Rights exist behind the wire
In 2004 the ACT Legislative Assembly enacted the Human Rights Act, the first Bill of Rights to be passed into law in Australia. In essence the Act provides that no one may be treated or...
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Policy Transfer
Policy Transfer Overview
Policy transfer analysis seeks to make sense of the cross cultural transfer of knowledge about institutions, policies or delivery systems in an era of globalization. There is nothing new about the concept of policy transfer or its practice. As early as 315BC Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics advised fellow citizens of the rationality of engaging in lesson-drawing from positive and negative administrative experiences elsewhere. Although policy transfer has probably been habitual practice since the dawn of civilization, it has become common to see observations that the scope and intensity of policy transfer activity has increased as a consequence of changes to the field of action in the public sector (see Stone, 1999; Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000; and, Evans, ed., 2010). It is claimed that this is largely the function of the world of public policy becoming increasingly small due to dramatic changes in the utility of ICTS, to global political and economic institutional structures and to nation states themselves. Moreover, because public organisations do not always possess the expertise to tackle the problems they confront they often look outside the organisation to other governments or non-governmental organisations for the answers. Further, the public demands more from government than ever before and this expectation has been mediated through politicians to civil servants. As the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (Cabinet Office, 1999) puts it:
Government expects more of policy-makers. More new ideas, more willingness to question inherited ways of doing things, better use of evidence and research in policy-making and better focus on policies that will deliver long-term goals.
Given this emphasis on the importance of ‘evidence-based’ policy-making, policy transfer has increasingly become the ‘rational choice’ for policy-makers in Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand. However, despite the upsurge in policy transfer activity between these countries there has only been limited attention placed on developing practical guidelines for assessing the transportability of ideas, policies and institutions from one country to another. Moreover, most policy transfer activity has proceeded from the false assumption that the sharing of language and certain political system characteristics provide fertile ground for policy transfer to take place. This runs counter to the empirical evidence which emphasizes that policy transfer can be a progressive learning activity but only if: the policy that is transferred is compatible with the norms and value system of the recipient organisation or is culturally assimilated through comprehensive piloting and evaluation, and, the policy that is transferred builds on existing organisational strengths. In short, locally sensitive solutions must be found to local problems. Moreover, it is also noted that in recent times the best results tend to emerge from the creation of action-based knowledge networks comprised of senior practitioners and knowledge institutions and the recognition that policy is made and remade in the process of implementation (see Evans, ed., 2005&2010).
The purpose of this research program is twofold: (1) to evaluate how useful policy transfer can be as a descriptive and explanatory theory of policy change; and (2) to identify the best conditions for successful policy transfer and how can they be achieved in practice. The program proceeds from an underlying assumption about the field of enquiry; that policy transfer analysis alone cannot provide a general explanatory theory of policy change but when combined with other approaches an empirically grounded account of policy change can be developed. Drawing on contributions from the world of policy advice and policy management it also seeks to identify the ingredients of effective transfer.
People
Professor Meredith Edwards, Professor Mark Evans (Convenor), Professor David Marsh (ANU), Dr Wayhu Sutiyano, Professor Diane Stone (CEU, Warwick, UWA), Dr Tim Le Grande (Griffith University).
Program Convenor
