Reconceptualizing transfer pathways: policy transfer and armed UAV proliferation

Abstract

ABSTRACT While policy transfer remains a widely used approach for understanding public policy formation, several conceptual shortcomings limit the approach’s capacity for explanation. Notably, the concept of “transfer pathway” lacks a precise conceptual definition and empirical specification, limitations reflecting broader gaps in the policy transfer literature. This article contributes to the study of policy transfer by explicitly defining transfer pathway and demonstrating how a more expansive transfer pathway conceptualization can increase analytical granularity. Conceptual insights developed here are empirically applied to U.S. State Department announcements in late 2020 to sell armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), first to the United Arab Emirates and then Morocco. Such cases illustrate two novel transfer pathways, the tortuous pathway and the foreign policy pathway, offering a sketch of how governments transfer policies in the foreign and security policy domain. By employing process tracing, specific causal process observations associated with the arms transfer processes in each instance can be identified to better understand specific transfer outcomes.