Recent years have seen an interesting development in practices and policies of nation branding.
Alongside an emphasis in which nation branding programmes seek to activate desires of conspicuous
consumption in consumers, or to use branded messages to attract investment, there has also been a
growing emphasis placed on policy transfer as a part of nation branding strategies. Thus, we see
countries emphasising the possibility of exporting (amongst others) their educational, environmental,
gender, criminological and even administrative policies, models and approaches. Instead of jealously
guarding points of possible competitive advantage the message is instead apparently benevolent, a
declaration that such countries may have something to offer that they are willing to share for the
greater good.
To date, this shift towards the incorporation of policy transfer within nation branding practices has
received only limited analysis (e.g. Marsh and Fawcett 2011a; 2011b). Questions that arise, therefore,
include: why are countries increasingly shifting their nation branding programmes in this direction?
What do they seek to gain by engaging in such exports? And should we take the ostensibly beneficent
nature of such practices at face value?
The aim of this working paper is therefore to consider what the shift to policy transfer may tell us
about the developing politics of nation branding, with particular focus placed on how policy transfer
can be seen as a form of branded identity politics that arguably belies its apparently benevolent
intentions by reaffirming hierarchical geopolitical imaginaries that remain premised on a politics of
leveraging perceived competitive advantage. However, while the paper indicates why such a shift in
nation branding strategies may be attractive, it also considers the potential pitfalls and limitations of
such an approach.
The working paper first discusses the shift towards nation branding through policy transfer at a
general level, before ending with a discussion that draws on examples from Norden – the countries
of which frequently populate the upper echelons of numerous nation branding and benchmarking
indices, which have historically presented themselves as a model for export, and which, following an
extended period of post-Cold War identity crisis and doubt, have more recently rediscovered a sense
of self-confidence and self-identity, not least manifest in a resurrection of ideas of Nordic knowledge
exports and policy transfer that re-instantiates more historical notions of Nordic exceptionalism
