Political and ethical aspects in the ethnography of policy translation: Research experiences from Turkey and China

Abstract

A currently burgeoning literature in planning and policy studies engages with the travel of policy models across countries and sites through novel concepts such as policy translation, policy mobility, and mutations. Increasingly, this literature calls for ethnographic methods to study the travel of policy models. Such methods require various degrees of researcher's participation in the policy process. As a result, ethnographers become entangled in complex webs of relationships during and after their fieldwork, which introduces political and ethical dimensions to ethnographic fieldwork. The literature on policy mobilities and translation, however, has provided few practical guidelines regarding the politics and ethics of conducting ethnographic research. Based on two vignettes from our research experiences in China and Turkey, we discuss the politics and ethics of applying ethnography to policy translation and offer a number of hints for future researchers.

Hybrid regulatory landscapes: The human right to water, variegated neoliberal water governance, and policy transfer in Cape Town, South Africa, and Accra, Ghana

“…vii While notions such as policy transfer, mobility, transformation, adaptation, mutation, and translation have been in applied in various fields (see Mukhtarov et al, 2017;Shore, Wright, & Però, 2011), we focus on the policy transfer literature that overlaps with: a) work that explicitly builds our understanding of neoliberalization processes; b) work that addresses evolving policy reforms in the water sector. viii South Africa is considered exemplary for implementing a range of legal reforms and policies designed to uphold a human right to water, including the entrenchment of a human right to water in its 1996 Constitution, the implementation of a free basic water allowance in Durban, Johannesburg, and Cape Town, and a national Free Basic Water Implementation Strategy (Dugard, 2015;Republic of South Africa, 1997).…”

Seeing the People’s Republic of China through the Eyes of Montesquieu: Why Sino-European Collaboration on Eco City Development Suffers from European Misinterpretations of “Good Governance”

“…This has been (1) hands-on policy-making and advisory experience in Shenzhen International (formerly Sino-Dutch) Low Carbon City; (2) knowledge exchange realized through membership of the Chinese Eco City Council and the International Eco City Network; and (3) participation in a great number of workshops and conferences on eco city development in China in general and Sino-foreign collaboration in particular. Many of his observations are reflected in international publications on the topic [3,6,8,47,48]. Observations below are primarily based on these abovementioned events.…”

Labour research under coercive authoritarianism: Comparative reflections on fieldwork challenges in China

“…In the case of cooperation with non-governmental organisations, Turner (2010) also points to potential ethical dilemmas when researchers are expected to follow organisational agendas. Therefore, the importance of reflexivity and remaining 'transparent, honest, yet effective and focused' cannot be over-emphasised (Mukhtarov et al, 2017), as it helps in the choice between voice and silence according to changing circumstances. Specific attention must also be paid to protecting collected data containing personally identifiable information (Loyle, 2016).…”