This paper addresses an apparent knowledge vacuum in the U.S. in the area of international urban environmental planning and the transfer of urban environmental planning practices. This gap is characterized by a dearth of understanding about the process of transfer and adaptation of environmental and urban planning policies into the U.S. from overseas in general, and from Germany in particular. Little is available or has been articulated about the conditions that support or inhibit the voluntary transfer of urban environmental policies into the U.S. and the outcomes. Improving understanding of cross-national transfer of urban environmental policies from countries such as Germany may strengthen the testing and application of appropriate and beneficial programs to heal urban environments in the U.S. This dissertation concerns itself with governmental urban environmental policies, ideas and lessons which have evolved in Germany and are candidates for potential voluntary transfer into the U.S. The intention of this dissertation is to shed light on the process of voluntary policy transfer of urban environmental and planning policies from Germany to the United States. The specific research questions addressed in this dissertation include: 1) In the context of the voluntary transfer, is the acquisition and use of imported information a more rational or more an anarchic process?; 2) What factors enhance or limit the voluntary transfer of urban environmental planning policies from Germany to the United States?; 3) Are there identifiable effects of voluntary transfer of urban environmental planning policies from Germany to the United States? This dissertation concludes that voluntary transfer of German urban environmental and planning policies is a relatively anarchic process. The search and testing of policies from Germany to the U.S. is not often conducted in purpose-driven or goal-oriented contexts. This dissertation also posits that voluntary transfer of German urban environmental and planning policies relies on determined policy entrepreneurs with cosmopolite qualities who bridge environmental and planning communities in both countries. It also suggests that the predominant outcomes of harvesting urban environmental and planning policies are soft transfers of ideas and concepts rather than hard transfers of laws and regulations. Finally, it is suggested that cross-national policy transfer is a “knowledge trail” comprised of unstructured acquisition of information and intuitive learning characteristics, followed by almost parallel implementation, confirmation and decision processes. / Ph. D.

<p>Abstract</p><p>Does Geography Matter? A Study of the Bologna Process from a Policy Transfer Perspective.</p><p>Essay in Political Science (D-level) at Karlstad’s University by Beatrice Högå, Spring 2007</p><p>Tutor: Susan Marton</p><p>The purpose of this essay is to generally see how theories of policy transfer can help us to better understand the process through which the Bologna Process is being spread throughout Europe, and to specially see if geographic placement, i.e. in the heart of Europe, plays a role in how well and how fast the Bologna Process is implemented.</p><p>To be able to answer the purpose, I have used Evans and Davies theoretical model on policy transfer network to describe the Bologna Process. Furthermore, Sweden and France are the countries being examined when they differ on the independent variable. From there, I have applied an analytical tool, namely process tracing, to examine whether there are differences in the two countries’ work with the implementation of the Bologna Process.</p><p>I have designed six specific research questions:</p><p>Have France performed more extensive work than Sweden when it comes to implement the two-cycle system?</p><p>Have France performed this work earlier?</p><p>Have France performed more extensive work than Sweden when it comes to recognize awards and periods of study?</p><p>Have France performed this work earlier?</p><p>Have France performed more extensive work than Sweden when it comes to quality assurance?</p><p>Have France performed this work earlier?</p><p>After applying the analytical tool to be able to answers these research questions, the answer to the general question Does geographic placement, i.e. in the heart of Europe, play a role in how well and how fast the Bologna Process is implemented? is negative. In this case, there are no unambiguous results to support that idea.</p>

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This study aims at examining the prospects for a policy transfer of a Swedish municipal environmental policy (that of Växjö) to the French urban commune Blois, for which an ambition of becoming a leading eco-city in France, was declared by the mayor in 2008. In the analysis, emphasis is laid on mechanisms to institutionalize the main environmental policy principles, such as political and institutional structures and processes. Other prospects for an institutionalization of a new environmental policy that are to be investigated are economic structures as well as visions of the different decision-makers concerned. Research methods used in the study are qualitative interviews, document studies and a questionnaire. The findings of the analysis show that today’s prospects for an environmental policy in Blois close to that of Växjö, are clearly limited. The limitations can partly be found in economic structures but these seem to be rather related to a lack of priority amongst actors. Moreover, problems have been identified arising from administrative complexity with a lack of internal integration. There is a commitment amongst some of the actors working with environmental issues, but the complexity of decision-makers involved together with unclear priorities make a developed strategic approach hard to achieve.

Urban policies are currently shaped by contemporary processes of globalisation including a market-oriented approach to urban development. In Rio de Janeiro there is currently a high rate of urban population growth causing issues such as inequality, informal settlements and lack of access to basic services. Improved urban management is urgently needed which has become an obstacle to overcome by the GoRJ and the World Bank. Participatory methods has become widely integrated into development promoting programs with the incentive to include various key stakeholders in urban policy making. This case study explores issues of how strategies are produced and implemented into the context of Rio de Janeiro. Furthermore, it aims to explore events caused by such strategies. Based on a taken-for-granted premise that participatory methods and market-oriented planning leads to accelerated development, this study calls for a critical examination of how such approaches are carried out in practice.  In communicative planning theory, there is a critical stance towards rational models used in planning systems. The findings of this paper present how neoliberal ideology has formed urban development in Rio de Janeiro and how it contains a rational rethoric. It furher presents ways of how participatory methods can reinforce oppressions and injustices, serving a top-down approach rather than the opposite.

The study of policy transfer has seen remarkable developments and received considerable attention in developed countries, but it has so far been ignored in the context of Libya. Thus, this research will fill a gap in the literature and further understanding of the topic of policy transfer, not only in relation to Libya but developing countries in general. This thesis aims at providing a comprehensive and systematic picture of the public health care system in Libya and, at the same time, to learn lessons from the UAE which can be transferred to the Libyan context in order to achieve a more effective health service. At the theoretical level, this research depended on the assumption that lessons can be drawn from the UAE to help build the public health system in Libya. This was achieved through the application of the framework of policy transfer. In order to build a more complete picture in relation to the success or failure of the transfer, the path dependency approach was used to explain the importance of old trajectories or how past legacy can lead to “lock-in" or decrease the ability of the lesson-drawing. Empirically it examined the public health sector in Libya as its main case study, comparing it with the UAE. Qualitative data collection methods were used, including personal interviews and official documents. With this in mind, the research aims to understand the public health care systems in the two countries and, through comparative analysis, make suggestions as to what lessons can be learned. The findings reveal that many lessons can learned from the practices of the UAE public health policy. Such experiences would help to remove the problems in public health services in Libya as well as to facilitate improvement of policies and plans. However, there are two factors, namely the legacy of the past regime and state capacity, which may hinder the success of the transfer. Furthermore, political will held by policy makers, including a desire for modernization of the public sector, could facilitate the transfer of the suggested lessons.

Traffic congestion is a significant cost to society, amounting to somewhere between 1 and 2% of GDP according to an EU-wide survey (CE Delft, 2011). To address this cost, road pricing has long been viewed as the first best solution although issues with public and political acceptance have meant the uptake of such schemes has been low. In the meantime parking policies, a second best alternative to road pricing, have become extensively used by local authorities as a means of managing congestion due to the influence the price and availability of parking can have on a motorist s decision to drive. The effectiveness of such strategies however is limited due to local authorities being unable to control privately owned parking. More specifically, free parking at the workplace is seen as contributing to congestion at peak times by incentivising drivers to commute to work by car. To address this, in the UK the Transport Act 2000 granted powers to local authorities to introduce a Workplace Parking Levy (WPL) whereby employers are required to pay a sum based on the number of parking spaces they provide for their staff with the revenue hypothecated for local transport improvements. The introduction of such powers meant the Government estimated there would be 12 schemes by 2010. To-date however, only Nottingham has introduced a WPL. The aim of this thesis therefore is to investigate the transferability of the WPL to other local authorities which is analysed through the application of the Policy Transfer Framework to the WPL in the UK context. It focuses on the views of key stakeholders with respect to the WPL at both the national and local authority level so as to understand the reasons for the low uptake as well as the design, implementation and operational considerations required to introduce such a scheme. The conclusions of this thesis are that lessons can and have been learnt with respect to introducing a WPL as the findings reveal that Nottingham City Council (NCC) drew on aspects of Policy Transfer to facilitate the introduction of the scheme. Specifically, NCC Councillors developed a vision of what a WPL could deliver and were reassured by experts from abroad whilst a staff transfer exercise allowed officers to learn lessons in terms of how the scheme should be designed, implemented and operated. What s more, lessons from a formal DfT evaluation of the pilot scheme in Nottingham following the delivery of the full WPL package will have a significant influence (either positive or negative) on the number of future schemes. More broadly, the results suggest that the WPL is transferable and the adoption of additional WPL schemes in the future is likely. This is due in no small part to the fact that the Nottingham scheme has so far enjoyed a relatively painless introduction even though it is still too early to evaluate how successful it has been in meeting its objectives. This research has made a significant contribution to knowledge in that it has explored the WPL with key stakeholders to generate a standard for introducing and operating a WPL. It has also provided an application of the Policy Transfer framework to understand the process and development of a new policy as well as the type and where lessons are learnt.

Agriculture remains one of the most contentious issues in the ongoing negotiations of the World Trade Organization, with serious implications for food security and the livelihood of farmers in the developing world. This dissertation examines the formation of agricultural trade policy and the politics and arguments surrounding it within the context of India’s position in the World Trade Organization (WTO). The research has two components. A set of archival documents relating to India’s participation in a WTO institution called the Trade Policy Review (TPR) was analyzed. In addition, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with a number of Indian experts and officials involved in agricultural trade policy. This project suggests a number of tentative conclusions with implications for political geography and particularly for the literature on policy transfer, neoliberalism, and Neo-Gramscian models of international relations. First, it finds that the WTO Secretariat plays a key role in promoting neoliberal ideas within the TPR institution and that the forms of argumentation used here can help to explain the resiliency of neoliberalism in the face of policy failure. Second, it shows that the Indian government has not accepted neoliberal policy models wholesale, but has exercised autonomy, selectivity, and adaptation in its liberalization programs. Third, it demonstrates that neoliberal ideas do not always favor the positions of developed countries. Finally, it supports the narrative of increasing developing country bargaining in the WTO and shows that the Indian representatives bolster their arguments by articulating them as being in the interest of the developing world in general.

This is a comparative study of how four countries –Canada, United States of America, England and Wales, and Australia –have developed youth crime related parental responsibility laws. In particular, I explore how governments have responded to calls for making parents more responsible for the criminal behavior of their children by relying on methods of governing that seek to incorporate the concept of “responsibilization” into legislation and practice. In doing so, I show how governments in a number of countries have ostensibly moved toward less state intervention in the prevention of youth criminality and have come to rely more on parents by enacting laws that acknowledge parental accountability for the criminality of children. In addition, this study uses the concept of policy transfer to examine how those responsible for developing youth criminal justice policy look to policies or laws in other jurisdictions for ways to prevent youth criminality. Despite the fact that there are similarities in legislation across the four countries examined in this study, only minimally do governments in these countries make reference to policies found in other countries. The thesis also looks at specific national and state–level government debates surrounding parental responsibility laws, and the perceptions governments elected officials have of youth criminality and parental responsibility.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), a paradigmatic example of a transitional post-conflict society governed by an externally-driven process of neo-liberal state-building, police reforms have played an important role in supporting the transposition of a particular variant of liberal order through security governance at the national and sub-national levels. This order is primarily constructed to reflect the interests of BiH’s supranational architect and benefactor since 2003: the European Union. It is less responsive to the interests or the needs of BiH citizens or constitutionally established governing institutions (Chandler 1999). Historically, prescriptions for police reform in BiH have been defined by various representatives of the international community in BiH rather than domestic policy makers or practitioners. They have also been glocally-responsive in their design. In other words, they have been introduced to generate policy alignment and to support the harmonisation of local policing mentalities and practices with the EU’s security interests in the Western Balkans as well as dominant ‘European’ approaches to controlling crime (Juncos 2011; Ryan 2011). In practice, however, it is evident that the outputs and outcomes generated by police reforms in BiH regularly deviate from their initial design. This is particularly evident in relation to a handful of community policing initiatives introduced in BiH over the past decade (e.g. Deljkic and Lučić‐Ćatić 2011). Using a meso-level analysis of two community-oriented policing projects implemented in 2011, this research draws on the conceptual framework of ‘policy translation’ (Lendvai and Stubbs 2006) to illuminate the agentive capacities of international development workers and local police practitioners and their role in shaping the conceptual and programmatic contours of glocally-responsive policing reforms in BiH. My first case study examines the translational capacity of international development workers at a major multi-lateral international development agency in BiH using an ethnographic account of my three-month placement with the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) ‘Safer Communities’ project in BiH in 2011. My second case study is used to illustrate the translational capacities of police practitioners working to implement an externally-initiated community policing project in Sarajevo Canton. Drawing from these case studies, I determine that the international political economy of global liberal governance and the interests of powerful global actors play only a limited role in affecting outputs and outcomes generated by internationally-driven police reforms. Rather, I argue that the concept of policy translation demonstrates that relatively disempowered actors like international development workers and local police practitioners can draw upon their agency and institutional resources to shape these policy making processes and in doing so, potentially contribute to more democratically responsive policing outputs and structures. My findings further suggest that important opportunities do exist for motivated reformers to foster deliberative forms of security governance in weak and structurally dependent societies like BiH and recognising and enhancing these can help to alleviate the potential consequences of introducing contextually or culturally inappropriate Western policing models to these societies. This is significant because it highlights the prospect of addressing the structural inequalities associated with global and transnational policing (Bowling and Sheptycki 2012), police reforms pursued in the context of liberal state-building projects (Ryan 2011) and donor-driven international police development assistance projects (Ellison and Pino 2012).