Transnational Policy Communities Research Articles

Transnational expertise and the expansion of the international tax regime: imposing ‘acceptable’ standards

Global economic governance outcomes in areas such as corporate taxation may be influenced by transnational policy communities acting at national and transnational levels. Yet, while transnational tax policy processes are increasingly analyzed through the politics of expertise, national preferences have usually been derived from domestic interest group preferences. We know little about how technical expertise interacts with interest group politics at national level, an important deficit given the sovereignty-preserving, decentralized way in which transnational tax norms become hard law. This article examines the drivers of expansion of the UK’s bilateral tax treaty network in the 1970s, which cannot be explained solely through monolithic interest group politics. Evidence from the British national archives demonstrates how tax experts in the civil service and the private sector, members of a transnational policy community, used tax treaties to impose OECD standards for taxing British firms on host countries, at times overruling the preferences of other political, bureaucratic and business actors. Expertise politics and business power may shape the development of norms and focal points within a transnational policy community, but it is often their interaction at domestic level that determines the implementation of transnational norms as hard law.

TRANSGOVERNMENTAL POLICY NETWORKS IN THE ANGLOSPHERE

Recent scholarship in public administration has drawn attention to the proliferation of transnational policy‐making processes and administrative practices. Although policy transfer and transgovernmental scholars have recognized the influence of these practices on domestic policy outcomes, little is known about how distinctive configurations of cross‐jurisdictional policy networks form. This article addresses this issue by exploring three novel transgovernmental policy networks situated in the Anglosphere: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Drawing on constructivist perspectives, the article holds culture, values and norms as critical to the coalescence of Anglosphere policy networks and an important additional explanation of how transnational policy communities emerge. These hitherto unreported networks facilitate, first, the transfer of policy ideas to resolve domestic policy problems and, second, collaborative mechanisms to resolve transnational challenges. Consideration of these novel public sector ‘assemblages’ deepens our empirical and theoretical knowledge of the new spaces of transnational administration.

The Group of 20 transnational policy community: governance networks, policy analysis and think tanks

The G20 is an evolving international institution. Aided by both advances in information technology and support from home governments, a number of knowledge actors and networks seek to influence global economic governance with policy analysis and advice. This article assesses the international G20 think tank network called Think20 and the policy advocacy of private research institutes (such the Lowy Institute in Australia and the Centre for International Governance and Innovation in Canada) which are in the orbit of the G20 policy community. Think20 assists the global economic governance processes of the G20 by developing ‘coordinative discourses’ for policy development and implementation. Points for practitioners Ideas matter but ideas that imply major policy reform and innovation need to be made to matter if they are to direct government action. Networks provide one mechanism to broadcast and disseminate ‘communicative discourses’ to many different publics – local as well as global – and the infrastructure to crystalize and amplify ‘coordinative discourses’ underpinning the policy blueprints and reform proposals of governments that must motivate their own bureaucracies as well as collaborate with foreign government. This article discusses some of the network tools and practices for consensus building in ‘transnational policy communities’ that cultivate global policy coordination.

Globalizing the Creative Industries Concept: Travelling Policy and Transnational Policy Communities

The emergence of the creative industries as a policy concept has been recent and rapid. Despite divergent cultures, politics, languages, and histories, a wide variety of countries have adopted the strategy of recognizing, celebrating, and (sometimes) supporting the development of those industries considered to garner their value from the creativity of those that work in them. Rather than interpreting this emergence as a result of the creative industries being at the frontline of the rising global knowledge economy, or as the latest manifestation of a long history of cultural commodification attractive to neoliberalized governance regimes, this paper argues that the creative industries have globalized through complex processes of engagement in political and technical spheres as various policy actors and networks have sought to enroll the concept in their own political projects. This is explored by considering how the creative industries concept has been technically rendered as a global form capable of travelling to quite different places, while still maintaining a degree of coherence. Three examples are given: (1) the engagement of the policy concept by policy actors in the UK located at the local and regional level, (2) the transfer of the policy concept to New Zealand where it was deployed first as a cultural policy solution and then as an economic policy solution, and (3) the emergence of a transnational policy community of creative industries policy experts networked across globally distributed sites of knowledge production and exchange. It is concluded that globally there is much diversity in the development of creative industries policy programs, but, somewhat counterintuitively, it is the common reference point of the original formulation that has allowed this diversity to flourish.

Policy Entrepreneurship and Institutional Change: Multilevel Governance of Central Banking Reform

Recent studies on institutional theory and the public policy field called for efforts to pry open the black box of institutional and policy change. This article offers a response to this call. It demonstrates that historical and discursive institutionalist approaches are complementary to explain how and why institutional change occurs. In addition, it shows how these approaches can add value to and benefit from the public policy and administration fields that seek to explain policy change and success. In particular, it emphasizes the interactions between structure and agency that contribute to the change. The empirical finding is based on qualitative analysis of central banking reform in Turkey. It suggests that institutional and policy change is more likely to occur when policy entrepreneurs, with joint membership in domestic and transnational policy communities, mediate various ideas and discourse within and among these communities in a punctuated institutional equilibrium.

Global Public Policy, Transnational Policy Communities, and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes thatcoexistalongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “globalagora.” Thesecond sectionadapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. Thethird sectionasks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.