ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the case of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), one of a number of institutional actors-cum-intermediaries operating at a multilateral scale that have come to exert influence in the transnationalizing field of urban policy. While the policy-mobilities research program remains quite diverse, some of its productive lines of inquiry have adopted “following” methodologies, focusing variously on moving objects and peripatetic actors, more or less inductively extending out to the networks, relations, and worlds that these policies-on-the-move make and remake. In the evolving, transnational dialogue around cities and urban policy, the OECD has emerged less as a unilateral maker of policy positions and proposals but rather as a multilateral mediator, the work of which is to construct venues and arenas for policy discussion and development, especially among its membership of advanced industrialized nations. Since the 1990s, the OECD has embraced the role of policy arbiter, one that has repeatedly affirmed neoliberal policy norms.
