Cross-National Policy Transfer to Developing Countries: Prologue

摘要

Application of principles, methods and techniques of structured policy analysis, regular impact assessments and clearly defined planning frameworks (names vary from policy area to policy area) is relatively common in what are known as Western countries, especially North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Northern Europe. Although political forces come into play in any policy process, the above mentioned countries have adopted the adage that power-play between political and socioeconomic actors should at least be mitigated by aspects of rationality and democracy (Flyvbjerg, 1998). The former is characterized by a serious attempt to solve problems by analytical means, the latter by imbuing interaction processes leading to such problem-solving with a participatory practice. In other words, relevant political and socioeconomic actors should collaborate to systematically make sense of problems and agree on the formulation of policy measures to eliminate these problems. Anglo-Saxon and North-European administrative cultures have been shown to represent values which go a long way in making such structured problem-solving possible, at least in theory. They have embraced linear or monochronic time-conceptions, have a universalistic outlook of rule application, tend to separate societal roles from the people who fulfill these roles and enjoy a relatively small distance between the highly placed and less privileged people in society (Hall, 1983; Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 1998; Furubo, Rist, and Sandahl, 2002).