The issues of translation, transferability and transfer of social policies: French and British 'urban social policy': Finding common ground for comparison?

Abstract

While international comparative studies of social polices is a well-established and fairly long-standing branch of social science (at least since the post-war development of the various configurations of the so called 'Welfare State' in Europe), there has clearly been a renewed surge of interest for this question in the past ten to fifteen years, a fact perhaps not unrealated to the institutional trend of 'European integration'. The resulting literature has thus become a successful and thriving sub-species within policy studies, in which disciplinary research is often subordinated to, and geared towards, the search for transferable 'good practice'. Yet be it for scientific or political and administrative purposes - 'policy transfer' - this research field seems to be riven both by doubt about the sheer relevance of and the the real scope for international comparison on the one hand, and on the other hand by a now long-drawn-out debate about the feasability of effective policy-transfers. The principal obstacles for international comparison, given the near-absence of a common international 'metalanguage' to describe and analyse polices in shared terms, would appear to be specific problems posed by the translation and description of 'foreign' social policies. Moreover, social policies themselves are often said to be too idiosyncratic and typical of each country to be adequately described, let alone really understood and transferred by foreign observers, analysts and policy-makers. Social policies are thus generally seen as differing radically from one national 'context' to another, and these 'contexts' themselves are often described, very deterministically it seems, as totally coherent and cohesive ' systems '. Against this dominant 'systemic' vision of national social policies so enbedded in their 'cultural' context that are barely translatable, hardly comparable, and utterly untransferrable, this paper argues that by choosing to analyse national sets of social policies into ' functional areas ' and further into (more or less) discrete functions, it is quite possible to develop an approach whereby it becomes manifest that structural resemblances between societies give occasion to homothetic functions or sets of functions. This general point is illustrated by the particular example of 'urban social policies' in France (' politique de la ville ') and Great Britian ('inner-city policy'). This is a policy area in which the institutional contexts are generally recognized to vary considerably between the two countries, but in which similar devices have been put in place to counter the adverse affects of the 'urban crisis' affecting France and Britain alike since the mid-sixties. Indeed, a recent comparative study of some of the lastest urban social policy programmes in both countries was able to conclude that not only was there a real convergence on policy objectives, but moreover that 'the actual measures available to take action differ little on either side of the Channel, and similarities are more striking than the differences' (Booth, Green and Paris 1997).