An analytical framework for policy transfer in the EU context

Abstract

Most scholars treat policy transfer as either a dependent or an independent variable without considering discursive components of the policy process and the role of subjective definitions of policy success or failure. This study allows more space for subjective definitions and the perceptions of actors involved in the policy transfer process, and by incorporating an element of social constructivism to the analysis of policy transfer in the European Union (EU) context, it demonstrates how subjective definitions affect policy transfer outcomes and how ‘transfer success’ is subject to competing interpretations. The analytical framework is tested through empirical data from a case study investigation of an EU environmental policy's transfer in Turkey.

The Impact of the EU on Turkey: Toward Streamlining Europeanisation as a Research Programme

“…In terms of the substantive focus, Table 1 shows the diversity of substantive domains studied by the sample of the literature analysed. Masked by this diversity is the clustered convergence of domains around policy (Unalan, 2009;Onis and Yilmaz, 2009;Grigoriadis, 2008;Oguzlu, 2008;Ulusoy, 2008), politics (Unalan and Cowell, 2009;Eralp, 2009;Samur, 2009;Tocci, 2008) and polity (Celenk, 2009;Dulupcu, 2005). The majority of units in the sample literature, therefore, focus on policy as the domain of Europeanisation followed by politics.…”

“…Factors explicitly identified as playing a role in Europeanisation in the units of the sample include domestic factors and the nature of the contractual relationship with the EU, in particular its value, credibility and political management (Tocci, 2008). Domestic factors, in turn, include interactions between actors and institutions (Unalan, 2009), preferences, discourses and discursive justifications of actions (Unalan, 2009;Celenk, 2009), historical and political context, centralised nature of the bureaucracy, its politicised nature (Celenk, 2009;Unalan and Cowell, 2009), and limited capacity of civil society and political dominance of economic development objectives (Unalan and Cowell, 2009). Factors that are implicitly assumed to play a role in Europeanisation in the sample literature include democratisation (Samur, 2009;Ulusoy, 2008), increased security (Samur, 2009) and pre-existing domestic structures (Grigoriadis, 2008).…”

“…Even though most of the units in the sample literature do not explicitly discuss research designs, those that have adopted a top-down approach start their analysis, some implicitly, at the level of EU conditionality, 'adaptational pressure' or 'goodness of fit', and then track down its impact at the domestic level. Some of the units in the sample literature examine specific aspects of EU conditionality, that is, the Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive (Unalan, 2009;Unalan and Cowell, 2009), administrative reform (Celenk, 2009) and minority rights (Grigoriadis, 2008), which are expected to exert impact at the level of domestic policy, politics or polity. Other units in the sample, however, do not explicitly specify which aspect of EU conditionality in particular they expect to exert impact at the domestic level, preferring instead to make a general reference to EU accession criteria in the political field implying democracy and human rights (Samur, 2009;Ulusoy, 2008).…”

“…Reflecting the less than fully developed state of Europeanisation mechanisms in Europeanisation research, most of the units in the sample literature that follow the Europeanisation research programme employ one or more of the mechanisms identified by Lehmkuhl (1999, 2002). Thus, Unalan (2009) and Unalan and Cowell (2009) explicitly identify the mechanisms of obligation-based policy transfer and obligatory compliance with EU conditions respectively, which correspond to the mechanism of 'institutional compliance' (Unalan, 2009;Unalan and Cowell, 2009). Even though they do not specify explicitly, Samur (2009) andUlusoy (2008) assume, rather than demonstrate, the mechanism of compliance with EU conditionality.…”

“…units implicitly evaluating propositions, units implicitly generating propositions, units explicitly generating hypotheses, and others that do not engage with hypotheses/propositions in either an implicit or explicit manner. Among these three categories, a majority of units engage in implicit testing of propositions by assessing the validity of (causal) relationships relying on qualitative data (Unalan, 2009;Unalan and Cowell, 2009;Celenk, 2009;Samur, 2009;Grigoriadis, 2008). While some of these units apply a theory to the case at hand, others assess the validity of a given proposition on a relationship.…”