Stormwater management the American way: why no policy transfer?

From the 1940s until the 1980s the federal government gradually extended its authority over the structure of the American stormwater management system. The goal was to improve the water quality of the nation’s waterways by regulating the pollution loads entering the system, primarily through the use of gray infrastructure. However during the1980s the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began to explore new approaches toward the regulation of stormwater pollution. Instead of focusing only on gray mechanisms, the EPA began developing and promoting the use of low impact development (LID) techniques as an element municipal governments could use to achieve their total maxim daily load of pollutants allowable under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit system. In light of the incentive offered by the EPA for the use of LID in the management of stormwater, it should be expected to provide a perfect area to observe policy transfer between federal, state and local governments; but it does not. This article will establish why the EPA began promoting a green approach to stormwater management and why this has not led to a widespread transfer of best management practices in the ways the literatures associated with federalism and policy transfer would suggest

Towards a model of policy transfer, an examination of the British and American welfare-to-work systems : developments of the 1980's

In recent years political scientists have been discussing the process by which policies, ideas and institutions operating in one setting are transferred to another. While there has been a growing body of literature examining the process and utilising it to explain the development of public policies, few authors have attempted to construct a coherent model which researchers of comparative politics can use to inform their work. The first part of this thesis develops such a model. After establishing the broad outlines of this model in the first section, I use it to re-interpret the development of the American and British welfare-to-work systems in sections two and three. Specifically, section two, examines the 1988 Family Support Act. This section illustrates how its development and internal elements can be better explained using the heuristic model of policy transfer developed in part one. The focus of this section is upon the process of internal policy transfer in which the programs and ideas originating in State welfare systems were utilised by Federal policy makers to inspire, design and justify the Act. Section three extends the model to interpret the development of the British employment and training system in terms of both cross-national policy transfer and the transfer of past experiences and policies. Moreover, this section will demonstrate that, contrary to its statements, the British Government developed a complete welfare-to-work system. More importantly, for contemporary debates, the Government was inspired to develop a unique workfare system based on the hybridisation of ideas and programs contained in the American and Swedish workfare programsIn recent years political scientists have been discussing the process by which policies, ideas and institutions operating in one setting are transferred to another. While there has been a growing body of literature examining the process and utilising it to explain the development of public policies, few authors have attempted to construct a coherent model which researchers of comparative politics can use to inform their work. The first part of this thesis develops such a model. After establishing the broad outlines of this model in the first section, I use it to re-interpret the development of the American and British welfare-to-work systems in sections two and three. Specifically, section two, examines the 1988 Family Support Act. This section illustrates how its development and internal elements can be better explained using the heuristic model of policy transfer developed in part one. The focus of this section is upon the process of internal policy transfer in which the programs and ideas originating in State welfare systems were utilised by Federal policy makers to inspire, design and justify the Act. Section three extends the model to interpret the development of the British employment and training system in terms of both cross-national policy transfer and the transfer of past experiences and policies. Moreover, this section will demonstrate that, contrary to its statements, the British Government developed a complete welfare-to-work system. More importantly, for contemporary debates, the Government was inspired to develop a unique workfare system based on the hybridisation of ideas and programs contained in the American and Swedish workfare program

Sport policy convergence: a framework for analysis

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in European Sport Management Quarterly on 30th April 2012, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/16184742.2012.669390The growth in the comparative analysis of sport management processes and policy has led to an increased interest in the concept of convergence. However, the concept is too often treated as unproblematic in definition, measurement and operationalisation. It is argued in this paper that a more effective framework for examining claims of convergence is one that analyses the concept in terms of seven dimensions which can be explored through a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection. It is also argued that a deeper understanding of the process of convergence can be gained by operationalising the concept in the context of a selected range of meso-level theories of the policy process or of specific aspects of the process. The proposed analytic framework provides not only a definition of convergence but also the basis for a more nuanced investigation of hypotheses of convergence

The Future of Policy Transfer Research

The fact that three contributions address the state of policy transfer research and, to an extent, our contribution to it, suggests that we emphasised, although we did not ‘discover’, an important aspect of contemporary policy making. Here, we shall briefly discuss some of the issues about our work raised in these contributions before turning to our main concern, a focus upon some of the ways in which policy transfer research might usefully develop

The British Child Support Agency: did American origins bring failure?

In late 1990 the British government published a two-volume White Paper, Children Come First: The Government's Proposals on the Maintenance of Children , announcing its intention to establish a Child Support Agency (CSA). In contrast with most of the literature associated with the British CSA, my main concern in this paper is not with the direct identification of the problems, or the perceived problems, the agency has experienced since its inception in 1993; it is with how the agency was developed, and how this can help explain many of its subsequent problems or perceived problems. More directly, I will show that the origins of the agency are to be found in policy transfer from the USA, and that the difficulties inherent in this process led to important implementation problems. To do this, the paper is divided into four sections. In the first section I examine why the Thatcher government decided to develop the agency, rather than continuing with the Department of Social Security (DSS) court-based child-support award system in operation at the time. Second, I demonstrate how parallel developments in Britain and the USA led the British government to be interested in, and then borrow, the key elements of the US Child Support Enforcement System (CSES). Third, I discuss the key elements of the CSA that were transferred from the USA. In the final section I illustrate how policy transfer offers an important, even if partial, explanation of the CSA's implementation problems, and why two successive governments have used considerable legislative time attempting to 'fix' the CSA.

Considerations of the obstacles and opportunities to formalizing cross-national policy transfer to the United States: a case study of the transfer of urban environmental and planning policies from Germany

Not enough has been written about the import, adaptation, and application of urban environmental and planning policies from abroad into the United States. Even less has been written about the voluntary cross-national transfer and application of environmental policies by American subnational actors and institutions. It is our intent to begin redressing this by discussing the transfer of urban environmental and planning policies from Germany to the United States during the early part of the 21st century. This discussion is informed by data drawn from governmental reports and planning statements and over thirty-five interviews with US urban environmental and planning practitioners operating in Germany and the United States. What we discover is that, unlike more rational models of policy transfer, the voluntary importation of environmental and planning policies into the US is seldom a problem-focused, goal-oriented process. Rather, what we find is that a better depiction of the transfer and adoption process is of a relatively anarchic situation. This appears to occur due to a range of institutional and cultural filters that predispose American policy makers against gathering (and using) information and experiences from abroad. We find that this filtering process tends to encourage policy makers to discount (or reject outright) the usefulness of overseas models and that, when they do engage in this process, any information gathered appears to be based less upon well-researched and analyzed data than embedded ‘tacit’ knowledge.