Lost or Found in Policy Translation? How to Account for Cross-country Travel of Policy Ideas

ABSTACT

The spread of policy ideas across countries is a widely acknowledged phenomenon. Conventional approaches to study this process hinge on concepts such as policy transfer, policy diffusion, lesson-drawing and institutional isomorphism. These approaches are influential in understanding public policy; however they assume perfect rationality of actors, and the stability of meaning of policy innovations in their spread. This literature may benefit from engaging with social constructivism and global governance debates. I build on the ideas of translation which have been prominent in linguistics, cultural studies, organizational studies, science and technology studies, and more recently, public policy. A resulting approach is called policy translation and represents a novel take to counter the shortcomings of conventional approaches in explaining how ideas travel across countries. I will illustrate the strength of policy translation with examples from my research in water and environmental governance.

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Roy Huijsmans