Introduction: drawing lessons from international policy-transfer initiatives in regional and urban development and spatial planning

Abstract

The collection of papers in this issue brings new insights to the processes of international policy transfer and learning in the fields of regional and urban development policy, regional innovation and transit-oriented development. It explores, through the perspective of different disciplines, the motivations of actors, tangible and non-tangible outputs, the role of factors affecting the process, and the spillover effects of such process. The contributions bring new insights into what represents success and failure in policy transfer and provide valuable lessons for policy-makers facing the challenges of a fast-changing global context. KEYWORDS policy transfer; lesson drawing; transit-oriented development; regional and urban development; regional policy; industrial parks JEL O2, O18, O19, R58 HISTORY

Environmental policy transfer in the shadow of political confrontation – the case of Germany and Russia

“…One much discussed area of policy transfer in recent years has been regional and urban development policy in connection with spatial planning (Dąbrowski, Musiałkowska, and Polverari 2018b). Since the late 1990s, the spatial development respectively planning context has often been connected in studies to the environment.…”

“…Furthermore, the concept has been successfully adopted in several policy fields, most recently in the field of urban and regional planning (see e.g. Dąbrowski, Musiałkowska, and Polverari 2018b;Kruijf, Augustijn, and Bressers 2012;Miao 2018;Stead 2012).…”

‘Double-taxing’ Indigenous business: exploring the effects of political discourse on the transfer of public procurement policy

“…It focuses on how power influences the ways in which policies 'morph and mutate as they travel ' (McCann and Ward 2012, 329), revealing that policymaking is a power-laden, discursive space (Peck and Theodore 2012;McCann and Ward 2013). These studies illustrate how power dynamics may alter the nature or focus of a transferred policy and how the policy transfer process changes as the context evolves, goals shift, and actors join or leave the process (Dąbrowski, Musiałkowska, and Polverari 2018;Ertugal 2018). For example, Ureta (2014), drawing on the case of local urban transport planning in Chile, examined how the interplay of powerful individuals and rational policy guidelines shapes policy outcomes.…”

“…We focus on moments of discursive contestation to explore the ways that power dynamics have reconfigured the intent and effect of public procurement policy in Australia (Dąbrowski, Musiałkowska, and Polverari 2018;Ertugal 2018). Using critical discourse analysis (Mumby and Stohl 1991), we unpack the power-laden processes involved in transferring public procurement policies in Australia.…”

The concept of solidarity in cohesion policies of the European Union and Hungary

“…The second aim of the article is to show in one national context, Hungary, how local political discourses of the solidarity principle are also a result of cohesion policies being implemented by member states. This section follows theoretical literature of past decades on the Europeanization of spatial planning and cohesion policy implementation (see for example Czernielewska et al., 2004; Dąbrowski et al., 2018; Dühr et al., 2007). Until now, most of the accounts in the contexts of Eastern European member states have looked at a unidirectional flow of policies: EU level policy-making materializing differently in national contexts (as for the Hungarian case see for example Faragó and Varró, 2016; Varró, 2008).…”