ABSTRACT
Introduction Mega-event policymaking is a highly globalised industry: an ‘Olympic caravan’ (Cashman & Harris, 2012) of consultants transports expertise from one city to the next, city administrators travel to previous host cities in order to learn through ‘policy tourism’ (Cook & Ward, 2011; González, 2011) and sports federations like the International Olympic Committee (IOC) maintain extensive databases for distributing technical manuals and policy documents. These mobile policies might be thought of as ‘policy commodities’: assemblages of documents, designs and expertise which are traded across cities by agents in the industry – consultants, travelling experts, local officials and sports federations (for background see also Carter, this volume; Horne & Manzenreiter, this volume). This chapter argues that policy commodities are manufactured for transit (in a form of import and export across cities) and are manufactured in transit while on the move. The mobile construction of mega-event policy draws attention to the migratory geographies of policy production. Mega-event planning industries might be thought of as production networks which are anchored in host sites temporarily, but which also generate value through the translation and transformation of policy.
