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Book Review
Policies on the move:
Translation, assemblages and
ethnography
Blaustein Jarrett, Speaking truths to power: Policy ethnography and police reform in Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2015; 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-198-72329-5,
$110 (hbk)
Clarke John, Bainton David, Lendvai Noemi, and Stubbs Paul, Making policy move: Towards a politics
of translation and assemblage. Policy Press: Bristol, UK, 2015; 224 pp. ISBN 978-1-447-31336-6,
$115.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-1-447-31337-3, $44.95 (pbk)
Kingfisher Catherine, A policy travelogue: Tracing welfare reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand and
Canada. Berghahn Press: New York, USA and Oxford, UK, 2013; 230 pp. ISBN 978-1-782-
38005-4, $120.00/»75.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-1-785-33221-0, $29.95/»18.50 (pbk)
Peck Jamie and Theodore Nik, Fast policy: Experimental statecraft at the thresholds of neoliberalism.
University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, USA and London, UK, 2015; 328 pp. ISBN 978-0-816-
67730-6 $105.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-816-67731-3 $30.00 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Farhad Mukhtarov, Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University
and Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, The Netherlands
Two issues have been hotly debated in public policy in the recent years. The first is the
intensive movement of policy models across space and time with often-unpredictable
consequences on the ground. Nationally, policy moves from the rooms of legislators and
executive officials to the offices of implementation agencies, and onto the people such policy
seeks to regulate. Transnationally, it moves from one country and context to another with
the help of international organizations, think tanks, independent experts, and academics
(e.g. Stone, 2012). Examples of policies on the move, among many, include neo-liberal
reforms in education, healthcare, and public service provision.
The second issue that increasingly gains attention is in the opening up of public policy to
an ethnographic inquiry. For example, through their ethnographies, Maybin (2014) and
Pachirat (2009) lift the lid on the micro-politics of policy and illustrate the human
dimensions of policy-making away from the rational choice assumptions or theories of
institutionalism. Instead, ethnographies allow revealing the political, cultural, traditional,
emotional, ethical, and other features of complex decision-making. This is a significant
methodological innovation.
Four notable new books speak to these very issues. The first book is ‘‘Speaking Truths to
Power: Policy Ethnography and Police Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina’’, written by Jarrett
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DOI: 10.1177/0263774X16663506
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Blaustein. It presents an ethnography of the police reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH)
assisted by the European Union, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC),
and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
In introduction, Blaustein problematizes the space between ‘‘best practices’’ and the local
police in Sarajevo as the ‘‘contact zones’’ (Pratt, 1992). He is interested in how transnational
policy interlocutors mediate the ‘‘best practices’’ on the ground in Sarajevo, including the
work of police officers. Blaustein authoritatively argues for the value of policy ethnography
in understanding the ‘‘contact zones’’ of contemporary global public policy. Chapter 4
introduced the major analytical concept of the book, ‘‘policy translation’’, which denotes
the ‘‘moving target’’ character of global policy models, which are ‘‘translated’’, rather than
transferred, from international theory to local practice. In two empirical chapters that
follow, Blaustein demonstrates how UNDP and SDC have the power to bend and re-
design the global policy practices in a local and national setting. Policy is not designed
exclusively in Geneva or New York, but is co-produced in Sarajevo. Methodologically,
Blaustein demonstrated the value of policy ethnography for global public policy research.
The book by Catherine Kingfisher titled ‘‘A Policy Travelogue: Tracing Welfare Reform in
Aoteroa/New Zealand and Canada’’ is devoted to neo-liberal welfare reform. Unlike the
previous book, the model of welfare support to single mothers has travelled to Canada
not through transnational intermediaries, but high-ranked public servants and politicians.
In order to make sense of this movement, the author employs two concepts, ‘‘policy
translation’’ and ‘‘assemblages.’’ Similarly to Blaustein, Kingfisher evokes policy
translation in order to oppose the conventional approaches of ‘‘policy transfer’’ and
‘‘diffusion’’. However, unlike Blaustein, she focuses on how key policy actors morph the
policy. Thus, ‘‘assemblages’’ help explain how actors work with the resources available to
them to indigenize the policy model in their home conditions.
If Blaustein’s work demonstrates the liberating power of translation to resist the global
structures, for Kingfisher, translation is always bound by decision-rules and meta-norms,
which are important to recognize if one is to design institutions. Methodologically,
Kingfisher’s work is a multi-sighted ethnography of the Prime Minister’s office, welfare
agency’s offices, and perceptions of single mothers. As a result, Kingfisher paints a picture
of two parallel forces of divergence and convergence in the work of policy translation in (a)
creating and sustaining global hegemonies of neo-liberalism; and in (b) producing variegated
forms of welfare policies on the ground. Most noteworthy, these processes seemingly take
place without any involvement of transnational actors.
In the third book entitled ‘‘Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of
Neoliberalism,’’ Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore further discuss neo-liberalism but place
focus on transnational processes of policy design and diffusion. The focus of the book is
not on what makes policies ‘‘transferable,’’ but on the ‘‘social practices and infrastructures
that enable and sustain policy ‘mobility’’’ (Peck and Theodore, 2015: xviii). With two case
studies, conditional cash transfers (CCT) and participatory budgeting (PB), the authors show
how fast policy moves around the globe and becomes both pervasive and variegated.
However, differently from the two books discussed above, the authors follow relatively
well-articulated methodological guidelines they call ‘‘follow the policy’’. This is a
significant methodological contribution, which suggests shadowing global policy
consultants and experts as they conduct their work at the centers of power and in the
periphery. The two cases provide interesting detail. The case study of CCT illustrates how
Michael Bloomberg, then mayor of New York, aspired to learn from the Mexican experiences
of poverty reduction through direct and intentional adaptation and experimentation with
foreign models and experiences. In the second case study, the authors analyzed the birth of
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‘‘participative budgeting,’’ its packaging into a model by the World Bank and subsequent
marketing around the world. Peck and Theodore made a significant departure from previous
treatments of the subject in two ways, (a) they provide much empirical nuance and texture to
their claims about the World Bank’s role in making fast policy move, and (b) they introduce
the conceptual apparatus to explain this process through such terms as ‘‘mutation,’’
‘‘modeling,’’ and ‘‘transduction.’’
Finally, the fourth book is collaboratively penned by John Clarke, Dave Bainton, Noemi
Lendvai, and Paul Stubbs and is titled ‘‘Making Policy Move: Towards a Politics of
Translation and Assemblage.’’ In this insightful volume, the topic of policy mobility
receives a stylistic treat of ‘‘talking back’’ in dialogues between the authors. In chapter 1
and 2, authors lay the foundation for ‘‘policy translation’’ in viewing and analyzing public
policy. In the rest of the book, individual authors provide their take on translation from
different perspectives. In Chapter 3, Paul Stubbs discusses the welfare reform in the South
East Europe. In Chapter 4, John Clarke takes another look at neo-liberalism, this time in
restructuring a university. Noemi Lendvai’s chapter discusses the fictions of the double
reality of welfare policies in Hungary as practiced and as reported to the European
Commission. Finally, Dave Bainton discusses what it means to translate western style
education to remote areas in the global South.
The final chapter makes most of conceptual and methodological points of the book. One
contribution is the ethics and politics of policy translation, an activity open not only to
technocrats, but all policy actors. The authors evoke the idea of ‘‘policies otherwise’’ inspired
by ‘‘development otherwise’’ (Rojas, 2007) and examine each case presented in the book
through this lens. Another useful contribution is the call to study language in policy
translation, as a mediator of power relations. Furthermore, Clarke et al. (2015) emphasize
contingency of policy as the possibility for change. This argument resurfaces towards the end
of the book and emphasized empowerment and emancipatory agenda in policy translation,
very much in the spirit of Paolo Friere.
All four books share a number of key similarities. They take complexity seriously and
acknowledge contingency in how policies move and unfold. This opens up space for viewing
translation and the work of assemblages as creative activism in transcending the dominant
power structures. Another key common theme is the central attention that the authors pay to
how policies change, mutate and transform as they travel, taking up new lives and forms. All
four volumes stressed multi-sighted ethnography, or ‘‘studying through,’’ as a key
methodology (Wright and Reinhold, 2011). Finally, the common thread in these works is
the detailed, committed, and textured discussion of agents of policy translation at work,
from the World Bank in Namibia, to individual consultants in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
However, upon reading these insightful books, a number of questions remain open. One is
whether the transformation of polices as they travel is confined within some boundaries, and
if so, how to discover such constraints in practice. Furthermore, with an exception of Clarke
et al. (2005), the books have not dealt with the inherent ethical and political implications of
engaging with the ethnography of policy translation. Cross-cultural research, integrity, and
ethics are important conceptual and empirical issues for policy scholars, especially if more of
ethnography is to be conducted. Methodologically and analytically, there is still much work
to be done to study and engage in policy translation. The future work will hopefully refine
the concepts, frameworks, and heuristics for that purpose. In conducting such work, a
refreshed look at narratives, textuality, networks, and applied hermeneutics may be useful
(e.g. Lejano and Park, 2015; Lejano et al., 2013).
These four books would be useful additions to the library of a policy scholar or a
practitioner. They emphasize the emergence of the new vocabulary, conceptual tools and
Book Review 3
methodologies to study policy mobility. Furthermore, they show that the work of
globalization and neo-liberalization is much more nuanced, textured, and complex than
conventional theories may suggest (Mukhtarov, 2014). Finally, these books provide
optimism that academic researchers and policy makers alike, through studying and doing
policy translations, may enact change; however, deep-entrenched old institutions and power
structures may seem.
References
Lejano R and Park SJ (2015) The aitopoietic text. In: Fischer F, Torgerson D, Durnova A, et al. (eds)
Handbook of Critical Policy Studies. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc., pp. 274–297.
Lejano R, Ingram M and Ingram H (2013) The Power of Narrative in Environmental Networks.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Maybin J (2014) Policy analysis and policy know-how: A case study of civil servants in England’s
department of health. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice 17(3):
286–304.
Mukhtarov F (2014) Rethinking the travel of ideas: Policy translation in the water sector. Policy &
Politics 42(1): 71–88.
Pachirat T (2009) The Political in political ethnography: Dispatches from the kill floor. In: Schatz E
(ed.) Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power. Chicago: Chicago
University Press, pp. 143–163.
Pratt M (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Abingdon: Taylor and Francis.
Rojas C (2007) International Political Economy/Development Otherwise. Globalizations 4(4): 573–587.
Stone D (2012) Transfer and translation of policy. Policy Studies 33(6): 483–499.
Wright S and Reinhold S (2011) ‘‘Studying through’’: A strategy for studying political
transformations. Or sex, lies and British politics. In: Shore C, Wright S and Pero D (eds) Policy
Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power. Oxford: Berghahn Press,
pp. 86–105.
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