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Summary

Fast policy

Since the 1980s, political and social scientists have been documenting the technological, economic and cultural effects of globalisation. Globalisation has given rise to a multitude of ontological and economic possibilities, from instantaneous communication to cross-border trade of physical commodities. Globalisation has therefore been studied at various scales and levels, from microqualitative studies observing the impact of resettlement on refugees and the emergence of hybridised local cultural identities, to macro-quantitative studies examining the impact of transnational capital mobility, trade liberalisation and international outsourcing on national industries.

Another significant impact of globalisation has been the intensification and compression of policy movement around the globe, held together by the involvement of ‘intermediary’ actors in the brokering, mediation and translation of relationships and exchanges between governments and agencies. This enables a range of intergovernmental and interagency pragmatic policy borrowing and fast-tracking policy decision-making to occur. The result is the translocal and cross-scalar flow and insertion of new global policy networks at the subnational and national level made possible by the expansion of multilateral organisations and international political and economic unions, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank and the European Union.

On the one hand, the increased mobility of policy ideas across the globe is, according to Peck and Theodore (2015), evidence of ‘fast-policy regimes’ (p 3) or ‘compressed policymaking moments’ (p xvi). These are mobile, fluid, transnational policy spaces in which intermediary actors and agencies spanning transnational corporations, philanthropic organisations, professional bodies and business communities work through long-distance interconnections to broker new kinds of cross-national political and institutional connections. Their aim is to influence and profit financially from the packaging and selling of ‘what works’ or ‘best practice’ solutions to different countries (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2016). While fast policy can give the impression of policy ideas moving seamlessly across national borders and subnational spaces more or less intact, Peck and Theodore (2015) warn against ‘reading off’ these processes as evidence that policy ideas are recontextualised and implemented according to interests or motivations that can be traced to some principle design, singular logic or predefined sequencing.