Policy Transfer Research: Still Evolving, Not Yet Through?

We are very grateful to Mauricio Dussauge-Laguna, Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward for their constructive and insightful responses to our original article (Benson and Jordan, 2011). Our original intention was to return to David Dolowitz and David Marsh's 1996 review article to chart the development of policy transfer as a concept and to examine some possible future directions for research, ranging from continuing evolution through to greater assimilation and possibly even eventual decay. At the time, we openly posed the question as to whether the heat had started to go out of the debate on policy transfer and, by implication, that conceptual 'decay' was just a stone's throw away. 1 How wrong we were! The answer, on the basis of these responses and others that we have received is that, as a research topic, policy transfer is very much alive and kicking. Indeed, in their very different ways, both responses powerfully reveal that not only is the literature on transfer broader and more dynamic than we seemed to imply, but it is also evolving in ways and in directions that we did not originally discuss and, we suspect, that even Dolowitz and Marsh did not originally intend. To adapt Charles Lindblom's (1979) well-known phrase, the debate about policy transfer is evidently still evolving, and is far from through.