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This chapter reviews various approaches available to making and analyzing public policy. It considers these as mechanisms of policy making within an overall strategic context and reviews them against outcomes. The approaches here include those mechanisms of policy making that are more formal, such as treaties which are seldom considered as policy shaping mechanisms, and, this book argues, have been of considerable importance within the UK context and policy transfer. The more informal means considered include policy communities and policy networks. The chapter also includes a short discussion on the emerging debate on policy mobility within this context. It also covers the effects of not making policy and concludes with an additional category on policy as fashion.

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.

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.

This chapter focuses on policy process studies as they emerged and developed in France from the 1950s to the early 1980s. To better understand how the establishment of policy process studies within academic research has taken shape, it seems necessary to trace the institutionalization trajectory. This trajectory developed within the academic world but also largely outside it, alongside it and in interaction with it. The influence acquired by the executive and its technocracy since the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958 provide also essential data for an understanding of how knowledge and the methods that focus on understanding and controlling public policy in France have developed. The first phase arose from planning and national accountability as vectors of the rationalization of public policy. It was further developed in the 1960s thanks to the transfer of debates and tools developed overseas. The second phase was characterized by the crisis of the Welfare State and the transfer of policy studies knowledge obtained by North American universities. During this second phase, the development and institutionalization of public policy analysis in academic research began to establish policy studies as an autonomous “branch” of French political sciences.

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.

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 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.

A key aspect for promoting quality in one-to-one probation supervision is to focus on what practitioners actually do with those being supervised during supervision sessions. The SEED initiative, developed by NOMS in England and Wales, aimed at promoting offender engagement in probation supervision. Through training and continuous development of experienced practitioners, it aimed to bring together practitioners’ skills in areas such as motivational interviewing, problem solving and cognitive-behavioural approaches, risk-need-responsivity and structuring and provide a framework through which they could respond to the individual being supervised over the course of the supervision, promoting desistance. This chapter provides some of the results from two evaluations of SEED training, one in England and one in Romania. Both evaluations included staff views, user views on their supervision and compliance measures. The chapter also reflects on the process of policy transfer needed and the experience of doing evaluations in the two countries, given the different histories and lengths of orders for probation supervision in England and Romania.

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.

Peter Squires and John Lea provide a critical overview of the criminological reviews, critiques and appreciations thus far published, in English, of Wacquant's two major works, Urban Outcasts and Punishing the Poor. It develops a series of common themes arising within the available published work on Wacquant and tries to relate these with the chapters which follow in the rest of the book.

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 chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of the EU discourse on Higher Education and the role of LLL within it. It highlights the underlying Neoliberal tenets of the overall discourse which is occasionally laced with social democratic trappings. The themes include those of Internationalisation, Diversification, Innovation and Competitivity, Entrepreneurship, Marketablity.

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.

Chapter 2 shows that the failure to develop a jurisprudence incorporating corporate wrongdoing into the architecture of the criminal law is not surprising. It was a consequence of Ireland’s history as a predominantly agrarian state and the resulting political and social inertia surrounding corporate affairs. Ireland remained a largely agrarian state for most of the 20th century. Initially it advanced protectionist policies to shield Irish industry from outside competition and as an assertion of sovereignty. Later, it opened up its economy, embracing free market capitalism to boost the prosperity of the State. However, earlier protectionist policies meant that there was little big business in Ireland so it had neither need nor experience of constructing a regulatory framework. Corporate activity was viewed positively and there was little political reflection on the desirability of corporate accountability and there was even less cultural recognition of the negative effects of corporate activity. The Irish State did not regularly or rigorously review company law and it avoided passing any original Irish company legislation. Corporate wrongdoing was addressed using conventional criminal law, without adoption or reflection, because it was easier than designing a specialised system of corporate enforcement.