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- Convenors:
-
Sam Hickey
(University of Manchester)
Giles Mohan (The Open University)
Farwa Sial (University of Manchester)
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- Formats:
- Papers Mixed
- Stream:
- Policy and practice
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
To explore the changing global politics and practices of policy transfer in an unsettled world through a range of case-studies, highlighting south-south and south-north flows of ideas as well as north-south. To include the spread of different responses to the pandemic across time and space.
Long Abstract:
Most processes of policy transfer within 'international development' have tended to flow from north to south and to re-enforce uneven relations of power between wealthy and poorer nations and raise concerns around issues of sovereignty and ideological bias. However, the rise of new powers has introduced the possibility of new forms of agency and policy transfer within an age of 'global development'. Potential examples include the spread of cash transfers from Latin America, new approaches to the green revolution and agricultural development and models of urban development. In all cases, epistemic communities (involving researchers, policy entrepreneurs and officials of inter-governmental, governmental and non-governmental organisations) have been critical in both formulating and promoting new policy agendas.
This panel welcomes a broad range of studies that talk to both the old and new global politics of policy transfer and which seek to unpack the actual practices of policy transfer across multiple levels and how these might lead to unintended consequences. It will include cases of western-driven cases of policy transfer as well as newer forms of south-south and south-north policy learning. Of particular interest are studies of how responses to the pandemic have travelled between different locations and also across time (in relation to earlier pandemics) and how policy lessons on green energy transitions might be generated and spread. The focus of submissions should be less about the substantive policy area and more about the ways in which the global politics and practice of policy transfer is changing in an unsettled world.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 July, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
During the pandemic, alternative agri-food networks faced constraints on engagement but initiated new approaches to South-South learning and policy dialogue.
Paper long abstract:
South-South cooperation has generally promoted business or geopolitical interests rather than develop alternative policy frameworks, especially in the agri-food sector. Alternative policies have lacked adequate government support and do not readily travel across places, especially given that inter-state cooperation presumes a linear policy transfer. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, however, civil society networks have initiated new spaces for policy debate and learning; these knowledge-exchanges emphasise empathy, sharing and reciprocity. This novel process has arisen especially among agri-food networks connecting actors in Brazil to other countries. They have used online platforms to reach out across diverse social groups and identities, thus stimulating links among struggles around land use and food security. These spaces warrant research attention for four reasons: (i) they empower actors that had been largely excluded from formal spaces of South-South relations, (ii) they reframe methodologies for dialoguing and learning, (iii) they likewise reframe multi-actor objectives through counter-hegemonic concepts such as Bem Viver, solidarity economy and territorial struggles, and (iv) they establish engagement channels cutting across geographical and epistemological boundaries. This paper will illustrate those dynamics through a selection of case studies, including: Agroecologia em Rede, a network focused on agroecology and connecting actors in Brazil with other Latin American countries, and AgroEcos, an action-research project that aimed to replicate good practices across space and time and that acquired new meanings when the pandemic stimulated numerous webinars attracting participants from around the country and beyond.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses Brazil's South-South development cooperation (SSC) with Africa as a vector for policy transfer. It examines Brazilian foreign and SSC policy change and the role of the time factor in policy travel to explain changes in policy circulation dynamics between Brazil and Africa.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on Brazilian South-South development cooperation (SSC) with the African continent as a vector for policy transfer and circulation. It argues that during the first decades of the new century, Brazilian policies in the fields of agriculture, health, and social protection have travelled to Africa through SSC embedded in a broader circulation of development-related policy knowledges and technologies from Brazil to the developing world. This resulted from strong active state-activism and the mobilisation of policy winning coalitions. This circulation was deeply connected to the attractiveness of Brazilian policy solutions to actors outside Brazil (international organisations and partner governments) and their eagerness to learn from Brazilian experiences, as well as to Brazil showing the necessary authority and capacity to inspire and share. Engaging with questions of policy change and the time factor in policy travel, the paper also explores more recent policy circulation dynamics between Brazil and the African continent. It argues that the simultaneous contraction in Brazilian governmental activism in SSC, since the mid-2010s, and the persistent efforts to consolidate SSC as a policy field in Brazil, have implications to the ways policy travels through cooperation and affects the politics of Brazilian policy circulation in Africa, with the emergence of a new set of dynamics, namely: (i) Brazilian implementing agencies resisting to policy sharing; (ii) ‘trilateralisation’ of Brazilian SSC and policy circulation through UN agencies; (iii) increased focus on hands-on exchanges to pilot of Brazilian policy solutions, instruments and programmes in Africa.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the activities of entrepreneurial but inexperienced Chinese industrialists developing urban industrial zones in Africa. In contrast to formal attempts at ‘policy transfer’, these forms of engagement are largely improvised, with implications for emergent urban-industrial forms.
Paper long abstract:
Amid growing excitement about Chinese investment stimulating a manufacturing boom across Africa, including through industrial zones, there has been little attention to what forms of policy transfer this might involve and how these processes affect rapidly evolving processes of urban development. We examine how Chinese zones in Africa are influencing the relationship between industrialization and urbanization: a neglected theme in the literature on China’s role in Africa, despite its centrality in China’s own experience. Through research in Ethiopia and Uganda, we argue that Chinese zones are key emerging sites for the making of an urban-industrial nexus.
However, these new urban dynamics are not driven by the government officials and consultants that dominate the ‘policy mobilities’ literature, nor by the State-Owned Enterprises usually associated with Chinese activity overseas. Rather, they are emerging through the activities of inexperienced private Chinese actors who do not even operate in the worlds of urban policy. Conventional forms of ‘policy transfer’ in this context have actually been very limited, and sometimes ineffective. Faced with government histories and capacities that vastly differ from China’s, efforts to directly replicate Chinese experience is virtually impossible. Yet the tentative relationships between Chinese firms and government authorities at different levels, and the ways in which this play out in territories characterized by institutions that are still in flux, are gradually moulding new improvised urban-industrial forms into shape.
Paper short abstract:
I examine the institutional drivers of the adaptation and successful deployment of Chinese-inspired, infrastructure-led development strategies in developing countries. Case studies of projects in Kenya and Ethiopia reveal that governmental coordination, property rights institutions, and economic structure can help explain variations in project design and economic outcomes.
Paper long abstract:
Place-based and infrastructure-led development strategies are receiving renewed attention. Although partly a reaction to widening social and geographic inequalities in the Global North, this owes also to the externalisation of China’s infrastructure-heavy model through its impressive developmental trajectory and its overseas investment. This paper examines the process through which this model was diffused to African countries, the local adaptations that it engendered, and the preconditions for its successful deployment. Empirical material is drawn from a study of Chinese-financed and built industrial and infrastructure projects in Kenya and Ethiopia. The first part of the paper examines the “land revenue regime” that undergirded China’s spectacular infrastructure-led economic boom, highlighting its institutional and ideational underpinnings. The subsequent empirical analysis draws on original and secondary research to examine the ways in which institutional features drove the adaptation of the infrastructure-led paradigm to African settings and its consequences for project performance. I highlight three explanatory variables. Firstly, I look at the authorising environment in which investment decisions are made and the degree to which they allow for coordination, focusing on the consequences of multi-level governance. Secondly, I examine the influence of property rights institutions on project costs and on the scope for induced economic responses. Finally, I discuss how the macroeconomic environment and existing productive capabilities condition these responses. Through this exercise, I put forward an institutional theory of infrastructure-led development, shedding light on how changing development paradigms, as well as the advent of initiatives such as the BRI, may differentially impact developing countries’ policies.