivery too. Noting the array of network forms across
social science, Rhodes defines networks thus:

Policy networks are sets of formal institutional and informal linkages

between governmental and other actors structured around shared if
endlessly negotiated beliefs and interests in public policy making and imple-
mentation. These actors are interdependent and policy emerges from the
interactions between them. (Rhodes 2006, p. 426)

In Rhodes’ disaggregated conception of the state, ‘networks’ are

presented as inter-dependent relationships between government and non-
government actors, within which policy aims and implementation emerge
in a process of lobbying, consultation and bargaining between the inter-
ests of network participants. Because of the variable nature of network
relationships, there is a spectrum of network types that range from
loosely-cohered issue networks to tightly-bound policy communities.

[a policy community is…] a limited number of participants with

some groups consciously excluded; frequent and high-quality interaction
between all members of the community on all matters related to the policy
issues; consistency in values, membership, and policy outcomes which
persist over time; consensus, with the ideology, values, and broad policy
preferences shared by all participants; and exchange relationships based on
all members of the policy community controlling some resources. (2006,
pp. 427–428)

The rise in administrative autonomy from political control and greater use
of networks are integral to the trends of the disaggregation of the state
Anne-Marie Slaughter refers to in A New World Order. Public adminis-
tration scholars are already alert to the notion of the disaggregation of
the state, since it refers—at the domestic level—to the moving locus of
power, whereby hierarchical models of decision-making are being replaced
or supplanted by alternate means of decision-making. And so the ques-
tion of ‘who governs and how’ is the logical, and urgent, quest for those
who apprehend fragmenting and disaggregated policy processes (Benson
and Jordan 2011, p. 373). Yet a second trend—at the international
level—complicates this picture even more. The influence of international
finance and markets can be as important to domestic social and economic
outcomes as government interventions, and so draws power even further
away from the state and the reach of domestic officials (Bevir 2008).
 4 POLITICAL-CULTURAL PROPINQUITY IN THE ANGLOSPHERE 123

This is the surging transnationalism, discussed in the opening chapter of

this book, in which modern societies exist in ‘complex interdependency’
(Keohane and Nye 1972). The rise in collective action problems—climate
change being a prime example—requires states to give up some of their
autonomy and perhaps sovereignty too in order to secure gains. But with
whom should states collaborate to ameliorate the surging threats of the
international domain and secure their national interests?

Understanding the Anglosphere

in the Era of Networks
Above we have traced the contours of a long-standing and steadily solid-
ifying cross-national cultural propinquity in and of the Anglosphere. The
effects of the colonial era were transformative for the (mis)fortunes of the
globe in many respects, but the most powerful legacy remains the shaping
of international alliances and especially the prevailing order of the Anglo-
sphere states. Theorising the role of culture and identity in state behaviour
has been the preserve of constructivist International Relations theorists
and especially Alexander Wendt’s work on the nature of cross-national
collaboration and national identity. As discussed here, Wendt reveals that
cooperative behaviour between states results in the cementing of collective
norms and collective identity; that is, national interests become increas-
ingly coterminous with the group’s interests and establishing solidarity.
It is in strategic practices of behaviour and rhetoric, Wendt argues, that
coheres shared identities and establishes shared norms. This has two impli-
cations here: first, it hints at the material impact of national identity in
directing who to learn from. Second, this is a recursive relationship insofar
as the effect of learning is to produce greater mutual identification of
interests and norms. Third, we gain a potentially greater understanding
from Wendt on why, and with what repercussions, the Anglosphere states
have cohered around common interests, identity and norms.
The ‘Anglosphere’ is a multifaced conceptual framing and laden
normatively with the overtones of the imperial mindset and more than
a few hints of new conservatism in the contemporary era (see Wellings
2020). The military and defence alliance, and not least in respect of
the combined signals intelligence facilities, is the longest-standing insti-
tutional manifestation of this alliance, but is far from the only one. The
opening pages of the introduction point to the forms of public policy
collaboration within this group that are apparent today, and Chapter 7
124 T. LEGRAND

charts an even wider range of Anglosphere policy networks. Framing

this relationship requires us to engage with the Anglosphere terminology
to assign some analytical role for the concept. In the framing advanced
above, we can conceive of the Anglosphere in respect of the five core
states—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA—and a series
of nested shared traits: the first-order legacy of the shared heritage of
the colonial era; second-order structures that derive from the colonial era,
such as English culture and language, religion, precepts of liberal democ-
racy, legal philosophy, bureaucratic traditions, mercantilism or capitalism,
and state infrastructure; and third-order characteristics that emerge from
these: policy protocols, political partisanship, legitimacy and equity, and
social justice norms.
Situated within this conceptual framing of the Anglosphere nested
traits is the substantive case of institutional alignment under the NPM
paradigm, which developed in parallel across the five countries. Though
it is beyond the empirical focus of this book to tell a causal story of the
spread of administrative ideas within specific countries, the overwhelming
consensus amongst public administration literature is that, globally, NPM
reforms emanated largely from and to Anglosphere states. It is argued
by some (e.g. Pierre 2013; Finkelstein 2000), this was because of the
common administrative traditions and cultures present in those coun-
tries—a consequence of the colonial era’s propagation of Anglo-Saxon
governing institutions and processes, I argue.
The next chapter explores the relationship between NPM, the Third
Way and welfare-to-work ideas. Here, I want to explore the structural
change that ensued from NPM: the turn to networks. I suggest that
networks as mode of domestic governance, yet the transgovernmental
dimension is less explored as TGNs. First, these are the countries that,
with shared institutional, ideological and cultural commitments, had by
the 1990s established a distinctive approach to restructuring the rela-
tionship between the state and the public. The New Public Management
reforms established not only the groundwork for the adoption of Third
Way ideological and administrative innovations, as we will see in the
next chapter, it provided the opportunity structures for future collabo-
ration and policy learning in the 1990s and 2000s. Second, the structural
transformation of NPM had the effect of precipitating network gover-
nance, which itself facilitated the process of sharing policy information
and learning between countries that had forged a commensurate system
of governing.
 4 POLITICAL-CULTURAL PROPINQUITY IN THE ANGLOSPHERE 125

Notes
1. https://www.norden.org/en/information/formal-nordic-co-operation.
2. Taken from: https://hub.globalccsinstitute.com/publications/carbon-cap
ture-and-storage-community-portuguese-language-countries-opportunities-
and-challenges/1-cplp-community-portuguese-language-countries.
3. Taken from World Bank: data.worldbank.orbg.

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 CHAPTER 5

The Third Way and the Landscape of Welfare

Reform: Australia, UK and USA

Introduction
This chapter, along with Chapters 6 and 7, constitutes the empirical
component of this book. Together, the three chapters trace a lockstep
ideational evolution across the Anglosphere, which includes (i) the adop-
tion of NPM, against a background of already strong proximity; (ii)
the transition into Third Way ideas and the production of the need to
transform welfare; (iii) into the establishment of highly interactive and
interpersonal elite networks. As the previous chapter suggests, the history
of amity, exchange and collaboration between the policy officials of the
Anglosphere prefigures a range of compatible institutional settings. We
might describe these as concomitant, but not (yet) convergent: rather,
my suggestion so far is that the historical context of the Anglosphere
operates as a structural influence, but not as a structural determinant.
This chapter explores the ideological background to what is, ostensibly at
least, the beginning of the era of Anglosphere shared institutional archi-
tecture. First a methodological proviso: the empirical data relied on here
is drawn from Australia, the UK and the USA: within the constraints of
resources, the project research did not have capacity to explore Canada
and New Zealand, though Chapter 7 does expand briefly into these
countries too. So, the purpose here is to undertake a sort of ideational
archaeology in these three countries, tracing the heritage and intellectual
development of the Anglo model of welfare-to-work. I approach this

© The Author(s) 2021 129

T. Legrand, The Architecture of Policy Transfer,
Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55821-5_5
130 T. LEGRAND

by looking back at the conditions that gave rise to the prevailing atti-
tudes towards welfare support during the 1990s in Australia, UK and
USA. Most noticeable within this period is the impact that Third Way
ideas were having upon government policy-makers, and the consequent
rhetorical emphases on ‘rights and responsibilities’ which were packaged
with renewed conceptions of community. The similarities in discourse
and philosophy between the three countries are striking and display a
shared commitment to projects of welfare restructuring. Here we survey
the landscape of welfare politics in Australia, the UK and USA from the
mid-90s to the early 2000s, drawing attention to the policy settings of
active labour market policies (ALMPs) of each country, drawing attention
to the salient features of each, since the sheer magnitude of programmes
make it impossible to examine each and every one in a meaningful way.
So, I have selected the main frontline programmes and ALMP measures
for each country from the late 1990s to early 2000s. In the case of
the USA and its plethora of state-administered systems, I have selected
those measures and programmes that the 1996 Personal Responsibility
and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA hereafter) legis-
lation endorses, although of course some of the more widely-known state
approaches will also be mentioned.
The chapter is divided into two sections. The first section begins with
an overview of ALMP and what the term has come to mean. It explores
the constituent programmes of ALMP and links these with the philosoph-
ical commitments of the Third Way. An examination of the Third Way is
seen as crucial to understanding the governing ethos of the governing
actors in Australia, the UK and the USA during the 1990s. The chapter
unpacks the ideas most closely associated with the Third Way and goes
on to demonstrate how welfare-to-work policies grew out of Third Way
ideology. In the second section, the chapter examines the welfare policy
portfolios of the USA, the UK and Australia, respectively, during the
1990s. First, it looks at the political development of the PRWORA legis-
lation in the USA (highlighting the strong Republican influence over the
policy). Second, it tracks the development of the New Deal in the UK
with a strong emphasis on the introduction of the welfare-to-work ideas.
The introductory period is seen as crucial as it is in this period that the
influence of overseas policies is most apparent. Finally, it addresses the
development of two associated policy platforms in Australia: the notion
 5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 131

of ‘mutual obligation’ and its heavy parallels with the Third Way and puni-
tive welfare policies; and Paul Keating’s introduction of Working Nation.
The chapter concludes by arguing that the philosophical commitments
of the three policy approaches in these countries were commensurate
and gave rise to parallel commitments to restructure labour market and
welfare politics.

Invigorating the Workforce: The

Rise of Active Labour Market Policy

None among the poor should be idle, provided, of course, that he is fit for
work by his age and health… Therefore, no one must be permitted to live
indolently in the state; rather, as in a well-ordered home, everyone has his
own role and its related tasks to perform. As the saying goes, ‘By doing
nothing, men learn to do evil.’ Jean Luis Vives (1492–1540 CE)

Failure to overcome successive employment crises in the 1980s and

1990s prompted conservative USA, Australian and UK governments to
re-examine the state’s engagement with labour markets. Unable to manip-
ulate demand-based levers to halt rising levels of unemployment, policy
officials began to seek alternative policy levers: ‘Dissatisfaction with the
efficacy of narrowly defined policies of demand management and mone-
tary control led to greater interest in examining the impact of supply side
constraints, especially in the labour market, on economic performance’
(Banks et al. 2005, p. 62). The move to supply-side management in the
early 1990s stimulated a wholesale shift in labour market thinking; one
that was marked by an increasing reluctance to interfere with market
movements. Policy-makers claimed that the corresponding shift in the
operations, functions and logics of capitalism meant that ‘the basis for
state intervention, the mixed economy, nationalisation and the provi-
sion of public services, [had] been radically undermined’ (Ferguson et al.
2002, p. 132). Notably, this approach is prominent within Anglo-Saxon
political traditions. In Welfare and Work in the Open Economy, Scharpf and
Schmidt contrast ‘Continental’, ‘Scandinavian’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ welfare
states (Table 5.1):
Within the Anglo-Saxon tradition, it is axiomatic to the neoliberal
model of active labour market policy (ALMP) that the available pool of
labour is able to be both adaptable to supply the caprices of the national
132 T. LEGRAND

Table 5.1 Constellations of welfare states (Scharpf and Schmidt 2000, p. 11)

Characteristics and Anglo-Saxon Scandinavian Continental

properties

Rights Individual Individual Family

Responsibilities Individual Collective Collective
Claiming principles Need Citizenship Work/family needs
Beneficiaries Poor All citizens Male breadwinner
Goal Poverty alleviation Equality/income Income
maintenance maintenance
Social security Flat-rate Flat-rate/contribution Contribution
transfer related related
Caring services Family/market State Family/intermediary
groups
Type of financing Taxation Taxation/contribution Contribution
Source of financing State/market State State/earner
Gender and status Neutral Pro-equality Differentiated
effect

(post-industrial, post-Keynesian) economy, and has a constant surplus of

available labour. Labour market flexibility is the crucial dictum of this new
logic: creating a market of skilled labour that can adapt to the rises and
falls in job-demand across the range of industrial sectors. The pay-off is
seen as twofold: (i) it provides a steady source of skilled labour which
contributes to economic stability and growth, and (ii) it offers individ-
uals more opportunities to access gainful employment and thus reduces
welfare dependency and expenditure (Rueda 2006).
Welfare-to-work policy is the most prominent example of ALMP
(De Koning et al. 2004). Using a combination of incentive (or puni-
tive) programmes and interventions, welfare-to-work policies cajole the
unemployed into the labour market directly or indirectly via transitory
voluntary work schemes which offer the work experience necessary to
make an individual ‘more employable’. The central principle of ALMP
is that workers must be equipped with sufficient skills or resources
to meet the changing employment needs/requirements. More general
levers to increase flexibility include: (i) the avoidance of mechanisms
that could increase wage levels above productivity levels; (ii) the removal
of barriers to mobility (such as non-transferable pension schemes); (iii)
the introduction of flexible working hours (Brodsky 1994, p. 55); or
(iv) the weakening of the employer–employee contract, making it easier
 5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 133

for employers to jettison excess labour (and all that entails for unions).
The direct applications of ALMPs are most often seen through various
government employment initiatives. Common examples of these schemes
include:

• Training and education: this might be vocational or offer assistance

in remedial skills (literacy, numeracy, etc.) (OECD 2001, p. 82).
• Youth schemes: using employment programmes and/or apprentice-
ships to give school leavers an employment start (OECD 2001,
p. 82).
• Employment subsidies: offering employers financial incentives to
employ ‘hard-to-place’ workers (Layard 2001, p. 2).
• Job-seeking help: offering information and support appropriately
tailored to the job seeker by matching their skills and experience
to employment opportunities (Layard 2001, p. 2).
• Work experience: offering the unemployed the chance to gain work
experience on government-sponsored and/or charity work schemes
(Layard 2001, p. 2).

These initiatives constitute the supportive mechanisms underpinning

welfare-to-work policy, insofar as they create the channels for the unem-
ployed to access job opportunities. However, they are accompanied by
a concomitant set of punitive measures to provide an inducement for
the unemployed to engage with the given opportunities. Variously, these
measures include: a reduction in the amount paid to the unemployed to
subsistence levels; time limits on claiming unemployment benefit; limits
on the number of job offers an opportunity may refuse; or making benefit
payments conditional on regular contact with the employment agency:

Welfare-to-work must involve the principle of mutual obligation. The state

has an obligation to ensure that offers of work are channelled to every
unemployed person within a reasonable time after becoming unemployed.
But in return the citizen should take advantage of those offers, and lose
some or all of their benefit if they do not do so, unless there are medical
reasons to the contrary. (De Koning et al. 2004, p. 11: Joint International
Unit, DWP/DfES)
134 T. LEGRAND

The Third Way and Its Advocates

The ideational foundations of welfare-to-work merits close attention,
for these underpinning ideas are illustrative of the philosophy of the
‘Third Way’. In the late 1990s, the Third Way philosophy was deployed
extensively in political circles and promulgated endlessly by academics,
particularly Anthony Giddens. Tracing its ideational development is a
complicated task: ‘In the first place, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly
whose idea the Third Way is, or whether this matters much. It is also
hard to establish just when it came into prominence, or how long vibrant
debate around it has lasted’ (McLennan 2004, p. 485; see also White
1998; Pierson and Castles 2002; Barrientos and Powell 2018). Pierson
and Castles claim that the Third Way is better understood as shorthand
for the repositioning of previously centre-left parties in the centre (2002,
p. 683). The abandonment of traditional lines of political orientation
makes the job of pinpointing the Third Way’s agenda more difficult:

We know, of course, what the third way is not: it is not old-fashioned

state socialism or statist social democracy, and it is not free market neo-
liberalism. We know also that it aims to reconcile a neo-liberal emphasis
on economic efficiency and dynamism, with a traditional left concern with
equity and social cohesion. (White 1998, p. 1)

Whilst pointing that out, we might also observe that the uptake and reso-
nance of the Third Way since the 1990s (regardless of where or when it
emerged) has been significant. Let’s begin with summaries of the Third
Way by its chief protagonists, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, sharing a
platform in New York in 1998:

[T]he whole idea of this third way is that we believe in activist govern-
ment, but highly disciplined. On the economic front, we want to create the
conditions and give people the tools to make the most of their own lives,
the empowerment notion. On the social front, we want to provide rights
to people but they must assume certain duties. Philosophically, we support
a concept of community in which everyone plays a role. (Bill Clinton,
Speech to New York University School of Law, 21 September 1998)
It [the Third Way] leaves behind, if you like, the old left that was about
big government or state-controlled tax-and-spend, and it is not the politics
of laissez-faire, either. It is an attempt, as I say, to construct a different
politics of community for today’s world… Socially, it is about a different
 5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 135

contract of citizenship. It’s saying, for example, in the welfare system, look,
there are rights and duties that go together. (Tony Blair, Speech to New
York University School of Law, 21 September 1998)

These parsimonious summaries of the Third Way philosophy hint at

the central themes in the various policy initiatives undertaken by both
the Democrats and New Labour in those years: rights; duties (read as
responsibilities); and community. It is worth noting that the theoret-
ical clothing of New Labour’s Third Way philosophy was designed by
Anthony Giddens (1994, 1998) who took his inspiration from the liber-
tarianism of the USA and melded it with the ‘ethical socialism’ of New
Labour (Prideaux 2001, p. 87). Indeed, to return to 1997, the year
of New Labour’s election victory, we might notice that talk was in fact
initially of ‘communitarianism’, rather than the ‘Third Way’. Indeed,
Driver and Martell emphasise this contribution to the political philosophy
of New Labour: ‘Communitarianism offers Labour modernizers a polit-
ical vocabulary which eschews market individualism, but not capitalism;
and which embraces collective action, but not class or the state’ (Driver
and Martell 1997, p. 33).
The communitarian dimension incorporates the concepts of moral
obligation and stakeholding. It asserts individuals have certain (distinct)
moral obligations to the community, such as a commitment to work,
and maintains that individuals can hold a stake in social or economic
enterprises. In this way, the individual could have a direct interest in
the achievements of the society and company: ‘Essential to this line of
thought was the belief that the selfish concerns of the individual had to
be tempered with a collective responsibility’ (Prideaux 2001, p. 91). The
mantra of the Third Way, rights and responsibilities , and the UK’s retooled
welfare state emerged from these philosophical precepts (Sevenhuijsen
2000, p. 8). Indeed, Tony Blair asserted this point quite clearly:

When I talk about rights and responsibilities, it’s not some idealistic,
impractical idea. It’s real. It’s a genuine balance. And the New Deal is
the best concrete example of it. (Speech on the New Deal, 30 November
2000)

Blair’s rights-responsibilities dualism was situated at the very heart of the

Third Way canon. In the UK, the effects of the rights and responsibilities
drive had been to redefine the terms of public-private engagement. By
136 T. LEGRAND

way of example this principle played out in New Labour initiatives as (i)
an education contract obliging students’ parents to keep to certain condi-
tions of ensuring the education of their children; (ii) tenancy agreements
that explicitly attached the good behaviour of tenants to their ongoing
accommodation (Deakin 2000, p. 12).
The linking of rights and responsibilities gave the New Deal its philo-
sophical impetus, validating the actions of government officials through a
justification of individual responsibility:

The success of the New Deal has been based on a clear framework of
rights and responsibilities. We have been extending this to all claimants,
building a system that recognises the responsibilities people have to get
themselves off benefits, while ensuring that society fulfils its obligations to
those unable to help themselves. (A New Deal for Welfare: Empowering
People to Work. Department for Work and Pensions)

In addition, with the fulfilment of societal obligation, so the logic went,

the new communitarianism overcame the failures of, as Pierson and
Castles note, ‘traditional’ social democracy:

The decline in a sense of civic responsibility (matching rights with duties)

is seen to have been one of the characteristic vices of ‘traditional’ social
democracy…Responsibility does not mean though, as it is supposed it
did for neo-liberals, either complete self-reliance or the kind of morally
(and/or legally) charged obligation to work or support family that restricts
the role of the state to that of charitable provider of last resort. (Pierson
and Castles 2002, p. 681)

The concept of ‘responsibility’ is deployed widely as one of ‘duty’

(Kershaw 2005). One of the most striking characteristics of Third Way
philosophy is the way in which it has been adapted and taken up, in
various forms, across the world. Governments in Italy, Ireland, New
Zealand and Germany have all invoked the terms and terminology of the
Third Way since 1996: ‘Although the rise of duty discourse is evident
across political traditions, the New Right has enjoyed the most political
success in English speaking countries by re-emphasizing the language of
social obligations’ (Kershaw 2005, p. 2). And this portability of the Third
Way ideas was perhaps one of its main features. For example, there is little
doubt that Australian policy-makers embraced the Third Way as eagerly
as their Anglo-Saxon counterparts: ‘We didn’t call what we were doing
 5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 137

the Third Way. For Australia, we saw it as the only way’ (Paul Keating
1999, cited in Pierson and Castles 2002, p. 683). The inbuilt capacity
for adaptation/adoption that McLennan argues that Third Way ideas are
‘vehicular’:

Vehicular ideas emerge as ways of problem-solving and ‘moving things on’.

Anyone who wants to get from A to B, for whatever reason, can therefore
usefully embrace certain sorts of ideas as ‘vehicles’ for doing so, whatever
their other differences with fellow-travellers. (2004, p. 485)

The ‘vehicular’ notion implies a form of pragmatic, rather than ideolog-

ical, thinking. Ideas in the Third Way canon are, thus, instrumental and
ends-oriented. This is not a contentious insight. Indeed, much of the
rhetoric invoked by politicians adhering to Third Way precepts acknowl-
edged the instrumentalism of their approach. As such, Pierson and Castles
argue that:

Third way politicians are proudly pragmatic (‘what matters is what works’)
and willing to draw experience (and policies) from a wide variety of sources,
including their more neo-liberal predecessors. (Pierson and Castles 2002,
p. 683)

Pierson and Castles observe that there is likely to be more than a hint
of post hoc rationalisation at work here, justifying policy decisions based
more in pragmatism than idealism (2002, p. 684). Yet the practical
approach embedded in Third Way ideas represented a continuity with
the era of New Public Management insofar as the managerial, techno-
cratic instinct of NPM remained intact: ‘But perhaps the most obvious
“Third Way” articulation of managerialism came in the commitment to
“Evidence Based” policy and practice’ (Clarke 2004, p. 38; see also
Davies et al. 2000). Duffy argues that the embrace of policy evaluation
approaches, which are central to evidence-based policy-making , was facil-
itated by NPM and digitisation. The purpose of evaluation is, according
to Duffy ‘to manage policy subjects and communicate information about
their activities’ (2017, p. 36).
138 T. LEGRAND

The US Pathway to Workfare

It is not entirely clear that the Third Way was the forerunner of welfare-
to-work per se. As mentioned above, the dualism of rights and respon-
sibilities emerged out of the welfare-to-work formulae. Certainly, albeit
unsuccessfully, Clinton attempted to institute his own form of welfare
reform in 1994. Yet, if the providence of the Third Way is ambiguous,
the reforms to welfare policy in the USA were far clearer in their roots.
Because of the latitude allowed to individual states in developing their
own welfare policy, the USA has a rich pedigree in welfare policy experi-
mentation. Here, a notable example which was eventually to provide the
model of welfare provision emulated by the Federal US government, and
farther afield, was provided by Wisconsin Works or, more commonly, W2.
From 1987 onwards, Wisconsin gradually implemented a series of
active labour market measures. Amongst these measures were a number
that are now recognised as orthodox welfare-to-work policies:

• time limits on receiving welfare benefits

• welfare benefit payments only made to individuals actively seeking
work
• incentives made available to encourage counties (who are respon-
sible for administering welfare rolls on a local level) to increase job
placements.

These were introduced with enhanced employment service provisions

such as:

• Employer-subsidies to increase job placements

• Funding for job-related training
• Job centres combining a number of employment agencies on the
same site

The apparent success of Wisconsin’s W2 programme piqued the interest

of welfare policy experts around the world. It had influence when two
Republican Governors used the experiences of Wisconsin and Michigan
to popularise the welfare-to-work approach. As Ellwood, who was Clin-
ton’s own inspiration for welfare reform, noted: ‘Republican Governors
Tommy Thomson and John Engler got enormous political mileage out
 5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 139

of welfare reform in two relatively liberal states, Wisconsin and Michigan,

long before Clinton ran for President’ (Ellwood 1996).

The Political Picture

The separation of powers in the USA threw up a common division of
power during the 1990s. The Presidency was held by a Democrat, Bill
Clinton, whilst Congress was held by the Republicans:

This has led in part to a dualism in policy where Federally controlled

programmes such as the Minimum Wage and Earned Income Tax Credit
(EITC) have expanded while there has been a retrenchment in what the
USA calls ‘Welfare’. (Evans 2001, p. 8)

The effect of this was not to cause legislative paralysis or stale-

mate/gridlock (though this is frequently the case), but rather to lead
to a, purportedly successful, employment policy throughout this period;
indeed, a policy that, since its inception, has overseen successive falls
in unemployment with year-on-year increases in labour productivity.
Yet, close examination of the unemployment legislation itself reveals an
unexpected emphasis on the reduction of out-of-wedlock births:

The Congress makes the following findings:

(1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.

(2) Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which
promotes the interests of children.
(3) Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to
successful child rearing and the well-being of children.
(4) In 1992, only 54 percent of single-parent families with children had
a child support order established and, of that 54 percent, only about
one-half received the full amount due. Of the cases enforced through the
public child support enforcement system, only 18 percent of the caseload
has a collection.
(5) The number of individuals receiving aid to families with dependent
children (in this section referred to as “AFDC”) has more than tripled
since 1965. More than two-thirds of these recipients are children. Eighty-
nine percent of children receiving AFDC benefits now live in homes in
which no father is present….
(10) Therefore, in light of this demonstration of the crisis in our
Nation, it is the sense of the Congress that prevention of out-of -wedlock
140 T. LEGRAND

pregnancy and reduction in out-of -wedlock birth are very important

Government interests and the policy contained in part A of title IV of
the Social Security Act (as amended by Section 103(a) of this Act)
is intended to address the crisis. (Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunities Reconciliation Act, 1996, preamble)

The opening text of the PRWORA legislation is illustrative of the key

concern in the minds of its authors: the breakdown of the family unit
and the attendant repercussions of this for American society. Whatever
hidden interests there may have been in the promotion of the PRWORA
legislation, its creators left no doubt as to the principle ostensible purpose,
which was to reduce the number of American single mothers and, with
it, the spiralling cost of welfare provision.
To understand this specific targeting within PRWORA, we need to
recognise that this period of reform was set against a backdrop of public
antipathy to recipients of the cash welfare system: ‘which was widely
perceived to discourage employment and to encourage non-traditional
family structure and fertility choices’ (Looney 2005, p. 6). In 1965,
a report by the Office of Policy Planning within the US Department
of Labor had produced a report entitled The Negro Family: The case
for national action. The report argued that the family unit in black
communities had been undermined by high unemployment and welfare
dependency amongst black men:

In essence the report argued that the payment of AFDC solely to lone
mothers created a financial incentive for the formation of one-parent fami-
lies in a situation in which unemployment had stripped many black men of
their traditional role as breadwinners. (Deacon 2000, p. 8)

The report, colloquially entitled the Moynihan Report after its author
Senator Daniel Moynihan, endorsed a stereotypical view of welfare that
endured through to the Reagan era. Reagan’s depiction of so-called
Cadillac queens—back single mothers using welfare benefits to live
comfortably at the expense of the tax-payer—gave legitimacy to concerns
that ADFC was being abused by its recipients. The ensuing public outcry
sealed the fate of ADFC system and compelled all parties to rethink
welfare policy in the USA. Clinton’s promise to ‘end welfare as we
know it’ was, then, born out of the fait accompli presented by Reagan’s
Administration.
 5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 141

The depictions of welfare recipients in the popular media fuelled public

support for reform. Certainly, Reagan’s rhetoric about ‘Cadillac queens’
was powerful, but the most telling signs of the US unease with welfare
dependency were displayed in the statistics: before the introduction of
TANF, 90% of welfare claimants were single mothers (Daguerre and
Taylor-Gooby 2004, p. 29) and there was a lifetime guarantee of welfare
support, if and when it was needed. It is partly because of the reliance of
single mothers on ADFC that this component of welfare, rather than any
other form of social assistance, has become synonymous with ‘welfare’.
As Clarke argues: ‘So, social security programmes, covering a much wider
range of benefits and a much larger population at a much greater cost,
are referenced separately – they are not welfare’ (Clarke 2004, p. 22).
PRWORA drastically changed this landscape. It introduced the rule
that, over a claimant’s lifespan, he or she must work after two years on
assistance. In addition, families that had received assistance for five years
(cumulative or not) were no longer entitled to assistance. Sets of puni-
tive measures were introduced to deal with those seen to be unwilling to
work. On top of this: ‘Each state […] implemented a different TANF
plan with unique objectives, funding priorities, time limits, and client
bases’ (Lichter and Jayakody 2002, p. 119). The terms of engagement
with single mothers changed overnight. Between the introduction of
PRWORA in August 1996 and June 2000, the number of TANF recipi-
ents fell from 12,241,000 to 5,781,000: a fall of 53% (figures taken from
the US Department of Health and Human Services 2007).
The groundswell of support for this putative antecedent of the UK’s
New Deal and the USA’s PRWORA legislation was mostly from conser-
vative Republicans: ‘[PRWORA] was a bill largely shaped by Republican
governors, notably Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and John Engler of
Michigan’ (Blank and Ellwood 2001, p. 767). For Clinton, the autho-
risation of PRWORA was a matter of political expediency, insofar as it
had become necessary to institute welfare reform of some sort. Clinton
promised prior to his 1992 election victory to ‘end welfare as we know
it’. David Ellwood, the intellectual inspiration behind Clinton’s welfare
thinking, writes: ‘The president’s famous promise to “end welfare as
we know it” was the most potent soundbite on welfare. It came up
so often that we referred to it as EWAKI’ (Ellwood 1996). Despite
the extensive research and design which went into the architecture of
Clinton’s much-trailed welfare policy, the proposed 1994 Work and
Responsibility Act (WRA) was eventually refused by a GOP-dominated
142 T. LEGRAND

Congress. Consequently, as Blank and Ellwood (2001, p. 761) argue:

‘The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act
(PRWORA), passed and signed in the summer of 1996, was very different
from Clinton’s original conception’. Clinton had twice rejected the
proposed (Republican) legislation but, after the third revision, accepted
the inevitable reality: that the guiding control over the new welfare legis-
lation was to be Republican. Although PRWORA was subsequently seen
to be an unqualified ‘success’, this success created an ethical tension for
the Democrats:

These results allowed both Congress and Clinton to gain political credi-
bility, but have also further reduced the importance and legitimacy of the
losers from welfare reform if they are not working and are no longer on
welfare. (emphasis in original, Evans 2001, p. 9)

The ethical tension created by the new legislation was too much for Clin-
ton’s two principal welfare advisors, Wendell Primus and Peter Edelman,
who both subsequently resigned. In the next chapter, I shall use inter-
views with these two advisors to illuminate the ideational shifts which
occurred during this period by Clinton.

State Programme Variability

Prior to the introduction of PRWORA, the main system of benefits
targeted towards needy families was AFDC: Aid to Families with Depen-
dent Children. Under the PRWORA legislation, this system was compre-
hensively overhauled and replaced with TANF: Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families, specifically targeting families rather than individuals
without children:

The only safety-net benefit available in all States is TANF for families with
children, which is the centre of welfare reform. Otherwise, public assistance
safety nets are the sole responsibility of the States – or even local County
governments. These schemes, called General Assistance (GA), can provide
cash or in-kind benefits, but only in 13 States are there such programmes
for able-bodied people without children. (Evans 2001, p. 10)

Whilst the Federal legislation provides the block funding and basic eligi-
bility rules, it is up to the States to set out the actual administration of
 5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 143

the financial support: ‘The 1996 PRWORA entirely relegated responsi-

bility for detailed policy formulation and service delivery to the states.
They determine their own eligibility criteria for cash assistance within the
general framework of loose federal guidelines’ (Daguerre 2004, p. 52).
Inter alia, it is also within the remit of the States to decide: the length
of time for which individuals are eligible for support (to the legislated
maximum of five years); the size of the job-catchment radius within which
individuals must accept employment; and the amount and length of job-
related training. Moreover, funding incentives are provided to those States
which are able to reduce their welfare rolls below target levels, resulting in
punitively-oriented TANF provisions. Crucially, Blank and Schoen argue
(NBER Working Papers with number 7627, 2000, p. 7):

Since 1962, the Secretary of Health and Human Services has had the
authority to waive federal welfare requirements if a state proposed exper-
imental or pilot programs that furthered the goals of AFDC. Although
there were a few waivers granted in the 1980s, it was not until the early
to mid-1990s that major, state-wide waivers became widespread.

The initiatives undertaken through the federal waivers were varied, but
commonly they were used to: increase the amount individuals could earn
whilst staying eligible for cash assistance; widen the pool of people suit-
able for certain types of jobs; limit the amount of time individuals could
remain on welfare rolls (Blank and Schoen 2001, p. 7); and ‘allowed
states to eliminate benefit increases to families who conceived and gave
birth to children while on welfare (the so-called ‘family cap’)’ (Blank and
Schoen 2001, p. 7). Indeed, the vast number of variations between the
state welfare systems make it very difficult to draw specific comparisons
between the states:

The August 1996 passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Oppor-
tunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), replacing AFDC with the TANF
block grant, further increased both the degree of variation across state
programs and the difficulty of tracking program rules. (Rowe & Roberts,
2004, p. 2)

Whilst the efficacy of PRWORA was soon questioned by academic

commentators (see Primus et al. 1999), it is clear that the prima facie
result of PRWORA was a substantial fall in the number of welfare recip-
ients from 1996 onwards. The key architects of PRWORA were clearly
144 T. LEGRAND

motivated by the impact upon social cohesion that family breakdown

was having and, accordingly, wanted to use the new welfare regime as
a means of discouraging non-orthodox family units. By allowing indi-
vidual states to take the lead in implementing their own tailored welfare
programmes, the Federal Government effectively devolved the respon-
sibility for delivering lower welfare rolls to the state-level. But, in so
doing, they removed any form of minimum support for welfare recip-
ients, resulting in huge national variations in living standards amongst
welfare claimants. The Federal Government further put in place a set of
financial incentives and supports to ensure the ongoing stability of TANF.
The most ‘naked’ incentive proffered was a direct nod to the preamble of
PRWORA: in 2007, an annual appropriation of 100 million dollars was
assigned to the five states with the greatest reduction in ‘out of wedlock’
births and abortion rates, whilst $1 billion separately allocated for the
best-performing states in reducing welfare caseloads (US Department of
Health and Human Services 20071 ).

The UK and the New Deal

The 1997 victory for New Labour ushered in an era in which the engage-
ment between the left and right was redefined. The political ethos of the
Third Way disregarded key tenets of social democracy; ownership mixed
economy, social redistribution or social entitlement, and replaced them
with questions of efficiency and effective government:

Without the ontological and ethical commitments of orthodox Marxism or

social democracy, or any reformulation of them, the critique of capitalism
as such turned into a critique of the particular capitalism of Thatcherite
neo-liberalism. It ceased being a political claim and became a managerial
one about how to run things better. (Finlayson 1999, p. 274 emphases in
original)

In so doing, New Labour forged a new path between the two entrenched
positions of social democracy and conservativism. The consequences of
this redefinition were apparent in the state-citizen contract:

This agenda is distinct from the conservative Right in its support for
welfare entitlements; but also distinct from the liberal Left in insisting that
 5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 145

those entitlements must be conditional: welfare rights must be matched by

welfare responsibilities. (Driver 2004, p. 35)

The New Deal represents a raft of policy initiatives instituted by New

Labour designed to tackle some of the UK’s most pressing employment
issues. Amongst these, unemployment amongst young people was seen as
a priority, as was changing the culture of long-term welfare dependency.
The previous Conservative Government had already recognised these
problems and had taken the first tentative steps towards enacting active
labour market measures capable of curbing the high rates of unemploy-
ment seen in the 1980s and early 90s. Perversely, according to Prideux,
the changeover of power in 1997 entrenched some moves already taken by
the Conservatives: ‘a deeper examination into the details that lay behind
the New Deal proposals also reveals that these deals were merely continua-
tions of previously tried schemes in authoritarian welfare’ (Prideaux 2001,
p. 97). Layard et al. (2004) (Layard, incidentally, was an advisor to the
creation of the New Deal) point out:

But from 1986 onwards the work test began to be used again and the
system tightened. In 1986 six-monthly work-focussed interviews (called
Restart Interviews) began, and since 1990 benefit recipients have been
formally expected to be “actively seeking work”. From 1990 onwards the
benefit office and job centres were progressively reunited, and in 1996 the
Job Seekers Allowance was introduced which allowed a personal adviser to
issue directions to the job seeker. (Layard et al. 2004, p. 16)

The Restart interviews, the expectation that benefit recipients must be

actively seeking work and the use of personal advisors were all facets that,
in one guise or another, were incorporated in the New Deal. Yet, the
inclusion of these facets might also be regarded as reflecting institutional
continuities. Moreover, the retention of these features of the pre-1997
regime does not represent a concomitant commitment to the same welfare
ethos. As Layard affirms:

Thus the big new idea in Labour’s New Deal is this. We ought to
offer everybody on the threshold of long-term unemployment a choice
of activity for at least a period. And when that happens we should remove
the option of life on benefit. (Layard 2001, p. 2)
146 T. LEGRAND

Long before the institution of the New Deal’s welfare-to-work, the

efficacy of state welfare provision was being called into question. The
traditional goal of full employment through a Keynesian demand-
management strategy and direct creation of employment had lost value
in the face of nearly unprecedented levels of unemployment during
Thatcher’s later years in office. Even before this however, there were
indications that a paradigm shift in welfare provision was imminent.
It was clear that Thatcher was uncomfortable with the amount spent
funding a cumbersome and lethargic welfare system and, indeed, felt that
welfare was partially to blame for some of the societal ills that it puta-
tively remedied. In his book, ‘Dismantling the Welfare State?’ (1994)
Paul Pierson highlights the attempts of both the conservative Thatcher
and Reagan Administrations to: ‘cut back entitlements and weaken the
political foundations of the welfare state’ (Starke 2006, p. 105). The
guiding rationale of increasing employment echoed the Thatcher-Reagan
economic-individualist philosophy: ‘The promotion of employment in the
1980s followed a distinctively neo-liberal route. Self-sufficiency through
paid work was the single governing principle of welfare reform’ (Daguerre
2004, p. 44). These attempts in the UK failed because of two key pillars
upon which the welfare state depended: institutional inertia, and the
enduring popular support for the welfare system.
But, whereas Conservative attempts at implementation (the processes
by which welfare was delivered) reform failed, New Labour’s revamp of
the welfare system succeeded through reform of the welfare contract as a
whole. By 1996, the ‘rights and responsibilities’ mantra had percolated
from Clinton’s third-way logics, through to Giddens’ social diagnosis
of the UK—‘The Third Way’—into the party mindset of New Labour.
Welfare-to-work had two prongs; emphasising both the responsibility of
the unemployed to actively seek employment or engage in training leading
to employment and their right to receive state support whilst doing so.
The qualifying phrase ‘whilst doing so’ emphasised the new contingency
of welfare: the unemployed are entitled to state support only whilst they
demonstrate a willingness to participate in the labour market:

This is a system of stick and “carrot”, based on mutual rights and respon-
sibilities. Everyone has the right to [job] offers but in return they have
the responsibility to use them – or at least to stop drawing benefits. Rights
and responsibilities is a central philosophy of New Labour and of the New
Deal. (Layard et al. 2004, p. 2)
 5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 147

The insistence that individuals have an implied moral duty to ‘at least
stop drawing benefits’ if they fail to take an offer of employment (of any
sort) reflects the normative political philosophy of the New Deal’s Third
Way. It is this form of rhetoric that captures the communitarian social
contract extended by New Labour, and this form of message is not only
promulgated through advisory pamphlets to job seekers. The Cabinet
Office document, Personal Responsibility and Changing Behaviour: the
state of knowledge and its implications for public policy, in clear echoes
of the ‘personal responsibility’ stressed by PRWORA, states:

It can be argued that welfare to work is effective because it employs a number

of behavioural change techniques as well as an economic incentive: aversion
to loss (in this case a modest financial benefit); psychological discount rates
(giving extra emphasis to immediate consequences) and authority (of the
advisor). In the hands of a skilful advisor, welfare to work can also play
on reciprocity (society wants you, or even I want you, to make a contri-
bution in return for support); social proof (many others have done this)
and personal affiliation (on the basis of an ongoing relationship). (Prime
Minister’s Strategy Unit 2004, p. 32)

This exhortation to reciprocate the moral values established by the state

subordinates the status of the unemployed in a system of ‘mutual obli-
gation’ or ‘reciprocity’. Moreover, this is not an artefact of the UK’s
approach to welfare-to-work implementation. Goodin writes that the
framing of mutual obligation in the USA and Australian models of
workfare also materially and morally undermines welfare recipients: ‘In
such circumstances of asymmetric resources, to insist upon strict and
immediate reciprocity has the effect of reinforcing relations of social
subordination’ (Goodin 2002, p. 592).
In the report Personal Responsibility and Changing Behaviour
(February 2004, Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit), the authors claim that
the arrangement of rights and responsibilities varies according to political
colour and, crucially, a ‘bagatelle’ of questions (see Fig. 5.1):
The arrangement of rights and responsibilities within the New Deal
however rendered the ‘bagatelle of questions’ redundant insofar as philo-
sophical commitments had already been made. Essentially, the use of
welfare-to-work in the UK was a form of evidence-based policy-making:
148 T. LEGRAND

Rights and Responsibilities emerge from a complex and iterative ‘bagatelle’ of questions

What kinds of fundamental rights do people have?

What rights/responsibilities does our notion of the

‘good society’ suggest as important?

Who, or what, is causally responsible?

Who, or what, is best placed to act?

What is the most effective means or mechanisms for

expressing the obligation?

What are the wider consequences for others, and do

these conflict with their rights and responsibilities?
(start again…)

Adapted from Personal Responsibility and Changing Behaviour: the state

of knowledge and its implications for public policy, 2004.

Fig. 5.1 The bagatelle of questions

Welfare to Work, usually referred to as the New Deal, represents the first
real attempt to implement activation policies for the unemployed in Britain.
The reforms involve a radical paradigm shift since they are based on a
typically American “workfare” approach. (Daguerre 2004, pp. 41–42)

In July 1997, an employer-led working group, ‘The New Deal Task

Force2 ’, headed by Sir Peter Davies, was given the responsibility for over-
seeing the rollout of the New Deal: ‘to solicit employer input on program
design and to encourage private voluntary participation’ (Martin 2004,
p. 55).The creation of the group underlined the intention of the govern-
ment to make the New Deal as amenable to the needs of the business
sector as possible.
The development of the New Deal for Young People was a manifesto
commitment of New Labour in 1997. Specifically, they pledged to move
250,000 jobless young people into employment in the lifetime of the
Government. Introduced in January 1998 in 12 Pathfinder areas, it was
gradually unrolled across the UK. The employment service was at the
helm of its implementation and took advantage of the UK’s extensive
 5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 149

network of local delivery agents, including, amongst others, local author-

ities, voluntary and charitable organisations, Local Enterprise Companies
and TECs. Because the New Labour Administration had recently imple-
mented the ‘windfall’ levy, financial resources were quickly in place for
the NDYP scheme and ensured continuity of financing throughout the
crucial initial year. This was the overwhelming emphasis of welfare-to-
work in 1997 and remains so today. The key target for the New Deal,
since its inception, was to place job seekers in employment at the earliest
opportunity. Often, this placement occurred at the expense of advanced
education or training and aims to reduce the length of time spent on
benefits. This approach, importantly, eschewed the principals of European
social models (such as Sweden, for example) that place greater emphasis
on long-term training. In this regard, then, the UK approach was very
similar to the USA:

Like most welfare reformers in the USA, the Labour Government in Britain
appears to be putting work, rather than education and training, first in
its welfare-to-work programme. But putting ‘work first’ has no inherent
interest in outcomes other than to increase work levels among those on
welfare. (Driver 2004, p. 33)

Most fundamentally, Deacon argues (2000, p. 13): ‘the British approach

follows the American in its redefinition of welfare as a period of temporary
assistance during which claimants would be re-equipped with the skills
and capacities to re-enter the labour force, and then required to do so’.

Components of the New Deal

The lion’s share of funding for the New Deal was allocated to the New
Deal for Young People. Up to 2002, the New Deal for the Disabled
received £200 million, the New Deal for Lone Parents £200 million,
the New Deal for the Long-Term Unemployed £350 million, whereas
the New Deal for Young People received £3.15 billion (Beaudry 2002,
p. 9). In this period, this group made up just 9% of welfare claimants,
yet received 77% of the funding. The NDYP (targeted at those aged
18–25 unemployed for six months or more) introduced a mandatory
requirement to participate in one of four programmes:

1. The Environmental Task Force

150 T. LEGRAND

2. Voluntary Work
3. Full-time education, training or apprenticeship for up to one year.
4. A subsidised work placement, in which the government contribute
£60 per week to the earnings of the young person, giving employers
the incentive to engage a worker for a considerably lower salary
outlay.

Crucially, young people were not allowed any form of ‘opt-out’; their
choice was to participate in the above programmes, or not receive benefit.
However, following the USA in applying such time limits to single
mothers was not considered to be politically prudent in the UK. As
Daguerre and Taylor-Gooby argue:

However, only certain elements of American policies were chosen in the

process of transplanting welfare to work programmes. For instance, if the
NDYP imposed time limits on benefit entitlement, such time limits were
seen as unacceptable for lone parents. (Daguerre and Taylor-Gooby 2004,
p. 31)

The New Deal for Lone Parents targeted parents with a child above
the age of 5 ¼. On the NDLP, parents were given advice and support
in finding appropriate employment and offered, in some circumstances,
finance for training and childcare. Initially, engagement with the NDLP
was voluntary, but after April 2002 an annual work-focused interview
became a mandatory requirement for all lone parents claiming welfare
payments (Daguerre 2004, p. 31).
As explained above, no time limits were imposed on lone parents
claiming welfare payments. Nevertheless, the feature of sanctions repre-
sented the most crucial to the shift in UK welfare values:

The use of benefit sanctions in cases of non-compliance with programmes’

requirements for young people was the most controversial aspect of
the New Deal and was strongly inspired by the new sanction regime
implemented by TANF in the US. (Daguerre and Taylor-Gooby 2004,
p. 31)

It is this pedigree of welfare-to-work that captured the attention of welfare

scholars in the UK and has provoked a plethora of articles, monographs
and research studies into the adoption of the US system of welfare.
 5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 151

Inevitably, demographic, economic and political comparisons are invoked

in the assessment of whether the US system is suitable for the British
policy portfolio. What is more, the relationship between US and UK advi-
sors is an enduring one. Most strikingly, there is an exchange scheme for
UK and US welfare policy the proximity of UK and US welfare officials:

The purpose of the exchange, initially discussed during a meeting in May

2003 between US Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao and the UK Secretary
of State for Work and Pensions at the time, Andrew Smith, was to take
advantage of opportunities to share best practices in tackling problems
of unemployment. The exchange of ideas and experiences is important
at the international policy level to address the ever-increasing chal-
lenge of assisting unemployed individuals in their return to work. (2004
US/UK Workforce Program Educational Exchange, 2004. Employment
and Training Administration, USA)

The close working relationship enjoyed by US/UK policy officials is

similar to that between UK and Australian civil servants: the Department
of Workplace Relations in Australia has a reciprocal agreement with the
UK to exchange labour market officials on a secondment basis. Indeed,
the parallels and linkages between Australian and UK labour market policy
are numerous and are based in their similar configuration of rights and
responsibilities.

Australia’s Welfare Engagement: From

‘Reciprocal’ to ‘Mutual’ Obligation

Confronting the reality of unemployment means providing a social net to ease

the hardship. It also means providing all the training opportunities we can.
But above all else it means we must create more growth. (Prime Minister
Keating 1993, p. 8, cited in Edwards 2001)

The mid-1990s saw a sea-change in the welfare ethos of Australia that

paralleled that of the USA and UK. Whereas previously the unique wage-
bargaining and residual welfare state combination had been a robust
feature of Australian social policy, this changed with the reconfiguration of
the relationship between the state and the unemployed during the Keating
Administration. This change is particularly apparent in the enactment of
the Mutual Obligation Initiative in 1998 (under John Howard), but the
152 T. LEGRAND

initial changes, as in the USA and the UK, began much earlier. Indeed,
the roots of Mutual Obligation can be seen in Keating’s 1994 legislation:
Working Nation. This section will briefly explore both Working Nation
and Mutual Obligation.
The structure and conditions of welfare provision in Australia had
previously been fundamentally different to the approaches of other
Western governments. As a result of the insights of its constitutional
‘Founding Fathers’, Australian welfare provision rested on two pillars:
the provision of ‘welfare by other means’ and a residual welfare state.3
To briefly address these in turn. First, ‘welfare by other means’ is the
descriptive moniker that Castles attaches to Australia’s unique consti-
tutional arrangement. To wit, the Founding Fathers of the Australian
Constitution provided for a system of compulsory conciliation and arbi-
tration in industrial disputes. This gave the courts the power to establish
wage levels, so that all industrial workers were, in a real sense, paid a
living wage. Compulsory conciliation and arbitration: ‘meant that those
who were waged were able to maintain a decent life for themselves and
their dependants without further intervention by the state’ (Castles 2001,
p. 7).
With one of the lowest expenditures on welfare within the OECD
membership, the post-war Australia welfare system looked impotent.
However, the nature of the wage-bargaining system provided the ‘wel-
fare by other means’ to which Castles refers. In strengthening the tie
between employers and workers, the increased equitable distribution of
wages counter-balanced the relative stinginess of the residual welfare
system: ‘The lack of generosity of welfare payments has been substantially
compensated for by a system of wages regulation which has prevented
waged poverty and delivered a reduced dispersion of incomes’ (Castles
2001, p. 3). The result of this was to create: ‘a model of the welfare state
quite unlike those of Western Europe and North America’ (Castles 1996,
p. 88).
By the early 1990s however, both these pillars of welfare had been
considerably weakened. Prime Minister Keating had systematically recon-
figured the awards system through increased deregulation and restrictions
on the power of federal arbitration tribunals (Castles 2001). The 1993
Federal Election provided the stage for an onslaught of criticism by oppo-
sition parties dissatisfied with the Government’s lacklustre economic and
employment record (Edwards 2001, p. 138). By 1994, the Government
had distilled a new policy approach to welfare from extensive discussions
 5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 153

with academics, the ALP and the public service: Working Nation was to
provide the roadmap to employment recovery, with special emphasis on,
but not limited to, the long-term unemployed.
Working Nation instituted a series of programmes for the unemployed.
Amongst these were:

• The provision of advisors to render tailored, targeted advice to

individual job seekers to direct them towards the most appropriate
employment opportunities based on their skills and experience.
• Early interventions with those deemed most at risk of becoming
long-term unemployed (the LTU).
• The ‘Job Compact’: Subsidised work placements to enable the LTU
to gain work experience (of at least six months) to make them more
employable. Parker and Fopp (2004, pp. 258–259).

Importantly, punitive measures were also introduced both to increase

the efficacy of the new programme and, crucially, to assuage community
concerns that the welfare system was being abused by the unemployed.
Amongst these measures were penalties for failing the ‘activities test’ (a
demonstration of ongoing commitment to looking for a job), or for
refusing the offer of employment, with varying consequences. Clearly,
both the ‘carrot’ and ‘stick’ components of the Working Nation initia-
tive mirrored the orthodoxy of welfare-to-work provisions in the USA
and the UK.
However, the lifespan of Working Nation was limited. Introduced in
May 1994, by March 1996 it had been abandoned after John Howard
was elected into office. Its replacement, the Mutual Obligation Initiative,
emulated Working Nation in one crucial way:

This program was based on the concept of Mutual Obligation (Keating’s

“reciprocal obligation” under a new guise) where the unemployed had to
(in return for social security benefits) demonstrate their mutual obligation
to society by accepting training, voluntary work, or WFD [Work for the
Dole]. (Junankar 2000, p. 18)

The shift from ‘reciprocal’ to ‘mutual’ obligation was a clear indication

of the Howard Government’s intention to continue the ethos of Working
Nation. The Workplace Relations Act (1997) instituted the creation of a
network of programmes to foster the labour market, including Centrelink
154 T. LEGRAND

(the main gateway of re-employment), the Job Network and Work for the
Dole.

The Government’s principle of mutual obligation is based on a simple

proposition: that unemployed job seekers, supported financially by the
community, should actively seek work, constantly strive to improve their
competitiveness in the labour market and give something back to the
community that supports them. (David Kemp, Minister for Education,
Training and Youth Affairs)

The introduction of the Mutual Obligation Initiative (MOI) by

the Federal Liberal-National coalition Government (headed by John
Howard) saw the already limited gap between the Australian welfare ethos
and that of the USA and UK narrow even further. The link between rights
and responsibilities and mutual obligation is apparent, and is made clearer
by the distinct ‘conditionality’ it invokes. At its most fundamental level,
the MOI is: ‘absolutely characteristic of exchange relations in the labour
market’ (Goodin 2002, p. 583). It provides a contractual-style relation-
ship whereby payments made to the claimant are expressly conditional on
their participation in specific labour programmes. It achieves this through
the central plank of the MOI: the Job Compact, which ‘aimed to offer any
person who had been on unemployment allowances for over 18 months a
job, typically full-time and in the private sector, for at least twelve months’
(Junankar 2000, p. 16).
The MOI was targeted at long-term recipients of welfare assistance
and required them: ‘to spend a prescribed amount of time (the precise
amount depends on which activity is chosen) in certain specified forms of
paid, unpaid, caring labour or working at educational, military or conser-
vationist tasks (Goodin 2002, p. 582). One of the key MOI measures is
Work for the Dole (WfD). Mainly a work experience measure, the WfD is
used to provide those who are new and inexperienced in the job market
(i.e. school leavers), and those out of work for a long time (the LTU),
with opportunities to participate in work-related activities:

WfD involves local communities in activities that provide work experience

for the unemployed, designed to help the unemployed re-attach to the
labour market. WfD is also designed to provide communities with quality
projects/activities, which are of value to those communities. (Yeend 2000;
Australian Parliamentary Library)
 5 THE THIRD WAY AND THE LANDSCAPE OF WELFARE REFORM … 155

The ideas of MOI directly echo the communitarian logics invoked by

both Clinton and Blair in their exhortations of the Third Way philos-
ophy. The notion of ‘community’ is elided with the labour market,
emphasising the link between the cost and benefits of welfare. The link
between the Australian system of welfare provision and that of the UK
and the USA was not found at the programme level during this era.
Although there were similar instruments found in the UK and USA, these
predominantly naturally grew out of a philosophical position on rights
and responsibilities. Certainly, Australian policy-makers, as we shall see,
gleaned some information on implementing active labour market policies
from the UK and USA, yet the crucial linkage lies in the adoption of
Third Way precepts.

Conclusion
The ideological heritage and intellectual development of the ‘Anglo’
model of welfare-to-work reveals the commensurate political commit-
ment to the precepts of the Third Way across Australia, the UK and
USA during the 1990s. As explored in the previous chapter, the adminis-
trative structures of these countries and others in the Anglosphere had
already been refurbished with managerial techniques, measurement of
outcomes and market-based solutions under the rubric of New Public
Management. Market-based solutions, along with a commitment to eval-
uating programme performance, invigorated the new ALMP approach
advocated by Third Way advocates and the resulting welfare policies in
PRWORA, the New Deal and Mutual obligation. It is, on one level,
surprising that the US welfare approach commanded so much atten-
tion: The legislative ambitions of the Clinton Administration were routed
by a Republican-dominated Congress and so the USA was left with a
far more morally-charged and punitive piece of welfare legislation than
the reforming Democrats ever envisaged. That such conservative legis-
lation, the main target of which was lone parents, should be attractive
to UK and Australian policy-makers (for whom long-term unemployed
were the greater challenge) is a puzzle. What becomes apparent, as the
next chapter elaborates, is that the political philosophy of the Third Way
paired with administrative reforms primed the context of mutual policy
learning between these states.
156 T. LEGRAND

Notes
1. These funding rules were taken from the website of the Department of
Health and Human Services, 1 July 2007. The specific webpage outlining
these rules can be found at: http://aspe.hhs.gov/hsp/abbrev/prwora96.
htm.
2. Originating out of the Department for Education and Employment, it was
subsequently renamed the ‘National Employment Panel’ in 2001.
3. For the sake of clarity, the ‘residual welfare state’ is taken to mean a catch-
all system of welfare that provides a minimum subsistence to those with no
other means of support (financial or otherwise). More figuratively, it is the
state-provided safety-net.

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 CHAPTER 6

Agents of Transgovernmental Policy Transfer

Whereas the previous chapter sets out the ideological terrain of the Third
Way, here I turn to the agents most closely concerned within the policy
learning process. This chapter sets out the empirical findings of primary
research taken from interviews and documents in the USA, the UK and
Australia. In looking, firstly, at the US research, we explore how the
common conception that a policy transfer link is embedded in the rela-
tionship between Blair and Clinton is not easily sustainable. Rather, I
argue that the use of US welfare-to-work policy was predicated upon
the superiority of the US regime of experimentation and evaluation: the
use of evaluations is seen to be the most crucial element adopted by
the UK and showcased in the New Deal. Subsequently, I show how
the qualitatively different relationship between the UK and Australia was
nevertheless founded upon a mutual regard for evidence-based policy. My
interviews support claims that the UK-Australia relationship is culturally
and historically based, yet also show how this relationship is politically
contingent: indeed, the research indicates that the 1989 JET programme
(Jobs, Education, Training for Sole Parents) in Australia was, in fact,
heavily drawn from US policy. Finally, the chapter turns the beginning of
systemised, networked, policy transfer network between Australia, New
Zealand, the UK, Ireland, the USA and Canada. The insights of one

© The Author(s) 2021 161

T. Legrand, The Architecture of Policy Transfer,
Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55821-5_6
162 T. LEGRAND

situated official reveal how this pioneering informal but elite network,
emerging in the late 1980s/early 1990s, began to share policy ideas and
experiences.

Interviewing Elites
The usefulness of a ‘positioned’ emergent model, such as that presented
in chapters 4 and 5, must be found in its applicability to the empirical
case. Whereas the previous chapter served to contextualise the landscape
of welfare-to-work, this chapter looks to report and analyse empirical data
from interviews. This research is based upon a qualitative methodology
and is driven by data from semi-structured interviewing and an analysis
of policy documents and related governmental publications. Specifically, I
draw upon findings taken from 40 interviews with elite policy-makers in
the UK, USA and Australia between 2004 and 2010. These are supple-
mented by interviews taken from a repository of interview data made
available by a Leverhulme project in 1999. This is the first study of
policy transfer in the Anglosphere to utilise interview data from interviews
with policy-makers at the very highest level of policy-making in these
countries—with six (former or current) departmental CEOs included.
These policy-makers come from the institutions most involved with the
development of labour market policy and, specifically, welfare-to-work.
Inter alia, these policy-makers are, or have been, senior officials in:
The United States Senate; The United States House of Representatives
(House Ways and Means Committee); The United States White House
staff; The United Kingdom Treasury; The United Kingdom Department
for Education and Employment; The Australian Department of Employ-
ment and Workplace Relations; The Australian Office of Prime Minister
and Cabinet; The Australian Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade.1
As with any study however, there must be an a priori starting point.
To summarise my theoretical position developed to this point:

i. Understanding policy transfer is crucial to explanations of contem-

porary policy-making. The increased willingness of policy-makers to
mimic the actions of policy-makers elsewhere indicates a change in
the traditional policy-making paradigm: this has implications for the
integrity of the modern political process.
ii. I have argued that existing theories of policy transfer (viz. Marsh
and Dolowitz, Evans and Davies) offer only limited explanations of
 6 AGENTS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL POLICY TRANSFER 163

‘policy transfer’; are focused on process rather than ‘position’; and

offer inadequate explanations of the relationship between structures
and agents in instances of policy transfer.
iii. I contend that adopting a critical realist approach confers the
following analytical advantages: it emphasises the importance of
structures and the independence of agency, yet gives considerable
room for theoretical exploration of the relationship between the
two.

In the material sense, these theoretical precepts play out in the following
ways. Using welfare-to-work policy as empirical vehicle to address my
abstract interests:

i. I look to see how transnational flows (or constitutive signifiers)

affects the way policy is made;
ii. I pick out common ideational and ideological approaches between
policy-makers in the studied countries;
iii. I examine how their perceptions of overseas policy influence how
they approach policy-making;
iv. I interrogate the significance of cultural similarity; and
v. I try to identify motivating factors for any use of policy from
overseas.

From the above starting points, my study uncovers the, often obscured,
informal as well as formal processes of policy-making. I verify what others
have found to be important parts of policy transfer, but, most impor-
tantly, I establish two, as yet unidentified, drivers of policy transfer: (i)
the increased commitment to evidence-based policy-making, and (ii) the
existence of an elite transgovernmental network of policy-makers.

Learning About Welfare

In the context of this research, the case of welfare-to-work stands out as
an appropriate vehicle of analysis for two reasons. Firstly, it is perhaps the
most studied example of policy transfer. The recognition of policy transfer
analysis as a potentially fruitful explanatory approach coincided with the
164 T. LEGRAND

election in 1997 of a New Labour government in the UK with

strong ideological and stylistic links with the US Democratic Party. The
subsequent deployment of policy-makers to study new techniques of
welfare administration in the USA directly preceded the launch of one
of New Labour’s flagship policies: The New Deal. Consequently, the
policy transfer of US-style welfare-to-work was immediately subjected to
scrutiny by policy transfer analysts. Secondly, welfare-to-work provides an
ideal empirical study because labour market policies are directly linked
to narratives on the policy impact of globalisation and the influences of
international institutions:

There has been a consensus among a number of international bodies,

including the International Monetary Fund and, less overtly, the OECD,
that the adoption of ‘flexible’ US-style labour market institutions would
be the cure of unemployment in Europe. (Banks et al. 2005, p. 69)

As it is, the transfer of policies and programmes from the USA to the UK
has already been extensively studied. The modelling of the New Deal on
US ‘workfare’ systems has provoked a cottage industry investigating the
process, the agents, the possible outcomes, efficacy evaluations, demo-
graphic comparisons and more. The general tenor of this literature is that
the social and economic ambitions of successive US-UK administrations
(strengthened by Reagan-Thatcher and consolidated by Clinton-Blair)
have borne close resemblance and the New Deal is an extension of the
ideological proximity of the two governments and their policy-makers.
Driver offers this summary:

There are two basic positions on what New Labour has learnt from the
USA. The first is that New Labour has gone all New Democrat, that Blair
and Brown are following in the footsteps of Clinton, especially the early
Clinton, and marking out a new progressive agenda on welfare based on
‘tough love’… The second position is that New Labour has simply gone
all New Right, that Blair and Brown have caved in to the Right’s welfare
agenda, just as Clinton did in the USA, and that all talk of a welfare
‘Third Way’ is so much hot air: the Anglo-American consensus is really a
neo-liberal consensus. (Driver 2004, p. 34)

In the following chapter, I wish to develop a third position: that what

the UK has borrowed from the USA, and Australia, comes from a
 6 AGENTS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL POLICY TRANSFER 165

endemic concern to base policy-making upon rigorous—read ‘quantita-

tive’—empirical evidence on policy outcomes: the ‘what works’ approach.
So, whereas the previous chapter showed philosophical link between the
Third Way and welfare-to-work, in this section I want to problematise that
link and argue that, for the USA, Clinton’s Third Way (normative) philos-
ophy was unrelated to the rise of welfare-to-work. This assertion has the
following implications. It weakens the position of those who claim that
‘workfare’ is a corollary of the Third Way (including its proponents) and it
indicates that the motivations behind adopting welfare policy instruments
from America are located elsewhere.
With the vast choice of viewpoints, data sources, arguments and histor-
ical assessments available to the analyst of welfare policy transfer, the issue
of measurement hangs uneasily. The level or the extent of the ‘trans-
fer’ of welfare-to-work from the USA to the UK is indeterminable in
a quantitative sense; even in a qualitative sense there is no agreement on
what constitutes ‘partial’, or, perhaps programmatic, transfer or, indeed,
what the importance of this might be. In the following section, I wish
to corroborate the claim that one important driver of policy transfer is
the commitment to evidence-based policy-making . Subsequently, I want to
show that my approach is useful because it takes the role of ideas (and
their contingent nature) more seriously than other analyses.

Welfare-to-Wedlock: The Moral

Crosshairs of the PRWORA
The link between Blair and Clinton has been well-established. Bill Clin-
ton’s electoral success in 1992 was seen by many in the Labour leadership
as an object lesson in election strategy. His management of press releases,
use of focus groups to determine the priorities of target demographic
population and refashioning of the (New) Democrats turned the previ-
ously lacklustre second party into the dominant political force in the USA.
It is similarly well-established that Brown, Blair and the cadre of polit-
ical advisers in Labour Party circles drew much of their inspiration for
their refurbishment of ‘old’ Labour into ‘New’ Labour from the expe-
riences of the US Democrats. The rhetoric employed by New Labour
on crime and welfare bore particular similarity to that of the Democrats;
moving away from the traditional left ‘soft’ stance towards the ‘harder’
conservative arguments. The movement towards the use of coercion in
166 T. LEGRAND

welfare provision is claimed to be a particular example of this develop-

ment. In support of this, King and Wickham-Jones point to the influence
of Laurence Mead, an academic whose work: ‘suggested not only that
there were electoral benefits to workfare-type arrangements, but that such
schemes were an important means of cutting unemployment’ (King and
Wickham-Jones 1999, p. 65).2 They go on to argue that, after a failure
in the attempt to introduce his much-lauded health reform plan, Clinton
embarked on a: ‘more coherent programme which was reflected in his
approach to welfare’ (1999, p. 65). King and Wickham-Jones describe
the passage of the welfare legislation thus:

Compulsion was emphasised, particularly to induce single mothers back

into the labour market. Under welfare reforms in 1996 (the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act), single mothers
must accept job offers or lose benefits. Signing the law, President Clinton
declared ‘today we are ending welfare as we know it’. (1999, p. 65)

The perception that Clinton was responsible for the construction of

the PRWORA and its introduction of coercion to welfare is integral to
the claim that ‘Labour’s enthusiastic espousal of such a tough position
emulates the Democrats’ experience in the United States’ (1999, p. 73).
This is a claim that I wish to briefly interrogate, given that it is central to
the case ‘for’ policy transfer. Clinton’s electoral promise to ‘end welfare
as we know it’ was, as noted previously, so oft-repeated that party staffers
began to refer to it as EWAKI. The powerful rhetoric carried with it,
however, a danger:

The Clinton campaign’s bold pledge also posed a risk that the admin-
istration might not be able to keep the promise it had made…Once in
office the administration was almost certain to confront a classic case of
overselling. (Weaver 2000, p. 224)

The legislation that Clinton had wanted to introduce (The Work and
Responsibility Act) in 1994 failed to get passed by Congress in 1994—the
year before the Republicans made sweeping House gains in the mid-term
elections, effectively sealing its fate. However, his reforms were by no
means supported by all Democrats. His attempts to introduce time limits
on ADFC claimants, for instance, were hugely divisive. Weaver writes:
‘Interestingly, Democratic members in the House, especially those on the
 6 AGENTS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL POLICY TRANSFER 167

Ways and Means Committee, were crucial in killing welfare reform once
the package was released’ (Weaver 2000, p. 247).
By the time of the 104th Congress, the legislative future on welfare was
still in the balance. Clinton’s failure to introduce the flagship policy of his
1992 election campaign, ‘to end welfare as we know it’, strengthened
the position of the Republican Party. Clinton had already signalled his
determination to reform welfare, yet did not have the political power in
the House to carry through reforms of his own design. Consequently, the
House Republicans were able to set out legislation that sat more easily
with their own conservative values. Indeed, in 1994, House Republicans
introduced their own bill, H.R. 3500, which proved to be the forerunner
of the PRWORA. As a member of House Ways and Means Committee
commented: ‘We developed a bill - HR3500 -and virtually every House
Republican signed onto that bill. And it had a lot of features that the ’96
welfare reform bill had’. (Author’s interview, Washington DC, July 2005)
Clinton’s aspirations for welfare were lost in 1994 and, in the event,
control of the architecture of welfare was surrendered to the Republicans
and their subsequent introduction of PRWORA in 1996. There is almost
unanimous consensus that Clinton missed the most opportune moment
to realise his aims for welfare:

If President Clinton had pushed for welfare reform rather than health
care reform in 1994, we would now be talking about a great Democratic
realignment, rather than a great Republican realignment. (Mickey Kaus
1994 [“They Blew It”, New Republic, December 5 1994], cited in Weaver
2000, p. 249, see also Ellwood 1996)

It is difficult, therefore, to reconcile the claim that New Labour borrowed

directly from Clinton when, clearly, PRWORA was a creation of neither
Clinton, nor the Democrats. Though Clinton signed the Bill in 1996 and,
in so doing, declared ‘Today we are ending welfare as we know it’, it was
not because it was the legislation that he had envisaged. Why, then, did
Clinton endorse the legislation? A senior welfare advisor to Clinton in
1994 claims:

Because he was playing his politics with a belt and suspenders and extra
zippers all at the same time: he was playing his politics with an excessive,
vastly excessive, degree of caution. Three of his political advisors - Leon
Panetta, George Stephanopolous and Harold Ickes - all advised him to
168 T. LEGRAND

veto the legislation and that he would still be reelected even if he vetoed
it. That’s important. (Author’s interview with Former Senior White House
Official Washington DC, July 2005)

This political miscalculation, although it was not to prove costly to

Clinton in the long-term,3 undermined the political praxis that he had set
out in his vision of the Third Way. Coming on the heels of the failure of
his health reform proposals, the vision that Clinton had sought to insti-
gate was a very different one to that which he realised. For another of
Clinton’s senior advisors, it was a matter of priorities that was ultimately
the cause of Clinton’s failure to reform welfare in line with his vision:

The Clinton Administration put most of its political muscle behind their
health reform not their welfare reform, and I think in retrospect that was
a huge mistake. (Author’s interview with Former Senior White House
Official, Washington DC, July 2005)

Thus, the format, the structure, the ideas and the norms of the PRWORA
were conservative-conceived and conservative-delivered. It is incidental
that the tenor of PRWORA resonated comfortably with the rhetoric of
Clinton’s Third Way.4 Nevertheless, this has not prevented the PRWORA
being commonly associated with both Clinton and his political philos-
ophy, when, in fact, very different arguments were at the heart of the
Republican Bills in 1994 and 1996. For example, one of the senior
Republican staff members observed:

There was one big problem, and that was that a lot of conservatives, inside
and outside congress, were saying work was not the most important thing.
Illegitimacy was the most important thing. And we had a huge, ugly fight
behind the scenes. (Author’s interview, Washington DC, August 2005)

As noted in the previous chapter, the conservative influence on the

PRWORA is plain to see in the opening line of the legislation: ‘marriage
is the foundation of a successful society’. The fact that the Republican’s
HR3500 was far more costly than Clinton’s Work and Responsibility Act
underscores the moral commitment that the conservatives were making.
For the Republicans, the primary function of the PRWORA was clear:

The heart of it is that you’ve got to really constrain those young mothers.
You have to really put them in a situation where they are going to lose
 6 AGENTS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL POLICY TRANSFER 169

their benefits if they don’t do the right thing. You’ve got to do that. I
think that’s even more important that the time limits. The time limit sends
a wonderful message. (Author’s interview with Former Senior Welfare
Adviser to President George W. Bush, Washington DC, August, 2005)

It is this primary intention that has been somewhat lost in the hubris
that surrounded Blair’s relationship with Clinton. Importantly for policy
transfer analysis, it is crucial that the putative use of the US welfare policy
framework was predicated upon very different intentions. For US policy-
makers, welfare policy was an instrument used to discourage illegitimacy
and encourage marriage. In this sense, the PRWORA might better be
described as welfare-to-wedlock.
In the light of this, the claim that the New Deal was based upon
the ideological project of Clinton is clearly flawed. This point has two
significant implications and begs one important questions. Firstly, we may
dismiss the argument that there was a Third Way philosophical pretext
underpinning the imposition of US-style workfare; clearly there is no
ideological compatibility of any sort between the two policies. Secondly,
although we might cut the philosophical link between PRWORA and the
New Deal, the functioning of US welfare-to-work systems was studied at
first-hand by UK policy advisers in the mid-1990s. From this, we might
infer that the motivations of UK policy-makers in adopting welfare-to-
work were, perhaps, more pragmatic, than dogmatic, in nature. This is
an important insight that we return to below.
So, the link between the New Deal and PRWORA is less than clear-
cut. The very central concern of the New Deal, as we have seen, was
to smooth the transition of Young People into the workforce. For some
authors, the ‘transfer link’ is all too obvious (Dolowitz 2000; Daguerre
and Taylor-Gooby 2004), yet, on closer inspection, the assumption that
there is a strong link between the New Deal and Clinton’s philosophy
becomes tenuous.

The UK’s Policy-Making

Strategy Under New Labour
As noted in the previous chapter, the development of the New Deal was
at the forefront of New Labour’s government strategy. It enshrined the
emblematic principles of the Third Way: rights and responsibility. Yet the
policy borrowed heavily from the USA and, to an extent, the Australian
170 T. LEGRAND

experiences. Contemporaneous interviews conducted in 1999 with senior

UK policy officials reveal that the lessons of Sweden also featured in
framing the welfare issues faced by New Labour in 1997, although the
direct influence was less obvious:

The problem with Sweden is that our system has very little in common
with theirs. Of course, there are similarities because what we are talking
about is the development of active labour market policies. But Sweden
places a much heavier reliance on the importance of training. Moreover,
their methodology for evaluating the impact of their policies in this area
is not very developed. What we are interested in doing is adapting what
works and what doesn’t. (Interview with Senior Official, Department of
Education and Employment, August 1999)5

The ‘what works’ approach is referred to heavily throughout the set of

interviews and, in a sense, is viewed as the main driver of their policy
learning. Certainly, another official at the DfEE was careful to point out
that the New Deal was not simply a cannibalisation of other countries’
policy portfolio:

We decided that the New Deal should have what we called a ‘front end’;
that is to say, a period of preparation for all individuals eligible for the
programme, which has now, as you know, been called ‘the gateway’. As
far as I am aware, nobody, including the Americans, has thought of this.
(Interview with Senior official, Department of Education and Employment,
August 1999)

This interviewee argued that, aside from the ‘Gateway’, the New Deal
featured other unique policy instruments, such as the employer’s subsidy,
employer’s training subsidy, post-New Deal monitoring of participants
and sanctions for non-cooperation:

Now, when it comes to the question of policy transfer from the US, all
these elements were new ingredients. None of them derived from the
American experience. If there were parallels, they weren’t immediately
obvious to us. (Interview with senior official, Department of Education
and Employment, August 1999)
 6 AGENTS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL POLICY TRANSFER 171

At the same time, the influence of Australia was also evident in policy
discussions. Interestingly, one official talked of negative policy learning
(or, ‘how not to implement policy’):

We have talked about the US, but other countries were important. For
example, Australia and New Zealand offered some lessons for us. Of
course, in many ways Australia was an example of how not to carry out
the policy, because as you know, it scrapped its initiative half-way through
and has started again. (Interview with UK Treasury Official, August 1999)

UK Policy-Makers and US Experience

The attitude of UK policymakers towards using American ideas and expe-
riences was positive. The Democrat Party reestablished themselves in
1992 as the dominant party in the USA, and the manner in which they
did so was of great interest to New Labour policy officials:

We in the opposition were preparing to come into government, as I said,

to cope with the kind of inheritance the Democrats coped with after ’92. It
was because of the common experience of that political staging and those
relationships that we spent a lot of time talking with American govern-
ment policy people while we were in opposition about how they were
coping with it and what we would do and so in that sense the strategy of
a minimum wage and the Working Families Tax Credit was certainly influ-
enced by the lessons which we could draw from the American experience.
(Interview with Senior Treasury Advisor, August 1999)

Because of the seeming natural affinity between the parties, close working
relationships were quickly established in 1996 and 1997. The usefulness
of the US experiences was augmented by the support of the New Labour
leadership. A member of the New Deal Taskforce commented:

First of all, Gordon Brown is fixated by learning from the US. If you want
to get him to accept something that you don’t think he will, if you tell
him that it has worked in America it’s a much easier battle. (Member of
New Deal Task Force, July 1999)

Such support for the US experience permeated the policy approach of

New Labour, informing not only their approach to welfare reform, but
172 T. LEGRAND

also electoral strategy and party re-branding. However, the different

political structure of the US warranted some caution:

There has been a natural affinity between the two countries in that sense
and the Third Way approach that both have adopted. But that only carries,
as you pointed out, that only extends to the degree that [individual]
states reflect that. Some of them do and some of them don’t. (Senior
Employment Policy Advisor, July 1999).

As a result, the actual adoption of policy instruments from the USA was
limited. A DfEE official commented that: ‘although there has been some
lesson-drawing from the USA, as already noted, we are not talking about
the wholesale importation of the US model’ (Interview with Depart-
ment of Education and Employment Official, August 1999). At the same
time, a policy advisor from the Hudson Institute (the creators of Wiscon-
sin’s W2 programme) identified the picking apart of the US welfare policy
model:

What I witnessed I think was a willingness to sample our welfare to work

menu. Pick here, choose there, discard time limits, but take the work
requirement, but make it voluntary instead of mandatory. Take the notion
of sanctions, but, instead of making them hard-core sanctions, immediate
sanctions, go a little bit light on them. (Policy Official, Hudson Institute,
August 1999)

This ‘sampling’ of US welfare policies was a direct result of the caution

expressed by policy-makers, aware that the US target population of single
mothers was somewhat different to those of the UK. A senior policy
official offered this view:

It is important to remember that the ideas and policies in the United

States were not about the unemployed. They were targeted towards lone
parents. So this factor was a big constraint on transfer. Moreover, we were
not convinced that many of these ideas were working very well. (Interview
with senior DfEE Official, August 1999)

So, the policy instruments utilised in the US welfare model were treated
cautiously. It is noteworthy, however, that, although UK policy officials
were reluctant to adopt instruments directed at single mothers, they were
 6 AGENTS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL POLICY TRANSFER 173

particularly influenced by the way in which the USA approached the

problems they faced:

It is also worth noting that Brown was very much influenced by his
contacts on the other side of the Atlantic, particularly in the ‘Employers
Coalition’. The lesson learnt here was the importance of involving
employers and this led to the development of the New Deal Taskforce,
which is separate from the government. (Interview with senior DfEE
Official, August 1999)

So, it is clear that UK policy officials were well aware of the different
circumstances faced by the US policy-makers and, accordingly, were
reluctant to adopt those components of the US model that directly
addressed those parochial problems. What then were seen to be the crucial
components of the US model to be adopted, and adapted, in the UK?

Evaluation and Evidence from the USA

The findings below spell out two of the salient insights taken from the US
approach: 1. they drew upon the evaluation techniques and procedures for
directly monitoring the effectiveness of the New Deal (such as RCT), and
2. They drew upon the evidence generated by these evaluations to discern
what worked effectively (such as the interview requirement). Although
they recognised the evident demographic differences in the US approach,
what impressed UK policy-makers, and what has been most influential in
the format of the New Deal policy portfolio, is the evaluation approach
taken by US policy-makers:

One way in which the American practice did influence our thinking more
directly was on the issue of evaluation. The New Deal has been thor-
oughly evaluated from the beginning… This emphasis on evaluation is
something which is characteristic of New Labour and a quality not imme-
diately apparent in the previous Conservative administration. (Interview
with senior DfEE Official, August 1999)

The use of quasi-scientific methods to evaluate the efficacy of welfare-

to-work policies made an immediate impact on New Labour officials.
The significance of the American-style ‘what works?’ approach was iden-
tified and viewed as intrinsically compatible with the pragmatism of New
174 T. LEGRAND

Labour. By seconding American policy experts, UK policy-makers were

able to ensure that the New Deal benefited directly from US insights:

Across the Atlantic [redacted]6 at the MDRC made an important contribu-

tion. He very much had a ‘roving ambassador’ role. More particularly, he
was useful to us when it came to the question of evaluating the results of
the New Deal… In terms of countries, our focus has been typically Anglo-
Saxon. As well as the US, we also visited Australia and New Zealand.
However, one reason why the US was more useful to us was because
the Americans were further advanced on this question of evaluating their
programmes. (Interview with senior Treasury Officials, August 1999)

The putative effectiveness of US evaluation procedures drove the ministe-

rial support for the New Deal and its associated programmes. A member
of the New Deal Taskforce recognised the influence that US evidence had
upon ministers:

The reason why I’m actually quite keen that we do use the lessons of the
US, once you accept that we’re actually talking about apples and pears,
is that what the US have been very good at is a couple of things in the
general area of welfare. One is that the programmes that they do run are
very effective, they are very business-like, very brisk, they’re very inten-
sive… Our advice to Ministers for two years has been to intensify and
sharpen the whole delivery. It’s very convenient to demonstrate that working
well in the US. (emphasis added: Interview with member of New Deal Task
Force, August 1999)

This is a crucial point because it lends weight to the view that it was
the methodology of US welfare reform, rather than the content, that was
implemented in the New Deal. The main substance of US reform entailed
dealing with the ‘problems’ of lone mothers and the threat they consti-
tuted to the fabric of American society. The targeting of this demographic
group was clearly not a priority for UK policy-makers:

On New Deal in particular, first of all the US experience is not entirely

relevant because of the huge difference in welfare benefit. And, as I keep
reminding them, and I’ve had quite a lively debate with Gordon Brown
over this on a number of occasions and one-to-one, that actually the US
experience is all around unmarried mothers, or lone parents, women with
children, single parents with children. And that is not necessarily indicative
 6 AGENTS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL POLICY TRANSFER 175

of the problem that we have in this country. (Interview with member of

New Deal Task Force, August 1999)

Thus, the techniques and methods used in the USA featured heavily in
the New Deal because they could be used to show the ‘success’ of policy:

In a sense what we can learn from the Americans is also a lot of technical
things. This works and in particular you will always get this with the US
because there are 50 states and, as you say, the Americans are great at
running pilots. (Interview with Treasury Official, August 1999)

Of course, US emphasis on evaluation was not limited to the welfare

model. Another Treasury official argued that the UK’s implementation
of a national minimum wage also utilised US evidence:

Certainly, the US policy, and intellectual and academic work, of those five
or six years meant that we were much more confident politically about
the minimum wage as a policy than we might have been ten years ago.
(Interview with Senior Treasury Advisor, August 1999)

Adopting the ‘what works’ approach has instituted mechanisms of self-

monitoring in the UK’s approach. One Treasury official claimed that the
resulting flow of information on the progress of policy was an attractive
feature of the ongoing evaluations:

Moreover, I think it is important not to see the role of evaluation as neces-

sarily being able to judge the success or failure of a policy at a particular
moment in time. We see it very much in terms of a particular process.
We are very keen to learn from previous experience and feed this back
into future exercises in evaluation, so that you end up with a sense of
continuous improvement. (Interview with Senior Treasury Advisor, August
1999)

Because ‘(t)he Americans are quite good at evaluating the impact of

different programmes’ (Interview with DfEE Official 1999), New Labour
actively canvassed US policy-makers for their welfare-to-work policy tech-
niques and methodology. Because of the sizeable emphasis placed upon a
‘what works’ approach, policy officials were effectively freed-up to pursue
demonstrably effective policies. By uncoupling ideology from policy, the
initiative for developing policy was effectively devolved to a profession-
alised Civil Service.
176 T. LEGRAND

The above interviews reveal a variety of attitudes and approaches taken

by UK policy-makers when formulating UK welfare policy. It is note-
worthy that, from the very beginning, policy officials from New Labour
were actively looking overseas to draw policy lessons from other coun-
tries. The countries that featured most often in this search were Sweden
(because of their wider experience in LMP), the USA and Australia.
Although Sweden was included, and at a high level, it quickly became
obvious that the central plank of the LMP of New Labour was to be the
welfare-to-work stance pioneered in the USA. Of course, US policy was
not adopted wholesale and the interviewees alluded to some of the unique
features of the New Deal. However, the central and ongoing concern of
policy officials was to learn from, and incorporate, the evaluation evidence
that was extensively available in the USA. The volume of data that had
been collated by US officials allowed UK policy-makers to make evidence-
based arguments to justify adopting welfare policy instruments from the
USA. Moreover, they actively adopted US instruments of evaluation to
undertake ongoing evidence-based assessments of the New Deal. These
policy-makers were well aware that the problems faced, and the purpose
of PRWORA (and the associated state programs), were vastly different
from the UK. The ‘problem’ of single mothers is, perhaps, the single
greatest difference between the two countries. Yet, the policy instruments
covering time limits, compulsory interviews and, most crucially, evidence-
based service delivery were transferred from the USA, where the target
was single mothers, to the UK, where the target was unemployed young
people.

Australian Policy-Makers’
and the UK, US Experience
In this section, I want to examine the findings of my empirical work
with elite policy-makers in Australia. Essentially, I look to establish three
insights: firstly, for Australian policy-makers, the cultural and linguistic
linkages between Australia and the UK facilitated the flow of policy
insights between the two countries. Secondly, I want to briefly highlight
(although I have neither time nor space to pursue this in great depth)
the existence of an informal policy network that exists at the elite level of
policy-makers in social policy between the UK, USA, Australia, Canada,
New Zealand and Ireland (identified for the first time by this research).
Thirdly, this section will emphasise the importance of evidence in this
transfer process: Australian policy-makers regard evaluations and research
 6 AGENTS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL POLICY TRANSFER 177

conducted in the UK as valuable assets in promoting evidence-based

policy.
The previous chapter referred to the unique institutional arrangements
that have developed in Australia. The manner of providing equitable wage
agreements to the labour force has, for many years, been privileged above
measures to stimulate higher employment:

Historically…employment policy initiatives have tended to be, and partic-

ularly labour market programmes, have been devised and designed in
isolation from the industrial relations regime. Partly because of Australia’s
institutional arrangements, the industrial relations system is very much
mediated by a tribunal system, and the government can’t just dictate
what shall happen there, it has to work through it. (Author’s interview
with former Senior Official, Department of Employment and Workplace
Relations, July 2004)

Such a division in policy portfolios forces Australian policy-makers to

second-guess the likely conditions of the industrial relations regime. As
a consequence, labour market policies are seen as less controllable:

If the incomes policy was a good as it gets, in terms of the capacity

to restrain aggregate wages growth and so on, then the labour market
programmes had to deal with the outcomes thrown up by that. (Author’s
interview with former Senior Official, Department of Employment and
Workplace Relations, July 2004)

With these uncertain conditions comes a scepticism towards the actual

material impact that labour market interventions can have in Australia:

There is always debate about the relative effectiveness and, indeed, the
net impact of labour market programmes, and anybody who has any real
grasp of that knows that the net impact of many interventions in that area
are relatively indifferent. (Author’s interview with former Senior Official,
Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, July 2004)

As such, ‘policy-learning’ from Australia in any form must address the

awkward institutional arrangements that hamstring the effectiveness of
policy-makers. Indeed, the Australian public service receives a number of
visits annually from parliamentarians, policy-makers and professionals in
search of policy lessons. The former Secretary of DEWR observed:
178 T. LEGRAND

We would have a pretty regular flow of international visitors, task forces,

or study groups coming across to Australia. Often they were one-off rather
than ongoing. But there was quite a lot of that… we would have a regular
flow of people who were looking at the changes and how Australia were
handling them and why we had gone in a particular direction rather than
another. (Interview with author, July 2004)

However, according to the same interviewee, a number of factors mili-

tate against constructive policy learning. Here, he offers his view on the
capacity of these visits to garner any real lessons:

I think it’s pretty limited really. The capacity to actually assist them think
through -of course you don’t necessarily understand where they’re coming
from, unless you happen to know something about their policy environ-
ment - so the quality of the interaction is constrained because of that.
It may be constrained because of language barriers; everything you say is
being translated… And then a number of our institutional arrangements
are in some ways unique and hard to get across in an easy conversation.
(Author’s Interview, Former Secretary of the Department of Employment
and Workplace Relations, July 2004)

Despite these apparent institutional limitations, the possibility of policy

learning was viewed as very real. The previous chapter emphasised the
importance of ideas and specifically those of the Third Way. The integral
role these play in the policy-making approach of UK policy-makers was
made evident in their adoption of US welfare policy tools. Philosophical
compatibility plays an equally important role in the approach taken by
Australian policy-makers:

You’ve got to find an ethos that is compatible with yours for political
reasons, but also for socio-political reasons; it’s got to be acceptable in
society, it’s got to have legitimacy. There’s no point in having an under-
lying current of philosophical pressure on the Australian electorate which
is saying you’ve got to pay your own way better and wean yourself off
government than to go to the champions of ‘the government provides
everything’… So you’re selective, and that brings you back to a very
narrow socio-economic group which probably clones policies all over
the world. (Author’s Interview, Former Secretary of the Department of
Employment and Workplace Relations, July 2004)
 6 AGENTS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL POLICY TRANSFER 179

The former Secretary’s insight highlights the small pool of socio-

economic policies overseas that are seen as commensurate with the ethos
of the Australian political climate. Importantly however, this view was
tempered by the assertion that active ‘interactions’ with overseas countries
with a view to adopting policies was not commonplace:

I’m not sure we’ve ever had…a methodical interaction with any foreign
government from the point of view of adopting more testing policies. I
don’t think philosophically we’ve ever felt that we needed to. We’ve been
very independent minded country in that sense. We’re also a little arrogant
in thinking we can teach other countries how to do things, and that arro-
gance is fed by the fact that occasionally that is right. (Author’s Interview
with Former Secretary of the Department of Employment and Workplace
Relations, July 2004)

Accordingly, although such interactions are not regular, they neverthe-

less occur and, as such, may rather be viewed as contingent interactions.
My study aimed to obtain a cross section of policy-makers’ views towards
overseas policies from a range of Australian public service departments.
As the above insight from the former Secretary of the Australian Depart-
ment of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) indicates, the
broad consensus was one of general reticence about policy borrowing
from other countries. However, the UK has a distinctly different contin-
gent relationship with the Australian public service (APS). Certainly, the
cultural and historical links with the UK were often emphasised:

I think we’ve often had a good dialogue [with the UK] because we have
the same language and shared history and all that sort of stuff. But its
also, to an extent, the same way of looking at the world. If you look
at Europe the UK is more open, liberal, laissez-faire than the French or
the Germans. And, more global, frankly. (Author’s interview with Senior
Official, Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade July 2004)

This ‘special’ relationship, however, is not unproblematic. The cultural

and historical links, according to one interviewee, brought political
baggage that has distorted the balance of the UK-Australia relationship:

The British and Australians…always had a bit of a master-servant [relation-

ship]. And of course Westminster being the source model, when Australia
or Canada ends up with a corrupted Westminster they consider us to
180 T. LEGRAND

be impure. It’s not overt, but it’s not an equal relationship. (Author’s
interview with Former Secretary of DEWR, July 2004)

In spite of this asymmetric relationship, Australian policy-makers never-

theless actively sought to borrow the underpinning ideas of UK policies.
For example, the former Deputy Secretary to the Office of Prime Minister
and Cabinet said:

The hard data is what [ministers] want. For example, [the UK’s] Sure
Start was something that you got… for early education as a result of hard
evidence. […] I suppose I’m saying it’s evidence-base they want. Whether
it’s economic based or not. But if you don’t look at the sums in terms of
the cost then it’s less likely to go far. (Interview with author, July 2004)

The acknowledgement that Australian policy-makers briefed ministers

directly on the British model of welfare provision in the mid-1990s is a
crucial one, for it directly points to a two-way pathway of policy infor-
mation transfer between the UK and Australia. Moreover, it directly
acknowledges the use by Australian policy-makers of the empirical eval-
uations that UK policy-makers were producing. The evidence-oriented
approach matched the expectations and approaches adopted by Australian
officials. Indeed, the most senior of my interviewees, a former head of the
Australian Public Service, said of his policy-making ethos, ‘I would like to
think it is heavily based on evidence. I would like to think that the way
I go about making policies is pretty much textbook’ (July 2004). Yet,
he also acknowledged the structural advantage presented by a common
language:

The one extra dimension with the UK is, I’d say, is not that the ideas are
necessarily better for us, but they are more accessible; there’s a common
language and we tend to know each other. So the ideas are more accessible.
(Interview with author, July 2004)

This ‘mediation’ process is seen as a natural process involved in adopting

policy ideas. For this interviewee, different political motives, institutions
and environments provided obvious qualifications to the transfer of UK
policy. On his view, the use of UK policy information is mediated and
adapted through the respective ‘lens’ of the policy-maker:
 6 AGENTS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL POLICY TRANSFER 181

You start with the policy idea… and sometimes you don’t go beyond that.
You do want to know the details of how effective it is, obviously, you’re
interested in the evaluations. But it may be the details can’t be translated.
I mean, for a start off, we’re a federation and the UK isn’t. So in the
area of health you straight away can’t do it exactly. But if the idea works
then you can adapt it fairly readily to suit your own country in terms
of implementation. (Author’s interview with Former Head of Australian
Public Service, July 2004)

The manner in which such policies were seen to be transferable depended

a lot on the use of UK evaluative evidence. It is apparent that the range
of evaluation evidence played a central role in the arguments promoting
the use of overseas policy. For example, one interviewee noted:

Britain is actually quite an interesting reforming government. A lot of

what we’ve adopted in employment reform and in social security reform is
against based on the English model. I remember writing when we briefed
ministers in Australia about the British experience, the positive nature of
the British experience. The evaluations the British had done on their poli-
cies. We were selective: this one worked, this one didn’t, here’s the notion
the Brits have done. (Author’s interview with Former Secretary of DEWR,
August 2004)

The fact that evaluative evidence is easily translated (as it is usually

based in statistics) is clearly an advantage. This is particularly useful in
institutions where ‘hard’ statistics carry more weight:

I think obviously it’s easier to pick up and remarket something which is

more quantifiable and where you think you can make a strong case for “had
these impacts, and this research demonstrates these impacts” and you can
translate the measure into income distribution statistics or whatever else is
a relevant component. Social policy, of its nature, is a lot more amorphous,
but I wouldn’t say that that makes it less amenable to being international
ideas or fresh ideas being able to be brought on and indigenised in order to
have them effectively appreciated and considered. (Interview with former
Senior Official, Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, July
2004)

At this time, Australian policy-makers were also looking at the USA for
programmes backed by strong evaluative evidence. Specifically, during the
development of the Australian Child Support policy (itself the subject of
182 T. LEGRAND

strong interest from the UK), Australian policy officials used evidence
from the US experience to inform the development of their own policy:

As we developed it [the child support system] we were getting all these

questions thrown at us, so we were using United States to see what
evidence there was that might help. And evidence is very powerful in the
cabinet room. Especially comparative evidence is very powerful. (Author’s
interview with Former Deputy Secretary of Australian office of Prime
Minister and Cabinet, July 2004)

Clearly, the use of evidence from overseas is useful not only in formu-
lating policy approaches, but also in strengthening the justification for
that approach itself. In this sense, the Australian policy approach emulates
that of UK policy-makers in their appeal to evaluative evidence in support
of insights drawn from overseas.

Australia’s JET Policy, and the USA

The JET programme (Jobs, Education and Training for sole parents) was
developed and introduced in Australia in 1989 (Cass 1993; Gray and
Stanton 2002; Pierson and Castles 2002). Cass summarises its aims:

JET provides a voluntary labour market programme for sole parents in

receipt of pension. The programme aids entry to the labour market either
in the short or longer term through an integrated strategy of individual
advice and counselling, access to education, training and employment expe-
rience programmes and affordable childcare places. The JET programme is
jointly administered by the Departments of Social Security (DSS), Health,
Housing and Community Services (HHCS), and Employment, Education
and Training (DEET). (Cass 1993, p. 6)

Similarly, Pierson and Castles claim that:

JET was established by the Australian federal government in March 1989.

Its aim was ‘to provide the advice and practical help sole parent pensioners
need to enter or return to employment: the ultimate objective being to
increase their income and reduce pension expenditure’. (DSS 1992)

Pierson, in an earlier article, references a document from the Australian

Social Justice Commission that states:
 6 AGENTS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL POLICY TRANSFER 183

Australia has pioneered a JET programme for lone parents which has, over
the last five years, reached nearly half of that group, significantly raising
levels of training, employment and earnings amongst its clients. Savings
have consistently outstripped targets and are now close to the overall
programme costs. Indeed the programme has been so successful that the
Australian government is now considering extending it to the registered
long-term unemployed. (Social Justice Commission 1994, p. 172, cited in
Pierson 2003, p. 88)

However, it has not been noted to date in the literature that, in fact, the
JET programme was heavily based upon the Massachusetts state model,
called ‘Education and Training Choices’. One of the elite interviewees
was heavily involved in its adoption from the USA and gave this frank
exposition of how the Australian JET programme came into being:

We had this wonderful programme called JET (Jobs, Education and

Training for sole parents) when I was in the department of social security…
I went over to Massachusetts where they had the well-known governor at
that time, [Governor] Dukakis, and I had read about this scheme, and I
went and looked at it, and I was pretty impressed. They called theirs E.T…
Education and Training, and it involved getting sole parents into work, but
not coercively, it was a voluntary scheme that provided them the necessary
training, assessing what they wanted to do in life… And it was being very
successful. I started talking to the state of Victoria about trying this thing.
Then the minister goes over there -or he’s about to go - He comes back
and says, ‘we’re going to do it, not going to try it.’
Then he arranged, because he’d been there, this is the network thing,
for the heads of the departments of social security and education and
training in Massachusetts - who were married to each other - to come
to Australia… He had them go all around Australia talking to the scep-
tical people, who they were mainly middle-aged males, about how grand
this scheme could be and how well they could do it… and so it was a
very smooth implementation process- it’s still successful. (Former Deputy
Secretary of the Australian Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet, interview
with the author, July 2004)

The fact that this policy originated in the USA is potentially significant
because it shows that, even in the 1980s, Australian policy officials were
adopting a pragmatic approach to policy-making and adopting policy
from overseas. For some authors, this is explained simply: Australia was
a precursor of the Third Way ideology (and its pragmatism). Pierson and
184 T. LEGRAND

Castles view the Third Way as: ‘an omnibus term for a particular reori-
entation of parties of the centre-left in the face of a series of substantial
changes in their external environment (encompassing both new threats
and new opportunities)’ (Pierson and Castles 2002, pp. 684–685). Whilst
careful not to suggest that Australia’s policy approach in the 1980s and
1990s was a comfortable ‘fit’ with the Third Way, Pierson and Castles
nevertheless suggest that:

Australia had, in some sense, long been pursuing, if not quite a third way,
then certainly a social protection regime that was quite different from those
prevailing in continental Europe. In shorthand terms, the ALP’s strategy
had for almost a century contained elements which were new to third way
reformers elsewhere (2002, p. 697)

For Australian policy-makers, the combined experiences of the UK and

USA provided a rich background of experience from which to draw.
Yet, the New Deal and PRWORA were not seen by my interviewees as
explicit examples that influenced their approach. Because of the histor-
ical and cultural relationship that Australian policy-makers felt they shared
with the UK, there was an ongoing, and shared, institutional relationship
which was low-key, but nevertheless persistent. Interestingly, in the cases
where they directly looked at particular policies in the UK, the impact
of evidence was emphasised. In this way, the Australian officials mirrored
their UK counterparts with their concern for evidence-based approaches
that use ongoing evaluations. The importance of ‘hard data’ was empha-
sised as a key component in the argument about whether to adopt a
particular policy. This insight marks an important step: policies appear
to be more likely to be transferred when evidence and evaluations of their
effectiveness are available. This finding is returned to in the next chapter.
The finding that the Australian JET programme was based upon a US
model is potentially very significant, even more so since it is an example of
a policy that was adapted from the USA to Australia and then to the UK,
underlining the strong policy relationship between the three. Indeed, the
relationship between these three English-speaking countries is even more
significant given the next findings.
 6 AGENTS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL POLICY TRANSFER 185

Systemising Learning About Labour

Markets: A Network Emerges
The close contacts between officials of the three countries identified here
underline the institutional proximity that had emerged by the late 1990s
on the questions of reforming welfare. One finding to emerge from
the set of interviews was the identification of an informal policy knowl-
edge network that exists between UK, the USA, Australia, New Zealand,
Canada and Ireland which holds biannual meetings. Such an elite social
policy network with regular and programmed meetings does not appear to
have been identified in the literature. Another elite interviewee confirmed
the meetings and gave this explanation of why the network formed and
selected member countries as it did:

Well it’s partly a function of who we have closest and most regular deal-
ings with and affinities with, I suppose, through a -not only just by virtue
of sharing language- but who historically we’ve had close links with or
have shared systems of government with. So, UK and Canada and, obvi-
ously, New Zealand. And a number of departments of state actually have
periodic ‘get-togethers’ with those. For example, our employment depart-
ment meets every couple of years with its counterparts from Ireland, the
UK, Canada, The US, New Zealand. They come together and pool ideas,
and thinking and experiences. Now, obviously, we’re linked into the US,
which is the focus for international bodies like the World Bank, the IMF,
quite aside from the significance of the US economy and our defence rela-
tionship. Our linkages with other non-speaking countries, on the whole,
are just not as deep, or as well-established. (Interview with former Senior
Official 2, Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, July
2004)

Crucially, this network is predominantly made up of the most senior

public servant of that country’s employment department, underlining its
importance as a network of policy ideas at the very highest level. The
interviewee gave the following insights to the attitude of the USA to the
exchange of policy information and the value of the informal meetings:

The English-derived countries that come from… the British systems, even
if they resent it, are a more natural grouping. And so, for example, there
are very active exchanges between Australia and Britain, Australia and
Canada, Australia and New Zealand… But the Americans never join us.
They are very isolated: don’t allow foreigners into the government. So, to
186 T. LEGRAND

have the American head of social security come to this six-country thing,
and participate actively and freely, was a coup and it was valuable. (Author’s
interview with former Senior Official 1 of Department of Employment and
Workplace Relations, July 2004)

Another interviewee agreed that these conferences took place regularly.

The meetings were given the moniker, ‘The Belmont Conference’. Apart
from these brief acknowledgements, little else about these meetings is
available in the public realm. One (off the record) participant in one of
these conferences noted:

it was clear that similar program structures and labour market strategies
meant that they shared many of the same policy and management prob-
lems. They could have a very informed discussion about the design of
earned income tax credits/supplements, for example. A lot of “sharing”
was going on over meals and at breaks.

This finding represents an important empirical step in the development of

policy transfer analysis for it indicates that policy-makers are increasingly
willing to engage in policy transfer on an ongoing or regularised basis.
This insight stands in contrast to Evans and Davies’ stated depiction of
policy transfer networks:

[Evans and Davies] developed the concept of a policy transfer network to

depict an ad hoc, action oriented policy-making structure set up with the
specific intention of engineering rapid policy-change. They exist only for the
time that a transfer is occurring.7 (emphases added, Evans 2004, p. 22;
Evans and Davies 1999, p. 376)

The fact that policy-makers engage in policy transfer networks on a

regular, and not ad hoc, basis highlights the importance of understanding
changes in contemporary policy-making. New and emerging forms of
inter-government communication and policy exchange must be captured
and investigated by political scientists, so that explanations of political
outcomes can be both richer and more accurate.

Conclusion
There are three key findings from his empirical work. Firstly, it has
demonstrated that the ideological parameters of the PRWORA were
 6 AGENTS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL POLICY TRANSFER 187

constructed by the Republicans in the 1992–1996 Congress. The insights

taken from interviews with former senior House Republicans and Clin-
ton’s advisors reject the claim that New Labour were borrowing a
‘Democrat’ policy. Rather, the substance of the New Deal was seen to
be qualitatively different to the welfare-to-work programmes of the USA.
An advisor to Clinton argued that: ‘The British system is a progres-
sive welfare-to-work policy; it’s completely different from the American
idea’. Similarly, for Walker and Wiseman, there are strong indications that
New Labour’s New Deal extends beyond the labour market interventions
authored in PRWORA. Whilst TANF was designed to tackle the problem
of welfare-dependent families with children, the New Deal initiated a far
wider range of interventions including:

welfare-to-work policies aimed at young and long-term recipients of unem-

ployment benefits, disabled people, and single parents; tax credits and other
policies intended to raise take-home pay; bridging schemes to facilitate
the transition to work; area-based antipoverty and economic regeneration
initiatives; and revised child support policies and increased cash benefits
to help defray the costs of raising children. (Walker and Wiseman 2001,
p. 124)

As such, the New Deal was not a US-derived policy transfer. It was
conceived and designed to target the young unemployed, whereas the US
policy quite clearly targeted single mothers. What can be seen, however,
is extensive contacts between UK and US policy-makers and extensive
learning: What, then, was adopted from the USA? What came out of
the US experience, it seems, is both the welfare-to-work rationality (i.e.
making benefit payments conditional on eventual work requirements)
coupled with an extensive regime of evaluation. It is this emphasis on the
‘what works’ approach and continuous monitoring that featured heavily
in the UK’s New Deal and which constitutes the central component of
policy transfer. The use of American-style evaluation procedures mirrored
the instrumental rationalism that was lauded by New Labour. What works
was what mattered and the US approach was seen to work because of
its extensive evaluation regime: ‘Surely all the evidence comes from the
United States even though it has nothing to do with the unemployed…
since there isn’t any other evidence that is being influential’ (Interview
with member of UK’s New Deal Task Force, July 1999).
188 T. LEGRAND

Some Comments on Research Methodology

The findings reported here are, of course, subject to a number of method-
ological limitations: (i) as a network of elite policy officials, there is a
relatively small pool of participants able to furnish valid insights, (ii)
the small pool of participants are relatively inaccessible since they are
diffused across six countries, (iii) senior officials, such as the those in the
Belmont Conference (see later in this chapter) participants, were possibly
constrained by contractual confidentiality requirements, or are naturally
reticent about what is a highly informal exchange of views, and (iv) the
time they have available for research interviews is limited by the demands
of their senior role in government.
These interviews were augmented and/or corroborated with govern-
ment documents throughout the research and this is reflected in the
reporting of the data. All interviews are anonymised. The following
interviews were conducted between July 2004 and January 2011. All
interviews were conducted with the guarantee of anonymity (with refer-
ences only to former posts held, minus any identifying detail). I have one
opening caveat: the selected quotes reflect the priorities of my research
agenda and are recorded faithfully from transcriptions of each interview
and, where the context of the quote is important to its interpretation,
I have preceded the quote with the relevant context. The information
derived from the interview data is taken as prima facie evidence; that
is, they are taken, interpreted and analysed at face value. Of course, any
qualitative data is open to hermeneutic distortion (conscious or other-
wise) and, as the principal researcher, I have minimised this to the best of
my ability.
As mentioned earlier, this study is qualitative, which means that it
relies on the discursive insights that actors choose to share. Whilst critics
of this method and methodology point to the inherent subjectivity of
data captured through interviews, my claim is that subjectivity is precisely
what my emergent model seeks to capture. As Devine writes, such qual-
itative methods: ‘are most appropriately employed where the goal is to
explore people’s subjective experiences and the meanings they attach to
these experiences’ (emphasis in original, Devine 2002, p. 199). Policy
transfer is not a neutral by-product of the policy process; it is through the
subjective ideas of agents that policy transfers occur.
The findings in this chapter are theoretically-informed and informative
theoretically. As outlined earlier, the methodological approach adopted
 6 AGENTS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL POLICY TRANSFER 189

here rests upon a ‘depth ontology’ and a critical realist epistemology.

Often with research studies, it is unclear how theory marries with the
empirical material. Here, I wish to render the relationship in my research
between the abstract (theory) and the concrete (material) unambiguously.
To return to my theoretical claims in Chapter 4, I argued that the link
between structures and agents in policy transfer analysis remains absent. I
put forward the claim that this link can be established through a critical
realist framework; specifically, that emergent properties of deep structures
are to be found at the level of the ‘empirical’ and that, by unpacking these
emergent properties, we can arrive at an understanding of how struc-
tures are linked to agents in policy transfer. Methodologically, this has
shaped/directed my study in the following ways:

i. Qualitative methodology: the research findings are derived from

interviews, policy documents and statements, thus are not informed
by statistical findings.
ii. Hermeneutically-cautious: I make no claims to having direct access
to reality (especially through the ‘double hermeneutic of others’
interpretations of events and phenomena) instead, it is recognised
that processes, facets, phenomena, events, structures (the ‘real) are
inevitably mediated by human interpretive faculties. Indeed, what is
defined as the area of interest is, for reasons of time and practicality,
arbitrarily circumscribed.
iii. Inductively-led research: the research process is led by its findings;
this means that I do not seek to make falsifiable hypothetical claims,
rather I look to build/develop theory through the findings.

Notes
1. Participants were identified in one of two ways: (i) travel and accommo-
dation expenses associated with attendance at network meetings. These,
for most countries, were subject to public disclosure in institutional annual
reports. (ii) Pre-existing contacts with policy officials aware of the network
enabled the author to identify and approach network participants. The
interviews were conducted under the Chatham House rules and the
findings are reported with the permission of interviewees.
2. It should be noted that David Elwood is more commonly understood to
be Clinton’s primary intellectual inspiration for his ideas on welfare (see
Weaver 2000).
190 T. LEGRAND

3. Much of the credit of lowering welfare rolls was given to Clinton in

recognition of his political will to change the terms of welfare engagement.
4. There is a strong suggestion that Clinton signed the PRWORA 1996
because he felt that his chances of reelection were pinned against the
implementation of the legislation. Indeed, Clinton refused to sign the two
previous versions of the PRWORA, having been counselled by his advisors
that to do so was unnecessary (Interview with Senior White House Staff
Advisor, 2005).
5. The interviews referred to in this section were conducted in 1999 with
a number of UK policy officials for a project funded by the Leverhulme
Trust. As with the interviews I conducted in the US and Australia, all
interviewees have been anonymised.
6. Obscured to retain anonymity.
7. This relates closely to our conceptualisation of ‘relationships’ between
actors. To say that the policy transfer network exists only for the time
the transfer ‘is occurring’ implies that the network is only incidental.
To contextualise this, consider a transaction between a shopkeeper and a
customer: to observe that a transaction has a beginning and an end is the
commonsensical position to adopt. However, the transaction is not a mate-
rial phenomena (except insofar as to say that goods are exchanged) it is a
property of the wider system of currency, value, exchange and ownership.
It is an emergent property of the wider structures.

References
Banks, J., Disney, R., Duncan, A., & Van Reenen, J. (2005). The inter-
nationalisation of public welfare policy. The Economic Journal, 115(502),
C62–C81.
Cass, B. (1993). Sole parent family policy in Australia: Income support and
labour market issues. Social Policy Journal of New Zealand, 1, 3–16.
Daguerre, A., & Taylor-Gooby, P. (2004). Neglecting Europe: Explaining the
predominance of American ideas in new labour’s welfare policies since 1997.
Journal of European Social Policy, 14(1), 25–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/
0958928704039786.
Department of Social Security, Australia. (1992). Jobs, Education and Training
(JET): Evaluation report. Canberra: Social Policy Division.
Devine, F. (2002). Qualitative methods: Theory and methods in political science.
In D. Marsh & G. Stoker (Eds.), Theories and Methods in Political Science, 2.
Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Dolowitz, D. P. (2000). Special issue on policy transfer—Introduction. Gover-
nance: An International Journal of Policy and Administration, 13(1), 1–4.
Retrieved from <Go to ISI>://WOS:000085236800001.
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Driver, S. (2004). North Atlantic drift: Welfare reform and the ‘Third Way’
politics of New Labour and the new democrats. In L. Martell, Leggett,
W., & Hale, S. (Eds.), The Third Way and beyond: Criticisms, futures and
alternatives. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Ellwood, D. T. (1996). Welfare reform as I knew it: When bad things happen to
good policies. American Prospect, 26, 22–29.
Evans, M. (2004). Policy transfer in global perspective. Aldershot, Hants, UK and
Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Evans, M., & Davies, J. (1999). Understanding policy transfer: A multi-
level, multi-disciplinary perspective. Public Administration, 77 (2), 361–385.
Retrieved from <Go to ISI>://WOS:000081848100007.
Gray, M. C., & Stanton, D. (2002). Lessons of United States welfare reforms for
Australian social policy. Australian Institute of Family Studies.
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(party) origins of welfare to work. In New labour, new welfare state (pp. 257–
280). Bristol: Policy Press.
Pierson, C. (2003). Learning from Labor? Welfare policy transfer between
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Pierson, C., & Castles, F. G. (2002). Australian antecedents of the Third Way.
Political Studies, 50(4), 683–702.
Walker, R., & Wiseman, M. (2001). Britain’s new deal and the next round of
US welfare reform. Retrieved from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wop/wispod/
1223-01.html. Accessed 1st September 2020.
Weaver, R. K. (2000). Ending welfare as we know it. Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution Press.
 CHAPTER 7

The Genesis of Transgovernmental Networks

Our final empirical chapter expands on the formation, evolution, oper-

ation and outcomes associated with a specific Anglosphere transgov-
ernmental policy transfer network—The Windsor Conference Policy
Network (WCPN)—to render in detail how a typical network of this sort
operates and to draw out the wider vista of subsequent policy network
collaboration, especially with respect to those within the Anglosphere.
In Part I, the case study highlights the impact that transnational policy
networking can have on the dissemination of policy ideas amongst a
cohort of elite policy officials. It provides an overview of the origins and
evolution of the network; initial insights into the structure and format of
the network; outcomes associated with the network; and reflections on
future empirical research. Part II of the chapter sets out a broader vista of
Anglosphere networks to have emerged since the WCPN that fall into the
same transgovernmental network template. These findings offer an oppor-
tunity for critical reflection on the intersection of the concepts of policy
transfer and transgovernmentalism, and it is contended that the case yields
valuable empirical insights into the murky processes of transgovernmental
policy transfer, policy learning and discrete regulation. The ambition is to
provide an empirical and theoretical insight into the opaque processes
of transgovernmental policy transfer and regulation drawing from the
three-stage framework proposed in Chapter 3.

© The Author(s) 2021 193

T. Legrand, The Architecture of Policy Transfer,
Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55821-5_7
194 T. LEGRAND

Part I: The Origins and Evolution

of the Windsor Conference Policy Network
The Windsor Conference is an informal network of Anglosphere chief
executives of social welfare and employment departments from the UK,
Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. The Windsor
Conference was originally formed with the intention of exchanging ideas
and experiences pertaining to social policy and labour market policy. The
inception of the network’s predecessor (the ‘Five Countries’ meeting) in
1989 coincided with the era in which information technology was making
its mark on public administration. Indeed, as outlined below, the use
and utility of IT in government were the first order of business for the
network. The network was, and remains, exclusive to the Anglosphere
countries. The Windsor Conference was formed in 2009 as an amalgama-
tion of two closely connected policy networks. The first of these formed
in 1989 and was concerned with social welfare policy. Known initially as
the Five Countries (latterly renamed the Six Countries upon the entry of
Ireland into the network), the network was used as a template for the
formation of the second network, framed around labour market policy,
known as the Belmont Conference. These networks operated in parallel
during the 1990s and into the next decade until April 2009 when the two
combined to form the Windsor Conference. Below I discuss the evolution
of the network(s) in more detail.
Links between UK, US, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian offi-
cials had already existed in bilateral form between social policy agencies
for some time prior to 1989. The impetus for the creation of a formal
multilateral network of policy learning, however, emerged from discus-
sions between senior Australian, US and UK officials in the late 1980s.
At that time, the network’s founding officials recognised that global
economic systems, underpinned by similar market mechanisms and popu-
lated by similar regulatory ideas, induced a series of policy problems that
were common across Anglosphere countries. One of key officials involved
in the network’s creation noted:

I found the ISSA Conference in Vienna in 1988 interesting but not very
helpful in regard to the sorts of issues we were facing. In conversation
with the U.K., Canadians and the U.S. people it was clear that we were
all in the same boat. At that stage we were a bit ahead on IT and we had
the Bettina Cass Social Security Review well under way. It seemed sensible
 7 THE GENESIS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL NETWORKS 195

to have a high level get together to talk about common issues. The other
potential participants all thought it was a good idea and we (DSS Australia)
agreed to convene the first meeting. (Interviewee A: Six Countries meeting
participant, May 2012)

With comparable, albeit far from identical, social security systems, an

initial one-off conference in Australia was scheduled to flesh out some
of the approaches to solving the emerging policy problems amongst
the participating countries. The international conference of senior social
policy officials was, from the outset, conceived as an informal network
meeting in which discussions could be a confidential ‘warts and all’
dialogue on the separate and shared policy issues problems faced by
social security departments. According to one interviewee, it was made
clear that network participants would only be heads of agencies and
their most senior staff (Interviewee D: Six Countries meeting partici-
pant, June 2012). The initial five countries were selected on the basis
of a set of shared policy characteristics: OECD membership, English
speaking; common policy protocols and terminology; and shared insti-
tutional features. Of course, common features were not evenly mirrored:
the USA, for example, is not modelled on a Westminster system and its
social security delivery was and remains rather more fragmented than that
of its counterparts.

The Five Countries Meeting: A Network Born

The first international meeting was hosted by the Australian government
in November 1989. Although hindered by a nation-wide pilots’ strike,
the meeting was attended by senior officials responsible for managing
social security policy from Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the USA
and Canada. Officials from these five English-speaking OECD coun-
tries included: Herb Doggette (Deputy Commissioner for Operations)
from the US Social Security Administration; Deputy Secretary of the UK
Department of Social Security, Ann Bowtell (later the Permanent Secre-
tary); Derek Volker, the Secretary of Australia’s Department of Social
Security; John Grant, Director-General of New Zealand’s Department of
Social Welfare; and Ian Green, the Assistant Deputy Minister for Canada’s
Department of Health and Welfare.
The premise of the Five Countries meeting in Australia was to
allow participating countries to identify common social security policy
196 T. LEGRAND

and administration issues. Despite clear differences between respec-

tive insurance and contribution-based national social security schemes,
policy considerations were regarded as substantively the same. At that
time, all Anglosphere countries were struggling to handle growing
privacy concerns and public calls for greater freedom of information.
Further, it was acknowledged at the conference that there were common
concerns around how to establish effective social policy for single parents,
workforce participation, the long-term unemployed, training and case
management and disability support. Shortly before the 1989 meeting,
a comprehensive review of Australia’s social security published its find-
ings. The Cass Social Security Review, established in 1986, signalled
the government’s intention to focus efforts on enhancing the labour
market participation of individuals claiming social security benefits, such
as single parents, the unemployed and people with disabilities. Indeed, the
Review’s analysis of social security provided the impetus for the creation
of Australia’s JET scheme, an initiative to induce lone parents to take
up paid work. The findings of the Cass Review were disseminated to
the Six Countries meeting participants to provoke discussion and afford
participants the opportunity to engage with social policy issues faced
by the Australian government. All five countries faced similar challenges
for disability/invalidity pensions and, moreover, the question of how
government should address issues specific to individuals with profound
disability.
The agenda for the initial meeting was divided into two policy streams.
The first examined common policy and administrative issues, as outlined
above. The second focused on emerging applications of information tech-
nology and, in particular, the challenges of designing and implementing
electronic administration of social security payments. The late 1980s was
the dawn of the computer age in public administration. Information
technology—viz. data centres, networked information and the desktop
computer—was becoming a core feature of service delivery for agen-
cies in the Anglosphere countries, especially data-intensive agencies such
as social security. According to one interviewee who attended the first
conference: ‘There was a view that [Australia] was ahead of the game on
computing infrastructure’ (Interviewee D, June 2012). The discussions
soon furnished valuable shared outcomes. For example, on the delivery
of social security benefits, Australia’s payment of benefit by direct bank
transfer attracted the interest of UK officials, where the benefit payments
via ‘Giros’ had been particularly vulnerable to fraud. Discussions also
 7 THE GENESIS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL NETWORKS 197

centred on organisational arrangements including institutional systems,

social security office set-ups, IT link-ups and staff training. Notably, the
IT group subsequently met separately from the main meeting to maintain
knowledge links on IT infrastructure arrangements.
Crucially, although the meeting in Australia was intended as a one-off
opportunity to share the successes and failures of the respective partici-
pating countries, the 1989 Five Countries meeting sparked considerable
enthusiasm amongst participants to continue not only the regular multi-
lateral network meeting, but also secured strong professional bilateral
and multilateral relationships. It was determined that hosting of the five
countries meeting would rotate between participants and that subsequent
meetings, which included the subnetwork IT group,1 would be themati-
cally focused. For example, the 1990 meeting in Canada was dominated
by discussions over Child Support policy. The 1991 meeting was held in
the UK and focused on the management of fiscal resources and adminis-
trative structuring. It attracted a similar seniority of officials2 and cost
the UK government an estimated £40,0003 to host. After the fourth
meeting, held in Washington DC in 1992, meetings were scheduled to
run approximately every eighteen months.

The Belmont Conference and Institutional Imperatives

of the Anglosphere
A parallel policy network, the Belmont Conference was convened in the
1990s in the USA. The network was inspired in part by the success of
the Six Countries and held to an identical format: a meeting of the heads
of the department responsible for employment policy from the Anglo-
sphere countries. As with the Six Countries meeting, the proceedings
of the Belmont Conference are held confidentially and little—beyond an
acknowledgement of its occurrence—is published regarding its outcomes.
One interview gave this summary of the Conference’s beginnings:

Of their volition, six heads of social security equivalent departments of six

English-speaking countries, it used to be five but then we discovered the
Irish spoke English, formed an informal group and decided to meet annu-
ally to meet for three days and just debate in a very open free discussion
the trend of policy in those countries. (Interviewee B, Belmont Conference
network participant, October 2004)
198 T. LEGRAND

The format of Belmont was much the same as the Six Countries meeting:
discussions were structured to elicit meaningful comparisons and policy
issues. Specifically, the issues under consideration resonate with the
reforms most prominently associated with NPM. Reflecting the new
commitment to active labour markets and mutual obligation across these
countries, the 2002 Belmont Conference in Canada, for example, focused
on the transition from instruments of income transfers (i.e. government
cash handouts) to investment in human capital. An interviewee attending
the conference—part of the ancillary staff—observed the following:

Even in my short time with them, it was clear that similar program struc-
tures and labour market strategies meant that they shared many of the
same policy and management problems. They could have a very informed
discussion about the design of earned income tax credits/supplements,
for example. A lot of “sharing” was going on over meals and at breaks.4
(Interviewee E: Belmont Conference ancillary participant, October 2007)

In the 2006 meeting of the Belmont Conference, which occurred in New

Zealand, a similar dynamic was evident. According to the New Zealand
Department of Labour, the meeting generated perspectives on ‘social and
economic issues affecting labour market participation and resulted in an
informal and frank exchange of views on medium to long-term policy
developments’.5 The meeting was foregrounded by New Zealand’s high
employment and labour market participation, a combination that was
the basis of concerns over dwindling supply and diversity of labour. The
Conference sought to generate a focus on: ‘boosting labour productivity
and the quality of work’; ‘enhancing labour market participation’; and
‘ensuring a more comprehensive and responsive skills base’.6
Subsequently, in April 2009, the heads of departments for social secu-
rity and labour market policy from Australia, Canada, Ireland, New
Zealand and the USA travelled to the UK for what was billed as the
Combined Six Countries and Belmont Conference. The themes of this
conference reflected the major governance patterns of NPM: ‘private and
voluntary sector contract mechanisms’ and ‘efficient service delivery’.
The impact of NPM reforms on the ongoing exchange of policy instru-
ments merits further consideration, for, if elite policy-makers actively
canvass the views and insights of selected countries, then not only is
there evidence of systemic and patterned utilisation of certain labour
 7 THE GENESIS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL NETWORKS 199

market policy (and welfare policy) ideas, but also these may become self-
reinforcing within the Anglosphere and promotor of the same policies
beyond: in selecting and privileging ideas taken from Anglo-Saxon coun-
tries, this ‘cluster’ of Anglosphere countries may well act as a structural
promoter of certain policies. As an example of how this cluster informs the
views of one another, the US General Accounting Office, in an exercise
to improve ‘performance management’, noted:

Our objective for this report was to describe how four OECD member
countries—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—
have begun to use their performance management systems to help their
governments achieve results. The experiences of these four countries may
prove valuable to federal agencies in the United States as they develop their
own initiatives to integrate individual performance with the achievement of
organizational goals. (2002, p. 1)

This insight is all the more surprising given that the general feeling
amongst the US interviewees participating in this research was that policy
transfer was considered by US agencies to be generally benign. Inter-
esting, and perhaps it is significant, Ireland was not included in the study,
although Bourgault et al. (1993) note that:

Such a system is now widely used for the annual appraisal of senior
managers in Australia, Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, and in the
United States (SES category), but it does not affect the most senior level
in the hierarchy. (Bourgault et al. 1993, p. 74, emphasis added)

An Insider’s Insights
The existence of a network of elite actors exchanging knowledge and
experience about labour market policy is potentially extremely significant,
because it opens up the possibility of an entirely separate driver of policy
transfer (as well as policy diffusion and convergence) that has, thus far,
escaped the attentions of academics. I was able to obtain an interview with
a senior official in the Canadian Department of Human Resources and
Social Development. This official was able to give an insider’s perspective
on the Belmont Conference (all quotes taken from an interview with the
author, 30 October 2007). According to this interviewee, the Belmont
Conference came out of informal relationships formed in the OECD:
200 T. LEGRAND

The corridors of the OECD in Paris are full of discussions, and things
like that. When I go to Paris I will very likely have lunch or dinner -very
informally- with Australia, New Zealand, whoever is around, very often
the UK and the US. And we’re going to have lunch or dinner and we’re
going to talk about all sorts of things, and we’re going to start exchanging
ideas. This is how Belmont was born. In the corridors and nice restaurants
around the OECD.

The ongoing bi-annual conference was intended to help senior policy offi-
cials ‘float’ policy ideas with like-minded officials. The official explained
that the six countries shared a very specific idea of their use of policy:

We have similar political regimes. And I think that’s very, very impor-
tant. Above all, we have a mentality: we use legislation as a last resort,
as opposed to Europeans who use legislation front and centre. That
differentiates us a great deal from the others.

The official echoed many of the sentiments expressed by interviewees in

Australia (see above) specifically highlighting the informal nature of the
Conference:

people are asked to do a country update presentation for each country for
twenty minutes and will talk about what’s new since the last time they met.
Then there’ll be some questions or comments around that. Then they may
address big issues like how do we ensure full participation of unemployed
people in the workforce. And that will be a major theme and each country
will highlight the particular initiatives that they have adopted or thinking
of adopting in their countries. This is a place where you can talk about
something that you’re thinking about. Normally you can’t talk about that.
If I go to the OECD I will not talk about the fact that we are right now
developing a paper on family policy. Because that paper has not received
any kind of approval from any political level. But if I go to a place like
[the Belmont Conference] I will be able to mention that.

This informal environment is intended to foster a greater exchange of

ideas and experiences. Indeed, it is not simply a ‘talking shop’. The official
saw the Conference as a means by which each country could compare and
contrast their country’s policies with others. Moreover, the experiences
gleaned contributed to active subsequent policy learning:
 7 THE GENESIS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL NETWORKS 201

What we did there was, I guess, we found out that more or less we
were thinking alike. It’s very bizarre. I’m not that this actually creates
the exchange of policy per se. I would say it is one way of doing this.
Most importantly, I think it is a way of getting people to meet and see how
different or similar their policies are. If they’re similar they find reassurance.
If they are different then they decide whether they will assess whether they
like it. Or, if they don’t, and then they see further whether the political
situation is good enough, then they will pursue that. It’s mostly for getting
together and discussing openly and then afterwards […] would decide to
go to Australia or Australia would decide to come visit us because of what
they have seen.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the Conference was that it estab-
lished personal relationships. The official noted that: ‘we use it mostly
to build relationships’. Indeed, over the three-day Conference, the inter-
viewee observed that: ‘I’d just say they [the policy officials] bonded. We
get them together and they become friends’. The resultant flow of ideas
led to active policy transfers. However, often these transfers of policy were
deliberately repackaged for reasons of political expediency:

I must confess to you that, for Australia, we did exchange a lot on matters
of operation. They have Centrelink, and I know that our operation people
here are fascinated by what’s happening in Australia. I’ll be frank with
you, sometimes with policies in Australia they have such a blunt way of
proposing their ideas that we have to be very careful. We couldn’t propose
the ideas they are proposing the same way in Canada… They talk about
outsourcing, which is something which is totally unpalatable here to [the
Labor Party]. Whereas if we refer to NGOs -which is exactly what it is,
basically- and third party delivery closer to the community, that becomes
much more acceptable.

In addition, this interviewee offered an interesting and highly signifi-

cant insight into the influence of this group of six countries. Rather than
confining policy discussions to the participants, the official claimed that
they also use collective pressure to influence the agenda of the OECD:

I wouldn’t say we create ideas, I think you can set a trend. And these
trends are synergetic: it’s like water, it’s very difficult to describe where
the river becomes a ‘fleuve’ [trans: ‘estuary’]. For instance, you say “well,
we’re pretty strong. The six of us think that it is much better to encourage
people to find work and to provide training”. And then some of us will
202 T. LEGRAND

go to the OECD and we’ll push on the OECD and influence the OECD
agenda, and then five years after you’ll see that the OECD in the job
strategy is pushing hard for this type of approach.

Although it is not clear whether such pressure is rooted in any specific

material interest, it is certainly significant that such collective pressure can
be brought to bear upon the OECD. This underlines the importance of
the Belmont Conference as not only a policy transfer network amongst
the Anglosphere, but also in setting international trends. When pressed
to explain why this may be so, the official responded: ‘It’s not a secret
or confidential- it’s something that is kept in a great deal of informality’.
The informal approach adopted by participants in this Conference has,
accordingly, generated very few papers or documents that might record
some of the issues with which it previously dealt.

The Windsor Conference, UK 2009

In recognition of the overlaps between the issues and portfolios of
employment and social welfare policy, the Belmont Conference and Six
Countries meeting combined as the Windsor Conference in the UK in
April 2009. The impetus to combine the two networks was led by Peter
Hughes, of New Zealand, Jeffrey Harmer, of Australia, and Leigh Lewis
of the UK. The combined conference, held in London and Stratford-
upon-Avon in April 2009, sought to combine the two networks and
discuss the issues presented to social security, welfare and the labour
market by the global financial crisis and, specifically, the impact on youth
training and employment.
The combined conference produced its first substantive combined
output: an information-sharing agreement to tackle benefit fraud. The
‘Windsor Arrangement for Mutual Co-operation on Benefit Fraud
Between Heads of Department of the Six Countries’7 (hereafter the
‘Windsor Arrangement’) is a non-binding accord: a ‘gentlemen’s agree-
ment’, according to one interviewee (Interviewee A, June 2012). In the
first public acknowledgement of the WCPN, a UK press release stated that
the aim of the information-sharing agreement was to ‘achieve stronger
prevention, earlier detection and effective deterrence of benefit fraud’.8
The press release described the Windsor Arrangement as an agreement
on sharing of intelligence and risk profiling related to benefit fraud and
included an ambiguously-worded commitment to ‘work together… to
 7 THE GENESIS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL NETWORKS 203

determine the scope for carrying out investigations and enforcement for
each other…’. The Agreement was described by the Australian Govern-
ment as ‘a cooperative agreement between Australia, New Zealand, the
Republic of Ireland, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United
States of America to work together on a program to increase collective
protection against benefit fraud’.9 The UK DWP Permanent Secretary,
Leigh Lewis, stated that: ‘This arrangement will ensure each country
works together more systematically and, in turn, increase our individual
and collective protection against those who seek to defraud our benefit
systems’.10
The Windsor Arrangement marked a watershed in the nature of the
policy network. Up until 2009, the focus of the Six Countries and
Belmont Conference meetings was to share ideas, experiences and policy.
The Windsor Arrangement indicates a new direction of regulatory coop-
eration. The exchange of data pertaining to benefit fraud implies the
disclosure of individuals’ personal information to overseas agencies, albeit
as the details of the agreement are not in the public domain it is not
possible to be certain of the extent or detail of the data exchange.
Certainly, the Windsor Arrangement is an indication that the WCPN has
turned full circle: the initial Six Countries network was set up with the
intention of sharing knowledge on constructing IT systems to support
social services. The Windsor Arrangement represents a transition from
sharing knowledge about data management to sharing data itself. There
is little more information available to the public.11
Since 2009, the Windsor Conference has continued biennially, in
Sydney (2013), Vancouver (2015), Dublin (2017) and London (2019).
In its latest iteration, the UK’s DWP Permanent Secretary Peter Schofield
described the latest meeting:

My opposite numbers from New Zealand, Australia, the US, Canada and
Ireland came together to hear how other countries tackle their respective
challenges, and hopefully learn from them. This year, I hosted the biannual
conference and it was a fantastic experience to have happen in the UK
and with the Department for Work and Pensions. We were able to visit a
jobcentre and show the great work of our colleagues – disseminating and
taking on knowledge, and working across traditional boundaries.
204 T. LEGRAND

The Windsor Conference Network Features and Dynamics

This next section reports the insights of senior policy officials interviewed
in the course of this research. In the course of interviews, the chief
concern was to acquire insights into the dynamics of the WCPN and
its participants. Below, I set out some of the prominent findings: (i) the
value of confidential policy learning and (ii) the importance of common
institutional/cultural characteristics.

(i) Inside the black box: the value of confidential policy learning

Primarily, the Windsor Conference policy network is regarded as ‘a

framework to interact and talk about what worked and what did not’
(Interviewee A, June 2012). The learning value of the network to partic-
ipants was widely expressed in interviews and published data. In a verbal
exchange with the Parliament of Ireland Committee of Public Accounts,
Rody Molloy, the Former Director-General of Foras Áiseanna Saothair
(Training and Employment Authority) of Ireland, said of the Belmont
Conference: ‘We exchange experiences in an up-front way and try to learn
from each other’s mistakes or successes. It has been extraordinarily useful
to us in terms of devising labour market policy’12 (2008). The meetings
occur in a strictly informal setting and are not minuted:

You don’t know about this because people don’t want you to know
about these things. It’s informal… We do use the Chatham [House] rules.
We don’t publish anything for public consumption or anything like that.
We see this as a very informal network where people can talk as freely
as possible. (Interviewee C: Belmont Conference ancillary participant,
November 2007)

The exchange of ideas and documents in this setting is regarded as

confidential and, as emphasised by another interviewee, highly valued:

They’re not formalised, they’re not approved by government, except that

the ministers would know that the secretary goes and would approve
his travel. So, Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the
U.S. would meet. I went to two of those in my period as Secretary of
XXXX.13 Very very rich exchange of experiences, policies, documents, etc.
(Interviewee B, October 2004)
 7 THE GENESIS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL NETWORKS 205

Discussions within the network over individual policy experiences were

seen to serve two purposes: first, to create a comparative context in which
officials can make sense of their own operating environment in relation to
that of their peers and second, to initiate bilateral policy learning, where
valid lessons/ideas seem valuable. One official noted the following:

What we did there was, I guess, we found out that more or less we were
thinking alike. It’s very bizarre. I’m not saying that this actually creates the
exchange of policy per se. I would say it is one way of doing this. Most
importantly, I think it is a way of getting people to meet and see how
different or similar their policies are. If they’re similar they find reassurance.
If they are different then they decide whether they will assess whether they
like it. Or, if they don’t, and then they see further whether the political
situation is good enough, then they will pursue that. It’s mostly for getting
together and discussing openly and then afterwards [XXX] would decide
to go to Australia or Australia would decide to come visit us because of
what they have seen. (Interviewee C, November 2007)

The formation of strong personal connections within the network is

regarded as a crucial element in forming collaborations. One inter-
viewee stated that ‘Collaboration comes from trust and trust comes from
knowing someone’ (Interviewee F: Six Countries meeting participant,
June 2012). The same interviewee imparted a brief anecdote to underline
the importance of cohesion and collaboration to the network. At the 2004
conference meeting in Ireland, one of the social policy mandarins of the
Six Countries meeting tasked his deputy to attend the meeting in his/her
stead. The other network members, keen to ensure the fidelity of the
network to its purpose as a meeting of mandarins, subsequently sought
out and obtained personal assurances from the absentee mandarin that
he/she would attend the following meeting, in New Zealand in 2006.

(ii) Common institutional characteristics

The countries involved in the WCPN share a set of common features,

although not equally. All are common law countries, share a Common-
wealth background and speak English as the primary language of society
and government. From these factors, much else might be derived:
common social values, political ethos, popular culture and so on. The
206 T. LEGRAND

common political mindset was a dynamic noted by one of the interviewees

of this study:

We have similar political regimes. And I think that’s very very impor-
tant. Above all, we have a mentality: we use legislation as a last resort,
as opposed to Europeans who use legislation front and centre. That
differentiates us a great deal from the others.
It’s that you’ve got a problem, that you can see it in other countries, but
it’s got to be a country that’s sufficiently similar to you that the solution is
going to make sense… You’ve got to find an ethos that is compatible with
yours for political reasons, but also for socio-political reasons; it’s got to
be acceptable in society, it’s got to have legitimacy… So you’re selective,
and that brings you back to a very narrow socio-economic group which
probably clones policies all over. (Interviewee B, October 2004)

There is nuance to the traits shared by Anglosphere countries. Some of

these traits can be regarded as a priori; that is, they are independent
variables from which others emanate. These are mainly historical char-
acteristics. As noted above, the comparability and compatibility of policy
are a key prerequisite of transgovernmental policy learning, especially with
respect to reforms to the delivery of public services that had occurred
across the participating states. For example, an ancillary participant in the
Belmont Conference observed this dynamic:

it was clear that similar program structures and labour market strategies
meant that they shared many of the same policy and management prob-
lems. They could have a very informed discussion about the design of
earned income tax credits/supplements, for example. A lot of “sharing”
was going on over meals and at breaks. (Interviewee E, October 2007)

It is noteworthy that out of all the Anglosphere countries, the USA

exhibits the fewest common third-tier political or institutional factors.
The US political system represents an exception amongst the Anglo-
sphere countries insofar as is not derived from the Westminster model.
One interviewee noted that, in general, US policy organs operate in rela-
tive isolation from overseas influences: ‘the Americans never join us. They
are very isolated: don’t allow foreigners into the government’. Yet, the
WCPN policy network was a notable exception to the rule. The same
interviewee went on to state, ‘So, to have the American head of social
security come to this six-country thing, and participate actively and freely,
 7 THE GENESIS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL NETWORKS 207

was a coup and it was valuable’ (Interviewee B, October 2004). Another

interviewee concurred with this view:

Now, again, the United States have had a lot of public evaluations but
to give you exposure to what they’re thinking internally is a bit of a rare
event. It is always a bit of an exciting episode to see what the Americans are
thinking internally because they’re not open. (Interviewee A, May 2012)

The access to US internal policy thinking underlines how the WCPN

operated as a substantively different sort of policy learning for the Anglo-
sphere officials involved in the network. Moreover, it suggests that even
policy officials are unable to peer inside the so-called black box of
policy-making of overseas countries.

Dynamics of the Windsor Conference Policy Network

a. From patrimonial to familial: key characteristics of the network

Insofar as it is possible to derive a complete picture of the WCPN at this

point, there are some characteristics that are apparent. As suggested in
Chapter 4, several structural and institutional levels of linkage are impor-
tant. A first-order similarity is derived from a common British heritage
(albeit with varying degrees of influence). Second-order common char-
acteristics bestowed by the colonial era—such as culture, language, and
political ethos—resonate to this day, yet the balance of power has shifted
considerably. No longer can the UK be regarded as a patrimonial figure
amongst Anglosphere countries; rather, the relationship should more
appropriately be regarded as one of a shared identity. This relationship
in the WCPN is predicated on five concords: (i) knowledge, a broadly
agreed understanding of what constitutes relevant evidence; (ii) peer
mutuality, a mutual recognition that each participant is an institutional
peer; (iii) public administrative philosophy, an implicit agreement of the
objectives and underpinning assumptions of democratic government; (iv)
bureaucratic savoir-faire, a shared articulation of institutional language,
processes and protocols; (v) policy issues, agreement on the challenges
and threats facing their policy portfolio.
208 T. LEGRAND

b. The WCPN’s dynamics of policy transfer

The WCPN is the first identified example of systematic policy learning—in

social policy, welfare policy, labour market policy—between Anglophone
countries since 1989. The WCPN’s founding rationale was to provide
a forum in which mandarins could exchange policy ideas. The inter-
views reported above provide a number of policy areas where this was in
fact the case including: active labour markets, welfare to work, disability,
youth unemployment and benefit fraud. The dynamics of learning and
transfer are underpinned by the six concords identified above: (i) knowl-
edge, the communication and exchange of data on policy outcomes; (ii)
peer mutuality, bilateral discussions via telephone or email or face-to-face
meetings; (iii) public administrative philosophy; (iv) bureaucratic savoir-
faire, sharing of internal policy documents and reviews; (v) policy issues,
identification of emerging issues and transmission of possible remedies.

c. The WCPN regulatory dynamics

Prior to the 2009 combined conference, the Six Countries and the
Belmont Conference’s primary purpose was to share policy ideas, expe-
riences and outcomes. Essentially, these networks operated to augment
the knowledge capital of its participants. With the amalgamation in
2009 to become the Windsor Conference and the announcement of an
information-sharing agreement to combat benefit fraud, the networks
transformed into a quasi-regulatory network. Operating beyond the
boundaries of traditional sovereign foreign policy organs, the participating
institutions have created and occupied an international foreign policy
space, albeit one structured by a non-binding agreement. Conceptually,
the prima facie conclusion is that we might regard the WCPN as two
sides of the same coin: on one side, a policy learning and transfer body;
on the other, an international quasi-regulatory mechanism. Although the
WCPN has maintained its founding raison d’être as a mechanism of policy
learning, the Windsor Agreement demonstrates that transgovernmental
regulatory functions are not only a possibility but also a reality.
 7 THE GENESIS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL NETWORKS 209

Part II: Flourishing Collaboration---Policy

Networks of the Anglosphere
Since the establishment of the Belmont and Windsor conference
s/networks discussed above, an extraordinary architecture of Anglosphere
network collaboration has developed. This second section elaborates on
the flourishing levels of collaboration to have emerged subsequent to
the WCPN. Between 2001 and as of June 2020, thirty-six Anglosphere
policy transfer networks have been established. This includes approxi-
mately 140 departments, agencies or regulatory authorities and around
1500 Anglosphere policy officials. These networks are active across a
variety of portfolios, outlined in Table 7.1. Linked to the Belmont and
Windsor networks are the Six Countries Benefit Fraud Group (which
is the Windsor network that governs the ‘Windsor Arrangement’) and
the International Heads of Child Support Meeting. The networks are
led by elite domestic officials: ministers, secretaries and CEOs. They
address cross-border policy challenges around social policy, finance and
economics, employment, justice, policing, public administration, security
challenges and more.
As informal vehicles of transgovernmental collaboration, these
networks operate at varying levels and intensities of engagement. As
with the WCPN, networks operate continually/periodically as channels of
government coordination amongst the five states. They establish shared
‘five country’ policy narratives (e.g. countering violent extremism, critical
infrastructure protection), pool institutional functions (e.g. immigration
and border protection), synchronise policy (cyber-security; mutual assis-
tance on extradition), transfer best practices (e.g. counter-terrorism) and
undertake real-time sharing of information and intelligence (e.g. immigra-
tion fraud; cyber-security). New technologies facilitate this collaboration,
including video-conferencing, shared secure databases and email, in addi-
tion to in situ annual conferences, secondments and embedding of senior
officials (see Legrand 2015, 2016).
There is active policy collaboration across (i) justice, (ii) immigration
and borders, (iii) national security and beyond. In law and justice, the
Anglosphere’s chief law officers have established a ‘Quintet of Attorneys-
General’, which is linked to policing policy networks, including the
‘Five Eyes Law Enforcement Group’; ‘Criminal Intelligence Advisory
Group’; ‘Money Laundering Group’; and the ‘Cyber Crime Working
210 T. LEGRAND

Table 7.1 Transgovernmental policy networks of the Anglosphere

Policy domain Transgovernmental networks (all are self-styled

titles)

Justice Quintet of Attorneys-General (Justice) &

Security and public safety
Borders and migration
Social policy
Development and international aid
Statutory and regulatory agencies
Five Eyes Law Enforcement Group:
‘Criminal Intelligence Advisory Group’;
‘Money Laundering Group’; ‘Cyber Crime
Working Group’; ‘Technical Working
Group’; ‘Going Dark Forum’
Five Country Ministerial; The Critical Five;
Technical Cooperation Program; The Ottawa
Five; Heads of Assessment meeting; The
Ministerial Summit (Veterans affairs)
Five Country Conference: Border Five;
Migration Five; Five Nations Consular
Colloque; Five Countries Passport Group
(and Five Nations Passport Conference);
Five Country Citizenship Conference; Data
Sharing Working Group (Biometrics); FCC
Resettlement Network; FCC Returns and
Repatriation Network; FCC Training &
Change
The Windsor Conference (previously “The Six
Nations”) & Six Nations Benefit Fraud
Conference; International Heads of Child
Support Agency Meeting; Health Ministers
Conference
Intergovernmental Immigrant and Refugee
Health Working Group
Fraud and anti-corruption network
(Inspectors-General of Defence);
International Supervisors forum (Anti-money
laundering regulators); Tri-Treasury
Conference & The Rev-Sec Group
(Taxation); Vancouver Group (Intellectual
Property); Four Countries Conference
(Elections)

Group’. In immigration and border policy, a ‘Five Country Confer-

ence’ was established in 2008 and has since fragmented into strategic
policy and operational networks, including the Migration 5 (or ‘M5’,
which is concerned with immigration policy); the ‘Border Five’ (or ‘B5’,
which collaborates on customs and excise policy). In addition, there are a
Five Nations Passport Conference (the Five Countries Passport Group)
 7 THE GENESIS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL NETWORKS 211

and Five Country Citizenship Conference, both of which are associ-

ated with immigration policy. Several national security policy networks
have also emerged: the ‘Five Country which is associated with other
networks concerned with critical infrastructure (‘the Critical Five’) and
cyber-security (‘The Ottawa Five’)’.

A Shared Vision of Anglosphere Transgovernmentalism

Running through this growing raft of Anglosphere policy networks are
repeated claims of shared identity that pivots on themes of a common
history, values and traditions, friendship, and alikeness of peoples. Public
declarations—usually in joint communiques or in speeches given after
the conclusion of network meetings—reveal the shared construction of
an Anglosphere identity underpinning the relationship. US Secretary
of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano in 2011 stated ‘As allies and
economic partners, our five countries have a successful history of cooper-
ation’.14 Then, in a Five Country Ministerial (FCM) in 2013, Napolitano
described the five countries’ ‘unique relationship with one another’, with
core common touchstones: ‘We are all are democracies, we share the same
language, we have strong economies, and we also have engaged citizens
who expect action and accountability from their governments’.15 After
a subsequent network meeting, US Attorney General Eric Holder rein-
forced Napolitano’s perspective, claiming: ‘These ties transcend parties
and governments in each of our nations and they are not just partner-
ships with leaders, but they are partnerships of our peoples’.16 A joint
communique from the FCM in 2018 gave collective voice from all five
states:

Our history of cooperation, our shared values, and our enduring friendship
provide solid foundations to face the challenges and opportunities of the
21st century together.17

A statement from a 2016 meeting acclaims the five countries as, ‘Collec-
tively, we are among the most generous countries on earth’.18 It under-
lines too the ‘close and enduring five country partnership’,19 and their
‘cooperation, friendship, and common values’.20 This is frequently framed
in historic terms: Napolitano describes ‘a successful history of coopera-
tion’,21 and ‘historic Five Eyes security’,22 whilst UK Home Secretary
212 T. LEGRAND

Theresa May affirms ‘the deepest, longest lasting security relationship in

the world’.23
A second dimension of rhetoric hails the common ‘traditions’ and
‘values’ of the five countries. A communique from the Five Country
Ministerial in 2017, for example, affirms ‘our deep commitment to the
shared values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law’.24 After
one ‘Quintet’ meeting, Canada’s Attorney General Rob Nicholson in
2011 stated that: ‘We all share common challenges, common problems
and we come from a tradition of working these things out, collabo-
rating and working with each other’.25 Robert McClelland, the Attorney
General for Australia in 2011, affirmed that view: ‘we’re able to get some
very constructive outcomes given our common traditions and our back-
grounds in so many other areas that we cooperate in’.26 In a subsequent
media release, McClelland asserted that the Quintet’s success was due to
‘the perspective of a shared legal tradition and common values’.27
Empirically, the active exchange of policy ideas and experiences relating
to welfare, labour market and social policy by the WCPN since 1989 has
clear implications for much of the literature on the transfer of public
policy (see, for example, inter alia, Dolowitz and Marsh 2000; Stone
2003; Daguerre 2004; Banks et al. 2005; Hulme 2005, 2006). In the
background of the processes and mechanisms of policy transfer described
by these scholars in the 1990s, 2000s and beyond, the WCPN was in
operation as a structural conduit of policy learning between Australia,
Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and USA. The network adds
an important dimension to these existing analyses and offers an array of
alternative explanations of policy exchange.

Conclusion
Much of the literature concerned with the underpinning model or frame-
work of policy transfer analysis focuses on the process by which transfers
occur. In part, this is a corollary of the definition offered by the progen-
itors of the policy transfer approach, Dolowitz and Marsh, who regard
policy transfer as ‘the process by which knowledge about policies, adminis-
trative arrangements, institutions and ideas’ of one political system is used
elsewhere (my emphasis, 2000, p. 5). Evans and Davies (1999) and Evans
(2009) undertook theoretical development of policy transfer analysis that
strengthened the spatial dynamics of the model with a ‘multi-level analy-
sis’ of policy transfer. In particular, they imputed a model that recognised
 7 THE GENESIS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL NETWORKS 213

the importance of international, transnational, domestic and interorgan-

isational dynamics and called for empirical work to determine the link
between transfer and internationalisation (1999, p. 365).
The case study presented in this chapter goes some way to providing
that empirical link and, further, to emphasising the utility of the trans-
governmental approach for policy transfer analysis. The activity and
mechanisms of the WCPN indicate that there have been systematic
social and labour market policy learning and exchange between Anglo-
sphere institutions over the period 1989 to present. Few analysts identify
policy learning between more than two countries and even fewer iden-
tify systemic multilateral policy learning to the extent identified herein.
This WCPN has clear repercussions for current knowledge pertaining to
how labour market and social policy within and amongst Anglosphere
countries have developed over this period. Simply put, narratives and
analyses of labour market and social policy are incomplete without consid-
eration of how elite policy officials have learnt from one another in
the manner of the WCPN. In addition, the formulation of the WCPN
itself reveals a great deal about the philosophy of public administra-
tion shared by Anglosphere countries members. The pattern of policy
learning indicates an underlying governance affinity that reaches back
to the common history shared by Anglosphere countries. Indeed, it
seems increased internationalisation—greater global integration and co-
dependency, convenient international travel and communication—has
amplified the shared heritage of the Anglosphere countries and widened
the prospect for institutional and policy cooperation.
Interviews

Interviewee A: Six Countries meeting participant (May and June

2012)
Interviewee B: Belmont Conference network participant (October
2004)
Interviewee C: Belmont Conference ancillary network participant
(November 2007)
Interviewee D: Six Countries meeting participant (June 2012)
Interviewee E: Belmont Conference ancillary network participant
(October 2007)
Interviewee F: Six Countries meeting participant (June 2012)
214 T. LEGRAND

Notes
1. The second stream of the first Six Countries meeting in 1989 focused
on common issues, challenges and experiences in the IT architecture
of social security administration. This sub-network subsequently took a
similar form to that of its parent network and undertook an iterative
collaboration exchanging ideas on practices and protocols.
2. United Kingdom—Department of Social Security: Sir Michael Partridge,
KCB, Permanent Secretary; Mr. Nick Montagu, Deputy Secretary,
Resource Management and Planning Group; Mr. Alec Wylie, Chief
Executive, Social Security Agency, Northern Ireland. Australia—Depart-
ment of Social Security: Mr. Derek Volker, AO, The Secretary; Mr.
Jim Humphreys, National Manager, Operations; Dr. Owen Donald,
First Assistant Secretary, Social Policy Division. Canada—Department
of National Health and Welfare: Mrs. Margaret Catley-Carlson, Deputy
Minister; Mr. John Soar, Assistant Deputy Minister, Income Security
Programs Branch; Mr. Ray Laframboise, Assistant Deputy Minister,
Corporate Management Branch. New Zealand—Department of Social
Welfare: Mr. Robin J. Wilson, Deputy Director-General; Mr. Alan Nixon,
Assistant Director-General, Programmes and Services. United States of
America --Social Security Administration: Mr. Louis D. Enoff, Prin-
cipal Deputy Commissioner; Ms. Janice Warden, Deputy Commissioner
for Operations; Mr. Renato A. DiPentima, Deputy Commissioner for
Systems [Mrs. Geraldine Novak, Director, International Activities Staff
Mrs. Gertrude Wiggins, International Activities Staff].
3. Figure taken from Hansard: Written Answers to Questions, Thursday
14 November 1991: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm1
99192/cmhansrd/1991-11-14/Writtens-1.html, accessed June 2012.
4. Correspondence with author, October 2007.
5. Taken from the New Zealand Department of Labour, Working Better:
Annual Report for the Year Ended 30 June 2007 . http://www.dol.govt.
nz/publications/general/soi2007/11goals1.html, accessed 12th April
2012.
6. Taken from the New Zealand Department of Labour, Working Better:
Annual Report for the Year Ended 30 June 2007 . http://www.dol.govt.
nz/publications/general/soi2007/11goals1.html, accessed 12th April
2012.
7. Signed by Heads of Department from: The Department of Human
Services of Australia, the Department of Human Resources and Skills
Development of Canada, The Department of Social and Family Affairs
of Ireland, The Ministry of Social Development of New Zealand, The
Department for Work and Pensions of the United Kingdom and The
Social Security Administration of the United States of America.
 7 THE GENESIS OF TRANSGOVERNMENTAL NETWORKS 215

8. Press release, Department of Work and Pensions, April 2009. http://

www.dwp.gov.uk/previous-administration-news/press-releases/2009/
april-2009/126-09-300409.shtml, accessed June 2012.
9. Taken from: http://www.humanservices.gov.au/spw/corporate/publicati
ons-and-resources/annual-report/resources/1011/html/centrelink/cha
pter09/part08_compliance_and_fraud.html, accessed June 2012.
10. Press release, Department of Work and Pensions, April 2009. http://
www.dwp.gov.uk/previous-administration-news/press-releases/2009/
april-2009/126-09-300409.shtml, accessed June 2012.
11. The Australian Department of Education, Employment and Workplace
Relations declined a request for release of further information on the
Windsor Arrangement.
12. Taken from http://debates.oireachtas.ie/ACC/2008/12/04/printa
ll.asp, accessed June 2012.
13. Obscured to retain anonymity.
14. Janet Napolitano. July 22, 2013.
15. Janet Napolitano. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano’s
Opening Remarks at the Five Country Ministerial. U.S. Department of
Homeland Security. July 22, 2013. https://www.dhs.gov/news/2013/
07/22/secretary-homeland-security-janet-napolitano-s-opening-remarks-
five-country.
16. Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney General. ‘Quintet’ of Attorneys-General—
Joint Press Conference. 15th July 2011. Available at: http://justinian.
com.au/storage/pdf/agsquintet.pdf.
17. Five Country Ministerial 2018 Official Communiqué. Australian Depart-
ment of Home Affairs. Accessed: 8th September 2017. Avail-
able at: https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about/national-security/five-
country-ministerial-2018.
18. Five Country Ministerial 2018 Official Communiqué. Accessed: 8th
September 2017.
19. Five Country Ministerial 2018 Official Communiqué. Accessed: 8th
September 2017.
20. Five Country Ministerial 2017: Joint Communiqué. 28th June 2017.
Accessed: 20th January 2018. Available at: https://www.dhs.gov/news/
2017/06/28/five-country-ministerial-2017-joint-communiqu.
21. Janet Napolitano. July 22, 2013.
22. Home Secretary attends Five Country Ministerial. 29 August
2018. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/home-secretary-attends-
five-country-ministerial.
23. Theresa May, U.K. Home Secretary. International action needed to
tackle terrorism. 16 February 2016. https://www.gov.uk/government/
speeches/home-secretary-international-action-needed-to-tackle-terrorism.
24. Five Country Ministerial 2017: Joint Communiqué. 28th June 2017.
216 T. LEGRAND

25. Rob Nicholson, Canada Attorney General. ‘Quintet’ of Attorneys-

General—Joint Press Conference. 15th July 2011. Available at: http://
justinian.com.au/storage/pdf/agsquintet.pdf.
26. Robert McClelland, Australia Attorney-General. ‘Quintet’ of Attorneys-
General—Joint Press Conference. 15th July 2011. Available at: http://
justinian.com.au/storage/pdf/agsquintet.pdf.
27. Robert McClelland, Attorney-General (Cth), ‘Key Allies Focus on Cyber
Crime at Sydney “Quintet”’ (Media Release, 5 July 2011).

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 Conclusion: The Architecture
of Policy Transfer
in the Anglosphere---A Networked
Present and Future

This book has set out to explore the rapidly changing patterns of inter-
national policy transfer and to gain insight into how the Anglosphere
nations in particular have forged a distinct architecture of mutual learning
and collaboration. The opening pages framed the challenge for us, as
scholars and citizens, as one essentially rooted in the public interest moti-
vation of the (liberal democratic) state: How are decisions made, on which
issues, by whom, how and with what effect? Elusive as the concept of the
public interest might be, it remains central to those from a liberal demo-
cratic tradition that the public have visibility of the decisions made and
actions undertaken by their governments and public servants, without
which accountability is cut off at the knees. And so the analysis in the
preceding pages has sought to illuminate a modest part of contemporary
policy decision-making: the age-old question of from where policy-makers
draw their best, or worst, ideas.

Beyond Policy Transfer

In its early iterations, the policy transfer framework was used as a heuristic
to answer these questions. To understand the processes by which policies
are transmitted between jurisdictions and across the international terrain,
its early protagonists showed how policy transfers operate as multi-level
phenomena, driven by agents, occurring at and between several levels,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 217
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
T. Legrand, The Architecture of Policy Transfer,
Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55821-5
218 CONCLUSION: THE ARCHITECTURE OF POLICY …

including local, regional, national, transnational and international (Evans

and Davies 1999). These showed how, normatively, the benefits were
manifold: policy transfer can be used as a beneficial technique of public
administration: overseas experience can be used to engineer rapid policy
change, to forestall the unintended consequences of untested policies, or
enhance inter-state cooperation. The lessons drawn can be negative as
well as positive; the policies drawn might be a direct copy, an emula-
tion, hybrid or ‘inspiration’; learning might occur at any stage of the
(domestic) policy process; and be initiated by elected officials, policy offi-
cials, policy entrepreneurs, international organisations and NGOs, interest
groups or any other suitably empowered actor (Dolowitzand Marsh 2000;
Ladi 2005). On the global stage, scholars showed that a policy transfer
perspective was integral to depicting the pressure that the IMF can
bring to bear on states by attaching policy conditions to financial aid
(Pal and Ireland 2009); to identify the combination of coercion, norms
and mimetics used by the EU to achieve ‘technocratic legitimacy’ of
its policy ambitions (Radaelli 2000); and to identify transnational policy
communities which generate ‘common patterns of understanding’ (Stone
2001). These approaches leave little doubt of the powerful influence
of non-domestic policy ideas on states, international organisations and
supranational organisations.
Yet lacking to date has been a deeper insight into the selectivity of
policy ideas; why some states tend to look consistently to particular
countries for policy lessons. Both the policy transfer and transgovernmen-
talism literatures have made a fundamental contribution to our conceptual
understanding of the policy interplay of state and non-state actors, though
it has been my contention that both literatures have yet to adequately
explain why certain configurations of transnational policy relationships
emerge. Reconciling both frameworks, as presented here, can generate
stronger insights into global governance policy processes and, specifically,
into the proliferation of transgovernmental networks. Engaging with this
puzzle, we have explored one of the oldest, most active, and perhaps most
resilient, of transgovernmental alliances active in the global governance
space: the ‘Anglosphere’ countries of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the
UK and the USA. As we have seen, at the heart of this alliance is a mani-
fest historical, cultural and political affinity, which plays out in a complex
raft of social, economic and policy relationships amongst and between
the Anglosphere states. The previous three chapters have been empirically
 CONCLUSION: THE ARCHITECTURE OF POLICY … 219

focused on the case study at hand—the evolution of New Public Manage-

ment and its stimulation of policy networking behaviours, and Third Way
ideas in shaping labour market policy across the Anglosphere. This is set
out in some detail with a concern for highlighting the linkages between
the structures at play and the agents who operate therein.

Operationalising the Architecture

of the Anglosphere framework
In Chapter 3, I outline the conceptual framework of transgovernmental
policy network formation and how they are sustained. This framework
operates as three theoretical levels to depict how transgovernmental
relationships emerge within a structural environment:

• Level 1. Structural: Political-Cultural Propinquity

• Level 2. Emergent: Institutional-Ideological Networks
• Level 3. Agential Articulation.

Level 1. Structural: Political-Cultural Propinquity

As outlined conceptually in Chapter 4 and articulated empirically in
Chapter 7, the Anglosphere states have coalesced as a partnership of ‘like-
minded’ entities with commensurate values, beliefs and political aims.
The strength of this affinity articulates as a political-cultural propinquity,
in which policy officials (and the publics) of those states identify and
assign a priori legitimacy to one another, which manifests in (in this
case) preferred transnational collaboration relationships. This is an associ-
ation that has emerged from long-standing historical alliance and become
cemented by both overlapping global policy challenges and commensu-
rate institutional structures most recently (but not exclusively) expressed
in New Public Management reforms and latterly as Third Way ideology.

Level 2. Emergent: Institutional-Ideological Networks

As outlined conceptually in Chapter 3, and empirically in Chapters 6 and
7, policy networks emerge in an environment structured by pre-existing
preferences and institutional relationships that make some policy ideas
220 CONCLUSION: THE ARCHITECTURE OF POLICY …

more palatable (ideologically) and compatible (institutionally and politi-

cally) than others. These are situated within the environment of cultural
propinquity—the Anglosphere—and as suggested above, two proper-
ties of this context are emergent. The first is the ideological effect of
New Public Management and Third Way politics. The growing disag-
gregation of the state in conjunction with the upsurge in the spread of
policy networks precipitated the conditions in which policy transfer and
collaboration could occur through transgovernmental networks.

Level 3. Agential Articulation

Institutions operate as structural constraints or influences on both the
preferences of agents and the available opportunities for policy transfer. As
Chapter 6 has suggested, agents work within institutions that already have
established channels of preferential learning and collaboration, as per epis-
temic communities that fall into similar ‘geographical, cultural, linguistic
and/or political environments’, whether as network or bilateral relation-
ships. Emphasised here have been transgovernmental networks in which
agents have forged closer and tighter bonds with their counterparts in
their praxis as collaborating policy officials while articulating the same
beliefs about their shared Anglosphere history, traditions, outlook, aims
and interests.

The Architecture of the Anglosphere

This analysis adds to a growing body of work on transgovernmentalism
and the Anglosphere. As we have seen, the new-style Anglosphere
architectures of policy-making to have emerged in this millennium
display considerable conceptual conformity to policy transfer and trans-
governmental frameworks. Anglosphere countries have constructed a
transgovernmental policy architecture encapsulating a range of national
institutions to, first, promote the exchange of policy ideas, information
and evidence to address domestic challenges and, second, establish
collaborative approaches to meeting transnational challenges. The shared
culture, values and norms of these states have, as argued in the preceding
pages, been critical to the coalescence of Anglosphere policy networks ,
which conform to distinct network features.
The networks themselves are noteworthy too. Foremostly, it is clear
that ‘small group size’ and homogenous preferences are a dominant
 CONCLUSION: THE ARCHITECTURE OF POLICY … 221

feature of the networks: over two-thirds of the networks identified in

Chapter 7 are occupied by the five core Anglosphere states. We might
further speculate that the constitution of the networks corresponds with
the claim that Anglosphere networks operate to the exclusion of ‘spoiler’
states and generate dominant policy blocs. Certainly, interview evidence
from the Belmont Conference reported in Chapter 7 suggests an ‘Anglo-
sphere bloc’ influence on the OECD (though naturally the claim requires
substantiation). In addition, the exclusivity and the strategic importance
of the networks are underlined by the participation of elite officials: offi-
cials from the highest echelons of a department/agency participate in the
networks, often at the ministerial level, with evidence of functional dele-
gation to sub-networks. Related to the exclusivity, these networks operate
under informal confidentiality where possible: the agenda, proceed-
ings and outcomes are not easily publicly accessible, which aligns with
the prevailing view of transgovernmental networks in the international
relations literature (Slaughter 2004).
Next, within the Anglosphere policy networks, the levels of policy
transfer are both valued and varied. The breadth of engagement described
above and in the detailed case studies below is suggested as a heuristic of
in Fig. 1, which places each Anglosphere networks along a continuum
of engagement and sets out the extent to which Anglosphere network
has coordinated and shared policies and functions. As suggested by the
policy transfer framework, Anglosphere policy officials in, for example,
the Windsor Conference and the International Heads of Child Support
Agency Meeting, engage in a rich exchange of policy ideas, experience
and data, and cooperation agreements on common transnational issues
(cf. Dolowitz and Marsh; Legrand 2012a). Additionally, the Four Coun-
tries Conference of electoral agencies meets annually to exchange ideas
and experiences on domestic policy and not undertake any collabora-
tive actions. Moreover, the Vancouver Group of intellectual property
agencies goes even further and has fully integrated their agency func-
tions, processes and protocols to form, effectively, one amalgamated
Anglosphere agency.

Towards Cultural Coalescence in Transgovernmental Policy Networks

The coalescence of Anglosphere officials reveals the importance placed
on cultural propinquity, as revealed across participants in the networks.
The five statistical agencies of the Anglosphere engage with one another
 222

Continuum of network engagement

Exchange of policy Agreeing to institute Agreeing Memoranda Manual exchange of Automatic data Amalgamation of
ideas and experiences common policy of Understanding data exchange governance functions
benchmarks High engagement
Low engagement (Functional
(Policy transfer) integration)
Anglosphere E.g. Four Countries E.g. Heads of Agency E.g. The Windsor E.g. The Six Nations E.g. The Migration E.g. Technical
transgovernmental conference (electoral Meeting (child Conference (social policy Five; the Border Five Cooperation Program
network agencies) support agencies) (employment/labour agencies) (military and
market agencies) intelligence agencies)

Fig. 1 Continuum of Anglosphere transgovernmental network engagement

CONCLUSION: THE ARCHITECTURE OF POLICY …
 CONCLUSION: THE ARCHITECTURE OF POLICY … 223

because of what the ABS describes as ‘cultural, language and historical

commonalities’,1 and a participating official of the Belmont Conference
stated: ‘We have similar political regimes. And I think that’s very, very
important’. This coalescence of transgovernmental networks suggests a
novel mechanism of network coalescence on the landscape of global policy
and offers an opportunity to develop a proposition of transgovernmental
network membership that, as claimed earlier, remains unexplored in both
the policy transfer and transgovernmental literatures, despite comporting
with the conceptual frameworks of both.
This offers some useful future directions for scholars of policy transfer
and transgovernmentalism. Following Wendt (see Chapter 4), we can
posit a proposition of Anglosphere network coalescence that frames
cultural identity as endogenous and prior to TGN membership and policy
transfer relationships. The formation of Anglosphere networks represents
a prior consensus on the nature of domestic and transnational policy
issues as well as an implied determination to prefer forms of knowledge
and partnership stemming from network peers. This perspective comple-
ments the prevailing functionalist perspectives of transgovernmentalism
and policy transfer by suggesting that, for Anglosphere states, the exoge-
nous imperatives of policy problems are framed a priori by and through
transgovernmental networks coalesced by endogenous shared cultural
frames. For the moment, this proposition is tempered, as noted above,
by the boundary conditions of the study: the veracity of the cultural
propinquity proposition is reliant on future confirming (or confounding)
additional comparative, historical or even ethnographic research.
Framed in this way, the proposition that endogenous cultural factors
promote network coalescence strengthens the arm of policy transfer and
transgovernmental theorists looking to understand why specific config-
urations of policy networks emerge above the state. This perspective
provokes questions for transgovernmental theorists around the existence
of other similar transgovernmental configurations globally. The lens of
culturally-coalesced transgovernmentalism might equally be applied to
long-standing relationships across, for example, Franco-phone, Latin
America and Nordic countries. Certainly, the Nordic Council was
established in the 1950s to facilitate coordinated policy responses to
transnational challenges affecting Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway
and Sweden, and exhibits the prima facie facets of cultural coalescence
suggested here as integral to Anglosphere policy networks. Examination
of this, and other similar transnational cultural configurations, is likely to
224 CONCLUSION: THE ARCHITECTURE OF POLICY …

furnish stronger conceptual insights into the structure and form of trans-
governmental policy networking. The latter question, why the five ‘core’
states dominate these networks to the exclusion of other Anglophone
states, provides an opportunity to refine the cultural propinquity proposi-
tion. There is a range of Anglophone jurisdictions including, for example,
Ireland, South Africa, the Caribbean, India and Pakistan, which conform
to many of the same background historical, cultural and political char-
acteristics. Why does the membership of Anglosphere transgovernmental
networks identified here not extend to these countries? One possibility
is that the post-war military and intelligence collaboration between these
states embedded a long-standing mutual trust that permits the Anglo-
sphere to enjoy collective military and intelligence global dominance;
or what former NSA analyst Edward Snowden has called a ‘suprana-
tional intelligence agency’. The intelligence-sharing and collaboration in
resolving transnational issues, such as immigration-related offences, radi-
calisation and cyber-crime, for example, are manifest in agendas of the
Quintet of Attorneys General and the Five Countries Conference.

Transgovernmental Policy
Networks in Global Perspective
Understanding and tracking how government institutions learn from
and network with one another at an international level is a crucial
endeavour for public policy scholars. Doing so achieves three things.
First, such knowledge can generate better insight into enhancing policy
processes—indeed, the pay-off of such research for our policy servants
are, at one level, quite clear: systematic policy learning and collabora-
tion provoke some significant ‘goods’ such as enhancing domestic policy
capacity, improving the use of evidence and delivering joined-up solutions
to common problems. For example, the case study considered herein
spans considerable engagement across almost every portfolio of Anglo-
sphere governments, indicating that models of the policy process in each
of these countries are incomplete without considering the transgovern-
mental dimension, especially at the elite level. Second, such research also
contributes to the public interest question raised above. The networks
discussed in this book raise some profound accountability concerns. With
few exceptions, the networks are populated by the most senior echelons
of public services, yet the substance of the meetings is almost never made
available to the public. And so we might wonder whether the obscurity
 CONCLUSION: THE ARCHITECTURE OF POLICY … 225

cloaking the networks militates against transparency and accountability for

democratic decision-making. This is hardly an original point, but it does
reinforce earlier scholars’ views on the subject:

The image of national regulators coming together of their own volition and
regularizing their interactions either as a network or a networked organiza-
tion raises the specter of agencies on the loose, unrestrained by democratic
accountability. (Slaughter 2004, p. 48)

Third, studying these networks also affords an opportunity to overcome

some domestic and international theoretical silos and refine our avail-
able concepts. Though the public administration discipline displays an
overwhelming emphasis on state-based explanations of policy outcomes,
the domestic/international distinction is nothing more than an analytical
artifice, or a ‘convenience of the mind’ as Cox puts it (1981, p. 126).
Developing interdisciplinary frameworks can promote the valuable enter-
prise of political science to burrow beneath the often opaque facade of
government policy-making to reveal the latent structures, processes, prior-
ities, agents, institutions, imperatives and encumbrances that, together or
separately, constitute the state: ‘If our existing map of our institutions and
how they work is faulty, we mislead citizens and undermine representative
democracy’ (Rhodes et al. 2003, p. 160). This book’s concern has been to
enhance our conceptual tools as means of refining our theoretical perspec-
tives on the state. Normatively, this gives ballast to my overarching view
that the opacity of the policy processes of global governance means that
there is a clear public interest imperative to link domestic ideas of public
administration to these emerging above-the-state policy processes. Doing
so meets Bob Jessop’s injunction to ‘look beyond the state to examine
its embedding within a wider political system, its relationship to other
institutional orders and functional systems, and to the lifeworld (or civil
society)’ (2004, p. 49).
If political science is to maintain a strong theoretical grasp of those
fundamental questions of political science—Who governs? How do they
govern? For whose benefit do they govern?—it is imperative that we
constantly refine and rethink our conceptual tools to pursue the ever-
changing modalities of public policy decision-making. The rise of Anglo-
sphere transgovernmental policy networks represents a new dimension of
global policy-making that, thus far, has managed to evade the attention
of political scientists. Here, I have attempted to remedy this omission
226 CONCLUSION: THE ARCHITECTURE OF POLICY …

and contribute a conceptualisation of the Anglosphere’s transgovernmen-

talism by, empirically, mapping out the range of active Anglosphere policy
networks and, conceptually, drawing out the role of cultural propinquity
in coalescing these networks.
As I have argued, reconciling both the policy transfer and transgov-
ernmental frameworks can help overcome the domestic and international
artifice. In so doing, I hope to have equipped both frameworks with
a stronger insight into culturally-shaped patterns of policy transmission
and provided an alternative to the dominant functionalist propositions of
why transgovernmentalism networks emerge. While some theorists posit
that the ‘new’ transnational regulatory system has emerged as bottom-
up response to perceived shortfalls in state action (Abbott and Snidal
2009b, p. 510) in which states and international organisations operate
as the orchestrators of international regulation developed in collabora-
tion with private actors (2009a, b). Proposed here, by contrast, is a
state-based concept of transgovernmentalism that both excludes private
actors and sidesteps international organisations, representing a reassertion
of domestic autonomy in the global space.
Locating these forms of policy-making is critical to our understanding
of the processes of contemporary global governance, of which Stone
states: ‘Not only do these collective processes of policy transfer or diffu-
sion create new cycles and circuits of interpretation, it also contributes to
new architectures of transnational governance’ (Stone 2012, p. 9). The
existence and activities of autonomous public officials developing policy
away from public scrutiny in new global governance spaces raise larger
questions of legitimacy and accountability that, for Eilstrup-Sangiovanni,
‘the more ambiguous (and in some cases secretive) nature of many trans-
governmental agreements may reduce domestic pressure by obscuring
distributive effects’ (2007, p. 10). It thus remains imperative for public
administration scholarship to pay close attention to these emerging
global policy spaces. By meeting Jessop’s (2004) injunction to extend
domestic policy analysis upwards into the transnational space, we can not
only illuminate nascent beyond-the-state decision-making actors, venues
and pathways, but also capture more precisely the consequences for
domestic public policy outcomes and, in so doing, strengthen the arm
of representative democracy.
 CONCLUSION: THE ARCHITECTURE OF POLICY … 227

Note
1. Taken from http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/productsbyCa
talogue/CA17DB8313B95A0BCA257061003172F1?OpenDocument,
accessed 10 July 2014.

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 Index

A Bhaskar, Roy, 58, 73, 74, 76–78

Anderson, Benedict, 112
Anglosphere
and the Commonwealth, xvii, 116
characteristics of, xxv, 124, 206,
224
colonial origins, xvii, 115, 117,
123, 124, 207
Five Eyes, x, 107
network emergence, xv, xxiv, xxv,
124, 129, 193, 194, 197, 202,
207, 209, 211, 220, 221, 223,
226
transgovernmental networks, xxiii,
193, 218, 220, 221, 223, 224
ASEAN, 113
B Countries - Comunidade dos
Base Erosion and Profit Shifting
(BEPS) initiative, 33
Belmont Conference, 186, 188, 194,
197–200, 202–204, 206, 208,
221, 223
Blair, Tony, 134, 135, 155, 161, 164,
165, 169
British Empire. See Colonialism
C
Clinton, Bill, 55, 134, 138–142, 146,
155, 161, 164–169, 187, 189,
190
Coercive, 49, 50
Colonialism, xvi, 115, 117
administrative legacy of, British, xvi,
115
Commonwealth. See Anglosphere
Communitarianism, xiv, 135, 136
Community of Portuguese Language
Países de Língua Portuguesa, 114
Conditionality, 50
Constructivism, 71, 109
Convergence, 29, 31
Copying, 48

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 229
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
T. Legrand, The Architecture of Policy Transfer,
Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55821-5
230 INDEX

Critical realism G
agency and, 58, 78 Giddens, Anthony, 84, 94, 134, 135,
emergence in, 58, 76 146
theory, xxv, 72–74 Global financial crisis, 8, 10, 202
Globalisation
and interdependency, 6, 8–10, 30,
33, 39, 55
D and internationalisation, 33, 54, 84,
Davies, J., 25, 41, 61, 83 85
Digital era governance, xi, xiii, xiv and transnational challenges, 6, 7,
DiMaggio, P.J., 31, 62 9, 84, 85
Dolowitz, David, xiv, xix, xxi, 14–16,
25–27, 29, 46–51, 57, 61, 62,
82, 83, 86, 87, 162, 169, 212, H
218, 221 Haas, Peter, 52, 89–94, 96
Dunleavy, Patrick, xi, xiii Hay, C., 62
Historical institutionalism, 93
Howard, John, 151, 153, 154
E
Elite Networking, 31
Emulation, 48 I
Epistemic communities, 29, 42, 52, IMF, 15, 47, 48, 54, 185, 218
63, 85, 87–96, 220
European Union (EU), 9, 30, 47, 85,
95, 113, 114, 218 J
Evans, Mark, xiv, xv, xix, xx, 14, 15, James, O., 41, 83
25, 27, 29, 41, 46, 51–56, 60, JET Program, 161, 182–184
61, 63, 83–90, 94–96, 100, 139,
142, 162, 186, 212, 218
Evidence-based policy-making, xiv, K
xxiv, 137, 147, 161, 163, 165 Keohane, Robert O., xxiii, 5, 6, 12,
59, 97, 117, 123

F L
Five Country Conference, 210 Labour market policy, xv, xxiv, 1,
Border Five, 210 131, 151, 162, 194, 198, 199,
Migration Five, 210 204, 208, 213, 219
Five Country Ministerial (FCM), Lesson-drawing, xix, 13, 15, 24, 28,
210–212, 215 29, 33, 41, 42, 45–49, 51, 52,
Five Eyes. See Anglosphere 82, 108, 172
Furlong, P., 51 Lodge, M., 41, 83

M Penetration, 31, 62
Marsh, David, xiv, xix, xxi, 14–16,
25–27, 29, 30, 46–52, 57, 62,
83, 86, 87, 121, 162, 212, 218,
221
Meadows, Thomas Taylor, xv, xvi
Multi-Level Approach, xx, 52, 86, 87,
89
Mutual Obligation, xxiv, 131, 133,
147, 151–155, 198
Work for the Dole and, 153, 154
N Policy diffusion, xix, 24, 28, 29,
National security, 209
counter-terrorism, x
international threats to, xi, 123
NATO, 111
New Deal, The, xxiv, 13, 130, 135,
136, 141, 145–150, 155, 161,
164, 169–171, 173–176, 184,
187
New Democrats, 55, 164
New Institutionalism, 25
New Labour, 55, 135, 136, 144–149,
164, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173,
175, 176, 187
New Public Management, xiv, xx, 55,
56, 82, 118–121, 124, 137, 155,
219, 220
Northcote-Trevelyan Report, xvi
Nye, Joseph, xxiii, 5, 6, 12, 59, 97,
117, 123
O 223, 226
OECD, 7, 15, 18, 33, 39, 47, 54,
133, 152, 164, 195, 199–202,
221
peer-review mechanism, 38, 39
P Dolowitz and Marsh Model, xix,
Pandemic, ix, xi, xxiii, 8, 9, 23
INDEX 231
Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunities Reconciliation Act
(PRWORA), 130, 140–144, 147,
155, 166–169, 176, 184, 186,
187, 190
Peter Hall. See Policy paradigms
Policy assemblage, 24, 28, 29, 56–58,
62, 63, 76, 80, 107
Policy Communities, 31
Policy convergence, xix, 24, 28–34,
36–38, 40, 44, 46, 85
36–39, 199
Policy learning, ix, xii–xvii, xix, 14–17,
28, 29, 33, 36, 38, 41–43,
45, 46, 52, 80, 82, 124, 155,
161, 170, 171, 193, 194, 200,
204–208, 212, 213, 224
Policy-making
digital dimensions of, 225
evaluation, 26, 137
evidence, xiv, xxiv, 137, 147, 161,
163, 165, 180
ideology, xv. See also Digital era
governance
Policy networks, xxiii, 16, 27, 45, 52,
53, 55, 56, 59, 60, 63, 80, 82,
87–89, 95–99, 101, 122, 124,
176, 185, 193, 194, 197, 203,
204, 206, 209, 211, 219–221,
223, 225
Anglosphere, xv, 101, 124, 193,
194, 197, 209–211, 219–221,
Policy paradigms, 43–46, 52
Kuhn and, 43
Policy transfer, 25, 48
criticisms of, 83, 93
definition of, xix, xxi, xxv, 87, 212
29, 47–49, 51, 52, 83, 87, 212
232 INDEX
examples of, 85, 86, 95, 163, 221
government advocacy of, 96
networks, 27, 53, 55, 56, 60, 82,
86–89, 94, 96, 102, 161, 186,
190, 202, 209
normative, 17, 26, 62, 218
voluntary and coercive, 27, 47–49,
52, 62, 83, 84, 87
Powell, W.W., 31, 62
Public interest, the, xii, xxi, xxiii, 1,
3–5, 10, 11, 18, 25, 217, 224,
225
Q
Quintet of Attorneys-General, 209,
210, 224
R 146, 147, 149, 150, 153, 155,
Rationality, 49, 50
Rights and responsibilities, xxiv, 130,
135, 136, 138, 146, 147, 151,
154, 155, 169
Rose, Richard. See Lesson-drawing
S and US policy, xv, xxiv, 130, 138,
Slaughter, Anne-Marie, 12, 59, 60,
96–99, 101, 122, 221, 225
Stone, Diane, xii, xiv, xv, xx, xxiii, 15,
23–26, 52, 61, 71, 72, 96, 212,
218, 226
Structure and agency, xiii, xxii, 53,
63, 80, 84, 87, 94, 101, 111
structuration and, 84, 94
T 194, 202–204, 208–210, 221
Third Way, the, xiv, xv, xxiii, xxiv,
121, 124, 129–131, 134–138,
144, 146, 147, 155, 161, 164,
165, 168, 169, 172, 178, 183,
184, 219, 220
Transgovernmentalism, 28, 29, 58,
59, 61, 63, 96, 97, 100, 193,
211, 218, 220, 223, 226. See also
Anglosphere, policy networks
U
United Nations, x
V
Visegrad group, 114
Voluntary, 49, 50
W
Welfare-to-work, xv, xxiii, xxiv,
124, 129, 130, 132–134, 138,
161–165, 169, 173, 175, 176,
187
and Australian policy, xv, xxiv, 130,
155, 161, 162, 165, 176
and UK policy, xv, xxiv, 130, 147,
150, 155, 161, 162, 164, 165,
169, 173, 176
150, 155, 161, 162, 164, 165,
169, 173, 175, 176, 187
punitive effects of, xxiv, 131–133,
153
Wendt, Alexander, xix, 81, 84,
109–111, 123, 223
and collective identity formation,
81, 109
Westminster system, xv, xvii, 115, 195
Windsor conference, the, xxiv, 193,
Working Nation, xxiv, 131, 152, 153
World Trade Organisations (WTO),
31, 54