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

Retrofitting urban drainage infrastructure: green or grey?

This paper explores the approaches that London, Glasgow, Washington DC and Philadelphia have taken in responding to urban stormwater and combined sewer overflows challenges. In brief, London has begun construction of a large interceptor tunnel with relatively little attention yet paid to green infrastructure, Philadelphia is pursuing green infrastructure based approaches, and Washington DC and Glasgow are implementing a combination of solutions. The cases illustrate that a diversity of responses are emerging to a common environmental problem in cities around the world

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

Missing Conceptual Links in the International Environmental Policy Debate: Power, Time and Transfer

Over the past 20 years, scholars have examined the role policy transfer has had on the development of environmental policies across the globe. The literature in this area has discussed everything from the movement of cap-and-trade policies to the movement of rain barrels. As the name ‘policy transfer’ implies, studies tend to focus on the successful movement of a policy or program. Part of the reason for this focus is that studies tend to neglect the role power and time play in the transfer process. To begin addressing this, the concepts of power most commonly associated with the three faces of power debate and ideas of political time, policy time and ‘chronological’ time (i.e. timing, tempo, time) can help explain a range of environmental transfers (or non-transfers) better than the existing literature

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