Tim Legrand

Overseas and over here: policy transfer and evidence-based policy-making

This article examines the relationship between evidence-based policy-making and policy transfer. The policy transfer framework has been widely employed across a range of disciplines in recent years, yet has also attracted criticism for its failure to adequately explain why policy officials engage in transfer at all. This article considers the changed political landscape after the election of New Labour in the UK in 1997 and argues that the policy transfer of welfare-to-work policy ideas from the USA was at least partly driven by pressure to develop evidence-based policy. In doing so, this article provides two new contributions to the literature. First, it asserts New Labours injunction to use evidence-based welfare policy provides an important explanation as to why UK officials adopted US welfare approaches. Second, using a series of interviews and document analysis, this article finds that, in addition to welfare policy ideas, UK policy officials adopted policy evaluation techniques from the USA.

The merry mandarins of Windsor: policy transfer and transgovernmental networks in the Anglosphere

This article looks at the formation, evolution, operation and outcomes associated with a hitherto unexamined elite policy transfer network. The Windsor Conference, as it is known, is an Anglophone international policy network that is populated by the mandarins of labour market and social policy institutions in the Anglosphere countries of Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. This article presents the preliminary findings of qualitative research undertaken with senior policy officials active in the network. The research highlights the impact that transnational policy networking can have on the dissemination of policy ideas, especially amongst a cohort of elite policy officials. These findings offer an opportunity for critical reflection on the intersection of the concepts of policy transfer and transgovernmentalism, and it is contended that the research yields valuable empirical insights into the murky processes of transgovernmental policy transfer, policy learning and discrete regulation.

The landscape of forensic intelligence research

Criminology, forensic science and policing scholars have a significant role to play in exploring new developments and directions in modern policing. Yet while the concept of forensic intelligence has caught the attention of a number of policing agencies around the world, it has yet to become a mainstream undertaking. In part this is an artefact of a pragmatic policing culture that only institutes new practices based on demonstrable, research and practice-based effectiveness. Here, we seek to draw attention to efforts in the scholarly community to accumulate a body of evidence on the efficacy of forensic intelligence. The article describes the international landscape of research pertaining to the development of forensic intelligence. We outline the key use of digitised, triangulated data on biometrics, scene of crime and illicit substances. In doing so, we draw attention to the challenges remaining for scholars and professionals to further understand and advance the use of forensic intelligence in mainstream policing.

Elite, exclusive and elusive: transgovernmental policy networks and iterative policy transfer in the Anglosphere

ABSTRACT The prominent corridor of bilateral policy transfer between Australia and the UK is underpinned by a long-standing cultural and political proximity. While ad hoc cases of transfer have in recent years been the subject to concerted attention from transfer theorists, much less attention has been given to the rise of multilateral, or transgovernmental, policy networks based on similar cultural and political amity amongst the ‘Anglosphere’ group of states including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. Populated by policy elites and regularly interacting, these networks represent potentially important modes of policy transfer yet little is known about how they operate, with what purposes or what outcomes. This article therefore sets out research findings that offer an insight into 23 identified networks, suggesting that understanding the emergence of these networks are crucial to explaining any bilateral transfer between Anglosphere states in general, and specifically Australia and the UK. The article contends that a consideration of these networks provides insight into (i) the substantive landscape of Anglosphere policy learning and collaboration, (ii) the attendant dynamics of collaborative policy networks as elite, elusive and exclusive and (iii) iterative policy transfers.

Legislating for otherness:Proscription powers and Parliamentary discourse

This article offers a discursive analysis of UK Parliamentary debate on the proscription of terrorist organisations between 2002 and 2014. It argues that these debates play an important constitutive role in the (re)production of national self and terrorist other that remains largely overlooked in existing work on this counter-terrorism mechanism. The article begins with an overview of this literature, arguing it is overwhelmingly oriented around questions of efficacy and ethics. While important, this focus has concentrated academic attention on the causal question of what proscription does, rather than the constitutive question of what is made possible by proscription. The article’s second section situates our analysis within discursive work in International Relations, upon which we investigate three pervasive themes in Parliamentary debate: (i) Constructions of terrorism and its threat; (ii) Constructions of specific groups being proscribed; and, (iii) Constructions of the UK self. We argue that these debates (re)produce an antagonistic relationship between a liberal, open and responsible UK mindful of cultural and religious difference, on the one hand. And, on the other, its illiberal, irrational terrorist others conducting immoral violences on behalf of particularistic identity claims. This analysis, we conclude, has significance for contemporary debate on security politics, as well as for studies of counter-terrorism and international politics more generally.

Framing the Policy Analysis of OECD and Australian VET Interaction: Two Heuristics of Policy Transfer

Abstract This article considers the recent refurbishment of Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) policy and highlights the substantial, though unacknowledged, influence of OECD ideas thereupon. It claims that this case study strengthens policy transfer analysts’ understanding of the role of international organizations in the policy transfer process. The article argues that the influence of the OECD can be articulated as a channel of policy transfer via two connected perspectives: first, the OECD’s use of peer review mechanisms induces ideational competition and conformity between member states; and, second, by virtue of the OECD’s expertise and resources in select policy areas, it operates as a form of epistemic community that privileges some policy options over others.

Policing to a Different Beat: Measuring Police Performance

The objectives of policing in a modern democracy are to uphold the rule of law and safeguard human rights (albeit the simplicity of these objectives belies the enormous political, normative, financial and administrative challenges the police face on a daily basis). In meeting these objectives, the police must constantly engage in a complex series of administrative manoeuvres to meet the evolving social, political, economic, demographic and technological demands of the state and the public. Against this imperative, it has become ever more important to refine and improve service delivery in terms of efficiency (which denotes the ratio of resources used to outcomes delivered) and — this is paramount — effectiveness (which describes how well the rule of law and human rights are upheld). The greater transparency that is ostensibly delivered by measuring police efficiency and effectiveness has been widely welcomed by the public and governments. In the most part, this is because, firstly, the public’s experience of crime is seen as the litmus test of the success of policing strategies, while, secondly, performance metrics provide some measure of the value or burden to the public purse. Yet efficiency and effectiveness are not comfortable bedfellows. A police force dedicated entirely to efficiency is not likely to be a wholly effective one, and vice versa. Thus, policing is a series of ongoing tradeoffs between tackling priorities and resource management.

Preaching to the Converted: Parliament and the Proscription Ritual

This article explores UK Parliamentary debate around the proscription – or banning – of terrorist organisations. It argues that these debates are usefully conceptualised as a form of political ritual organised around a core script, established participant roles, a shared respect for the performance of democracy and a predictable outcome. Taking these ritualistic aspects seriously extends research on proscription by highlighting the importance of the procedures through which such organisations are produced as requiring exclusion from the UK’s body politic. The article therefore makes three contributions. First, it provides a sustained empirical analysis of data from every relevant UK Parliamentary debate on proscription between 2001 and 2014. Second, it moves academic debate on proscription beyond questions of the power’s effectiveness and legitimacy. And, third, it contributes to contemporary work on political ritual by offering a new heuristic for the analysis thereof centred on four dimensions: orchestration, constitutivity, sedimentation and performativity.

The Proscription or Listing of Terrorist Organisations: Understanding, Assessment, and International Comparisons

ABSTRACT This article serves as an introduction to this Special Issue on the banning or proscription of terrorist organisations around the world. It begins by arguing for greater attention to proscription powers because of their contemporary ubiquity, considerable historical lineage, implications for political life, and ambiguous effectiveness. Following an overview of the Issue’s questions and ambitions, the article discusses five themes: key moments of continuity and change within proscription regimes around the world; the significance of domestic political and legal contexts and institutions; the value of this power in countering terrorism and beyond; a range of prominent criticisms of proscription, including around civil liberties; and the significance of language and other symbolic practices in the justification and extension of proscription powers. We conclude by sketching the arguments and contributions of the subsequent articles in this Issue.

‘I am somewhat puzzled’: Questions, audiences and securitization in the proscription of terrorist organizations:

A recent wave of scholarship has drawn attention to the need for further engagement with the role of ‘the audience’ in securitization ‘games’. This article contributes to this discussion both theoretically and empirically by exploring the types of question an audience may ask of a securitizing actor before a securitizing act meets with success or failure. To do this, it offers a discursive analysis of all 27 UK parliamentary debates on the extension of proscription powers to additional terrorist organizations between 2002 and 2014. We argue first that these debates are characterized by a wide range of questions relating to the timing, criteria, mechanics, consequences and exclusions of proscription; and second, that these questions function as demands upon the executive to variously justify, explain, clarify, elaborate and defend decisions to extend the UK’s list of designated groups. Taking these questions seriously, we suggest, therefore allows insight into a variety of ways in which audiences might participate in security politics that are not adequately captured by notions of consent or resistance, or success or failure. This has empirical and theoretical value for understanding proscription, parliamentary discourse and securitization alike.