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This chapter argues that the SPF resulted from the intersection of the biographies of three individuals: the Head of the Social Security Department at the ILO, the Director General of the ILO and his Social Protection Advisor in his Cabinet with the idea that the world needed a global social floor which had for some time been advanced by a policy advocacy coalition. This was, essentially, an idea whose time had come with the new circumstances of the 2008 global economic crisis which provided the opportunity for the UN Chief Executive Board to act, an idea that could find an unlikely home inside the institution of the ILO which was open to a degree of policy change because of the de facto circumstance of the development of forms of social protection in Latin America and Africa. The subsequent endorsement by the G20, building on earlier work with the G8, was largely due to determined work by individuals working in the context of the fortuitous interest by France in having Social Protection on its G20 agenda. The chapter locates this explanation in the context of the theories of Global Social Policy Change including the Agency, Structure, Institution and Discourse (ASID) framework.

Sino-African cooperation embraces not only trade and foreign direct investment, but a ‘social dimension’ also, including expenditure on health and education. However, the ‘Chinese approach of social welfare appears to be mediated under a different set of normative premises, institutional actors, and policy mechanisms from traditional development partners. Based on in-depth elite interviews, and a systematic content analysis of key policy documents, this research examines both the nature and implications of the emerging Chinese “social policy model” in Africa. Located within global social policy discourses and focusing on the role of policy actors, the analysis investigates how welfare and social policy is conceptualized in China-Africa development aid cooperation. The study explores the implications for our understanding of traditional debates concerning the drivers of social policy development, as well as the extent to which these ideas represent a new policy paradigm or merely repeat earlier debates.

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 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.

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 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.

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.”

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.

It is not just market forces and imperative coordination that fail; civil society as a mode of governance at the intersection of networks and solidarity is also prone to failure. This claim is illustrated from four case studies. First, recent work on global social policy; second, a critique of the literature on the neoliberal project of ‘good governance’ to solve the problems of local economic development; third, a study of the difficulties of economic governance in Dartford (regarding the London Science Park) and Greater Manchester (its Olympic Bid); and, fourth, a periodization of corporatism and social economy models. In each case, the focus is on the discourses and multi-spatial character of the social problem and the dynamics of policy failure.

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.

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.