LIST OF PANELS

The 21st century is touted as the period where the center of world shifts back to Asia. The popular and scholarly discourse around the ‘rise of Asia’ has been predicated around the “ubiquitous and inevitable” unraveling of the dogmas and traditions in public policy based on Western standards (Bice and Sullivan 2014, 539). The lessons drawn from the management of the COVID-19 is set to turbocharge the deepening of the ‘Asian Century’ and highlight what the world can learn from Asian pandemic response (Abbas and Michael 2020; Patel and Sridhar 2020). These developments prompt new critical thinking about ability of mainstream policy theories to account for heterogeneity in cultural and administrative values, and to explain how the difference in formal and informal institutions influence actions of individual policy actors (Van der Wal 2015, Van der Wal and Yang 2015). It provides a critical proxy for sparking our thinking about how these contemporary challenges may “revolutionize public policy: how it is defined, what it addresses, and how it is implemented and managed” (Bice and Sullivan 2014, 540).

No concept is more important to re-appraise than policy transfer. Defined broadly as the adoption of public policies from one jurisdiction to another, policy transfer studies have historically focused on policy transfers occurring in the Northern hemisphere and among Western countries (Jacoby 2000, Marsh and Sharman 2009). While recent studies illustrate the dynamics of policy transfers in the ‘rest’ of the world (e.g. Dussauge Laguna, 2013; Common 2017; Liu and Wang 2018; Romano 2020), how Asian countries export policies out of the region remain largely unexamined. Studies from Latin American scholars have illustrated the role and contribution of regional powers such as Brazil (Porto de Oliveira 2017; de Sa e Silva 2017), or countries such as Colombia (Montero 2017) in the global diffusion of policy models like participatory budgeting and conditional cash transfers. Systematic understanding of the broader diffusion patterns from Asia continues to patchy because studies tend to focus on city-to-city transfer of various economically advanced states like Singapore, Japan and South Korea (Pow 2014, Lee and Hwang 2012). Lesser known are policy transfers from China (Porto de Oliveira and Romano 2022), despite the activism of the country in diffusing its policy ideas, models and approaches, already from the early decades of the PRC. Even less well known are policy transfers from countries that are commonly seen as importers of public policies, such as the Philippines, who recently became active in spreading its migration management model (Saguin and Shivakoti 2022).

This proposed panel aims to interrogate policy transfer from Asia to the rest of the world. It is motivated by the need to appraise the applicability of policy transfer theories in understanding how and why Asian countries disseminate policies and models both in the region and in other parts of the world. Ultimately, it asks the question, is there an Asian-style of policy transfer (Saguin and Sha 2021)? How can we modify policy transfer studies to accommodate such style?

The panel will take place onsite.

Given that policy transfer is a widely researched topic across disciplines, this panel is envisioned to be interdisciplinary.  We encourage papers that approach policy transfer from various disciplinary lenses – policy mobilities, policy assemblages, policy diffusion and policy circulation – to examine how policies that originate from Asia is challenging our contemporary understanding of public policy. Single case studies, comparative case analyses and descriptive historical analyses are most welcome, specially if the paper addresses one or more of the following research questions:

1.    What are the specific strategies Asian countries do adopt in promoting their ‘recipes’ to the rest of world? How are they unique or different from contemporary examples?

2.    Why are these countries promoting their solutions? What narratives accompany the promotion of solutions?

3.    Which actors and agencies are involved in their promotion? Are the actors actually uniquely configured?

4.    Are the objects (e.g. ideas, instruments, institutions) they transfer different from what we have already observed?

5.    What is the impact of these transfers? Does the fact that some Asian countries can be considered as developing countries make it easier to transfer their solutions?

These are just some of the preliminary questions this panel aims to answer. The goal is to start building the blocks for a comparative conversation that allows us to better understand the phenomena of policy transfer and to contribute to theoretical development through the consideration of regions that have been ‘under the radar’ for a long time. For this reason, we invite papers that focus on Asian countries as exporters of policy solutions and that can answer some of the questions outlined above.