Policy-making Cycle Research Articles

Exporting workfare/importing welfare-to-work: exploring the politics of Third Way policy transfer

Abstract The paper presents a critical analysis of ‘policy transfers’ in the field of welfare-to-work or ‘workfare’ programming, focusing on recent experiences in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the 1990s, work-based welfare reform has been established as a policy orthodoxy, a social-policy counterpart to ‘flexible’ modes of labour-market governance. Increasingly, this is celebrated as a paradigmatic example of ‘Third Way’ policy-making. While it has become something of a cliche that British welfare policy has been ‘Americanised’ in recent years, detailed analysis of the policy formation and development process around the Labour Government's New Deal programme for the young unemployed reveals that this has indeed been a sphere of intensive and multi-lateral policy transfers. Categorically, this does not mean that some simple process of policy ‘convergence’ is underway, as the form and function of such policies is prone to change as they are translated and re-embedded within and between different institutional, economic and political contexts (at the local and national scales). Rather paradoxically, while the turnover of the policy-making cycle seems to be accelerating in the field of welfare-to-work — as implementation schedules are intensified, as ‘reform’ becomes a systemic condition, and as extra-local policy learning and emulation is normalised — the effectiveness of policies and programmes remains stubbornly dependent on local economic and institutional conditions — as ‘successful’ programmes remain very difficult to replicate in other locations, as tendentially-decentralising policy regimes exhibit growing spatial unevenness, and as local labour market conditions continue to exert an inordinate influence on programme outcomes. Policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly pinning their hopes on decentralised modes of policy delivery as a means of animating (supposedly latent) innovatory capacity at the local level, despite the growing evidence that sustainable solutions to the problems of unemployment and poverty lie outside the neoliberal policy agenda of market-orientated workfare.

Employing analytic tools in large-scale engineering public policy-making

This paper examines the interactions of analytic approaches and policy-making for large-scale engineering projects. It is thereby argued that the efficiency of policy-making can be increased if a fruitful synergy between analytical decision analysis and political opinion forming can be achieved and nourished along the whole policy-making life cycle. The discussion is built around the NEAT rail project in Switzerland. Relevant analytic tools are addressed in terms of a newly proposed taxonomy. The appropriateness of those tools is then discussed in terms of the decision makers and environmental characteristics. Ways to improve the synergy between analysis and decision-making are based on the study of the life cycle of the project and the potential for successful analytic support.