ABSTRACT
Since the early 1990s a body of knowledge on the cross-national, crossregional, cross-local and cross-historical transfer of policy ideas, frameworks, programmes and institutions has been developed. Sometimes this involves bilateral transfers, sometimes the setting is a multilateral one, where global “best practices” are consulted or inspiration is drawn from various examples. Unfortunately, a great variety of terminologies has evolved in this body of knowledge, making it rather fragmented. Best-known and also most often criticised in the Anglo-Saxon world of the policy sciences is the concept of “policy transfer”, as coined by Dolowitz and Marsh (1996, 2000; for critiques see James and Lodge, 2003; Evans, 2004; Marsh and Sharman, 2009). Closely related, but derived from the US practice where states learn from each other and allow policy models to hop from state to state (and sometimes back) facilitated by the federal government is the phenomenon called “poly-diffusion” (Mossberger, 2000; Mossberger and Hale, 2002). Continental European political scientists, often writing with a strong focus on the consequences of European integration on institutional systems in member states, have been looking at signs of whether they can observe policy harmonisation among EU countries as a result of new initiatives and directives from Brussels and through which mechanisms institutional convergence might emerge (Heritier et al., 1996; Knill, 2001; Knill and Lehmkuhl, 2002; Knill, 2005; Busch and Jorgens, 2005; de Jong and Edelenbos, 2007; Duhr et al., 2007; Adams, 2008). Already in the late 1980s, an influential author adopting a historical viewpoint wrote a famous study in which she described how the Japanese governments since the mid-1850s made systematic efforts to “imitate and emulate” from other leading nations in putting the most desirable or modern policy frameworks in place (Westney, 1987).
