ABSTRACT
The simplest question that a policymaker faces after returning from travel abroad is, ‘How was your trip?’ The simplest answer is to tell a series of anecdotes about what happened, giving impressions of people, places, and colourful and unexpected incidents. Anecdotes reflect experience, and acquiring experience about the working of a programme in its national context is an essential step in lesson-drawing. But such anecdotes are about the experience of foreigners and, by definition, foreigners are different. For that reason, many policymakers will reject alien ideas without further thought.
