ABSTRACT
Policy transfer analysis is a theory of policy development that seeks to make sense of a process or set of processes in which knowledge about institutions at one sector or level of governance is used in the development of institutions at another sector or level of governance. Policy analysts deploy the policy transfer approach as a generic concept that encompasses quite different claims about why public organizations engage in policy learning. Policy scientists who focus on the process of policy transfer directly in order to explain the voluntary, or coercively negotiated importation of ideas, policies or institutions use process-centred approaches. Multi-level approaches to the study of policy transfer are characterized by a concern with understanding outcomes of policy transfer through combining macro and micro, or, macro, meso and micro levels of enquiry. Policy transfer analysis is a useful analogical model employed for cognitive purposes to suggest something about the properties understood to exist within the process of transfer.
