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Adopts a more global perspective on CCT policy development, considering the roles played by multilateral agencies. In one sense, this is a story of the formidable power of organizations like the World Bank as “knowledge managers.” On the other hand, the limits of the Bank’s hegemonic reach are also revealed: domestic politics continue to exert a major influence on project design and implementation which often contradict preferred paths of policy development.

Chapter 3, “New Ideas for New York City,” explores Mayor Bloomberg’s experiment in South-North policy learning, his ultimately frustrated attempt to replicate the well-publicized successes of the Mexican Oportunidades program. New York City’s struggling CCT program is a sobering reminder of the challenges of “off-the-shelf” policy borrowing, but it also illustrates the persuasive power of evaluation methods and compelling invention narratives.

This chapter first calls attention to the enormous momentum generated behind CCTs as a “paradigm positive” policy program which has been steered, most notably by the World Bank, through a combination of financial incentives and technocratic persuasion. Though even with these strong following winds, CCTs have evolved in some surprising ways.

The conclusion reflects on the analytical lessons have been learned across the two case studies. It suggests that there is evidence that qualitatively different forms of fast policy are at work in each of the sprawling fields of practice that are PB and CCTs, considering what this might mean for the politics of policy “translation.”

Chapter 1 critically reviews the literatures on policy transfer, with an eye towards understanding the contributions and limits of orthodox approaches researching policy mobility. It presents a social-constructivist approach that problematizes the inherent tensions between local specificity and global interconnectedness, and the continuous processes of (mis)translation and mutation that this entails.

This chapter takes up this theme in more transnational terms, examining the extensive “repurposing” of participatory-budgeting routines in the context of mainstream experiments in inclusive local governance. The “pasteurized” version of PB favored by the multilateral agencies is seen to have traveled far and fast, but the transformative potential of the original seems to have been lost along the way.

This chapter centers on the storied site of PB’s “invention.” Though still an inspiration to many, the Porto Alegre experience illustrates the political slipperiness of the PB concept, which under more conservative administrations has become a hollowed out version of its former self. Policy models are consequently not always what they seem, even in their sites of authenticity.

Reflections #1, “Pursuing projects, following policies,” is the first in a series of reflections that close each section of the book, where we anticipate some of the methodological and interpretative challenges of this critical approach to policy mobility. Here, in conversation with the extended case study method, we characterize our strategy for researching a far-flung selection of interconnected fieldwork sites, which we provisionally style as a distended case study approach.

This chapter explores the vital role of policy networks in the transnational (re)construction of the PB field, concluding that these are nevertheless invariably connected to centers of political power.