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Seeks to explore the notion that European welfare states have been becoming more alike in recent years, with a view to establishing the reality or otherwise of the notion of a distinct ‘European social model’. The analysis shows that convergence within Europe is largely restricted to aggregate social expenditure levels, but that welfare state standards, spending on individual welfare programmes and welfare state priorities quite often differ appreciably within and between different European families of nations. In consequence, it would appear that we are no nearer to a European ‘social model’ in the early twenty-first century than we were in the early 1980s.

This chapter explores some of the broader implications of studying the dynamics of policy convergence and divergence, the relationship between political institutions and policy styles, and the public perception of risks. The extensive literature on policy convergence addresses two issues: the extent of policy convergence and direction of policy convergence. A second body of literature addresses the impact of convergence on the direction of public policy. Much of this literature focuses on the impact of increased economic integration and global competition on the stringency of environmental regulation. The fact that both the United States and the EU have adopted a wide range of comprehensive consumer and environmental regulations suggests that powerful political and economic states enjoy substantial discretion in responding to domestic pressures for more stringent consumer and environmental regulations.

Since 2000, EU interventions to combat poverty and social exclusion have centred around the emergence of a novel technique of EU governance: the Open Method of Coordination. It is argued that the desire to study ‘the OMC’ and to compare it to other EU governance tools has given policy coordination an overly singular identity. This chapter deconstructs this technique in order to render its identity more ambiguous and more fluid than scholars have often been prepared to admit. It is suggested that different rationales, modes, and philosophies underpin coordination processes with significant implications for the role of the OMC as a medium of either ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’ benchmarking. In turn, this has implications for the tolerance of policy autonomy and the pursuit of policy convergence. Moreover, there is a central ambiguity as to whether the objective of policy coordination is governance through influence or a form of ‘dynamic accountability’.

Despite the persistence of idiosyncratic characteristics, the trend in Europe's immigration policies is one of convergence in two basic areas: border control and residence rights. Everywhere border control is a priority, and the principle of closure to foreign workers is maintained. Nonetheless, discrepancies remain in the rights each country grants to foreigners, including right to remain, residence status, social rights, and access to work and to citizenship. The Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 raised new issues about the decline of nation‐state sovereignty with the transition from the “third pillar” (intergovernmental decision‐making processes for immigration and asylum) to a “first pillar” (a communalization of decisions). This treaty may lead to the end of European national immigration policies and an end to citizen control over such decisions.

The final chapter summarizes and highlights the main findings of the twelve substantive chapters of the book and assess trends of growing or diminishing similarities between British and German social policy in the respective policy fields. The chapter also reflects on broader trends in the three domains of family policy, pensions, and employment policy in Europe more generally.

This chapter analyses the extent to which the social investment perspective finds its expression in the social expenditure profile of the OECD member states. It traces the development of public social expenditure using disaggregated programme expenditure data in 21 OECD member states from 1980 to 2007. By distinguishing between investment and compensatory social spending, the analysis outlines four worlds of spending profiles. In this way, it draws out the diversity in the approaches pursued in different countries and also considers the extent to which one can observe a convergence in welfare policy.

The chapter introduces the aims and scope of the book. It presents Germany and the UK conventionally portrayed as contrasting models of modern welfare states. However, similar challenges, such as demographic ageing, social and labour market changes, as well as intensified economic internationalization have posed questions about the sustainability of both, and particularly of the German ‘model’ of welfare capitalism. The chapter provides a brief overview of the two parts of the chapters of the book, three of which investigate attitudes and perceptions towards welfare provision and solidarity, followed by discussions of changes in the fields of family, pension, and employment policy, reflecting on both statutory and occupational welfare.

The chapter offers a critical analysis of the call for policy convergence in Competition Law. This merely emanates from the global business community and enables established Competition Law regimes, such as those of the United States and Europe, to influence the convergence point and take ownership of the process. This does not take into account the different patterns of diffusion of Competition Law and consequently the variety of Competition Law systems globally. The chapter castigates the lack of participation in this global deliberative space of emergent and developing economies and the inability of various affected interests, beyond global businesses and to a limited extent consumers, to be considered. Taking a participation-centered approach, the chapter argues that global antitrust governance should not aim to policy convergence as such, but to increasing levels of ‘total trust’. Establishing a BRICS Joint Research Platform in Competition Law could a first step in this process.

The Chapter analyses the post-Millennium Development Goals policy debate to frame a successor framework that is universally acceptable. It looks at the changing global dynamics since the adoption of the MDGs in 2000 and calls for a paradigm shift and rethinking in approach. The author argues that the task of formulating the post-2015 development framework will need to be balanced by a plethora of other global development initiatives that have taken place over the past few years. The analysis points to an emerging framework that must contend with the dynamics of a fast changing world and why it is essential to build a global policy convergence. The chapter highlights on the Common African Position on the post-2015 agenda and some of the key priority issues to be considered in the post-2015 development agenda.

In the concluding chapter a team of four of the authors-Hulme, Menter, Murray and O'Doherty-consider some of the implications of the analyses from the earlier sections of the book. In particular they consider the extent of convergence or divergence between teacher education policy in the five nations and ways in which global forces are acting on each national system. The chapter then goes on to discuss the ways in which teacher education relates to the school systems and may or may not create greater social justice. The links between teacher education and citizenship in contemporary democracies are considered and the chapter concludes by considering the future both for teacher education itself across the nations but also for the future of teacher education research.

The chapter introduces the broad theoretical arguments regarding globalization, policy convergence, and labour market reforms. It initiates the discussion on globalization and public policy and elaborates on the nature of such interaction. A major section of this chapter is devoted to the discussion of the factors and mechanisms of policy convergence. Summarizing the potential factors that influence policy convergence, an analytical framework with three broad categories, namely structural determinants, institutional determinants, and political determinants of policy convergence, is presented. The discussion is theoretically linked to the issue of labour market as a site of reform through existing theoretical frameworks and global experiences. The chapter proceeds to set out the theoretical framework to analyse labour market reform and presents an alternative index of labour market flexibility that is meaningful for transitional economies to facilitate subnational comparative study.

This chapter examines the correlation between national cultures and competition policies in Northeast Asia. It presents evidence on culture-competition correlation and discusses the implications of the correlation for the convergence of competition policies. It concludes with some suggestions to promote competition law and policy convergence within Asia.

This chapter argues that legislative and policy frameworks which have been designed to address sexual grooming in England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland can be viewed as the pinnacle of regulatory initiatives which are designed to pre-emptively govern the risks posed by sexual offenders. It highlights the broad trends within criminal justice policies on sex offending as well as the variations and nuances which are embedded within local, international, historical, and cultural contexts. Although there are many points of policy convergence, there are also subtle differences in regulatory approaches to sex offending between these jurisdictions. Various explanations for these key policy differences are explored, including ‘policy transfer’ and differing political economies. The chapter also provides an overview of the historical and political relationships between the respective legal systems and traditions in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

This chapter reviews the conceptual lineage of the concept of ‘policy translation’ and considers its methodological implications. It begins by rooting the term in the related concepts of ‘policy convergence’ and ‘policy transfer’ and then proceeds to differentiate between the two concepts by drawing on the work of Lendvai and Stubbs. It argues that ‘translation’ lends itself to an interpretivist, ethnographic approach while the concepts of ‘convergence’ and ‘transfer’ are better suited to reductionist, post hoc analysis. Both of these approaches have their place in criminological research but the case studies presented in this book seek to illustrate the benefits of the former. The chapter concludes by elaborating on the methodology used for each of these case studies and the advantages and limitations of employing participatory and non-participatory methods to interpret active policy translation processes.

Chapter 4, which examines the development of macro-economic policymaking in Europe, argues that the internationalization and regionalization of macro-economic policymaking are products of concrete internal struggles fought at the domestic level within European states over the implementation of anti-inflationary monetary policies and the dismantling of the main institutional expressions of the post-war Keynesian consensus. Looking at the development of European economic integration from the 1950s to the present day, the chapter differentiates between forms of cooperation in the heyday of the post-war Keynesian consensus (the ECSC, the Treaty of Rome) and cooperation driven by the collapse and movement away from that consensus (European Monetary System, Single European Act, monetary union). These two periods of integration correspond to very different forms of statehood. The chapter ends with a detailed account of the Eurozone crisis of 2008–12 and how this crisis has both challenged and reinforced the member statehood paradigm.

This chapter focuses on some of the circularities and discontinuities within education policy and flags up for further attention some of the recurring themes in the book as a whole: the changing form and modalities of the state; the production of ‘new learners’; the subordination of education to economic imperatives; policy convergence, across countries and across sectors; the ‘privatization’ of public-sector education, and the ‘joining up’ of social and educational policies. It concludes the account and interpretation of education policy by focusing on a set of general issues that have arisen and recurred in the foregoing text: first, by looking at ‘dissolutions and conservations’ within current education policy; second, by thinking about how education and education policy are being reconfigured in space and time. The chapter also discusses ongoing trends.

This chapter provides an analytical frame for explaining the geography of finance and global financial integration. The chapter unpacks the functions of finance, the form of financial systems, and the drivers of financial system convergence, as a means of evaluating the similarities among geographically distinct financial systems and their integration with higher scales of aggregation. Our perspective rests on a view that institutional form does not necessarily determine function and that function does not necessarily determine institutional form. By breaking this causal assumption, this perspective of institutional form and function and institutional change avoids the potential pitfalls of methodological territorialism, which tends to hold history and geography static. Moreover, it injects a more spatially and temporally dynamic perspective into the analysis of the forces of economic integration and mimesis that are changing previously distinctive economic geographies across different scales.