Introduction

A constructivist ‘anthropology of policy’ ‘treats the models and language of decision-makers as ethnographic data to be analysed’ (Shore and Wright, 1997, p 13) so that policy is viewed as a process rather than a fact. This approach is more concerned with how policy means rather than with what policy means. It reverses a traditional anthropology of ‘making the strange familiar’ with a commitment to ‘making the familiar strange’ (MacClancey, 2002, p 7). In addition, policy has become internationalised, with important policy-making arenas existing at levels beyond those of the nation state; transnationalised, as policy models and frameworks travel across time and place; and even globalised through the formal conditionalities of international financial institutions and the ‘soft’ power of ‘global public policy networks’ (see Stone, 2003). This chapter, essentially, explores some of the implications of developing an anthropology or ethnography of the transnational dimensions of policy, that is, those dimensions of policy which encompass levels beyond the individual nation state.

This is framed, theoretically, in terms of the notion of transnational policy not as transfer but rather as translation. It is addressed, contextually, in terms of our own work on understanding changes in social policies in a number of post-communist countries in transition in Central and South Eastern Europe as a somewhat dramatic, although perhaps not unique, site of a decade and a half of ‘symbolic hyperinflation’ of ‘symbols, metaphors, language and emblems’ (Scott, 2002). A complex conceptual architecture has emerged, under the umbrella of ‘reform’, constructed in the encounter with supranational bodies including the European Union, the World Bank and the United Nations and its agencies, as well as in and through encounters with a range of international non-state actors, including international NGOs and private consultancy companies.

In this sense, our work is part of an emerging tradition of international social policy research which replaces a notion of international actors as all-powerful with a much more complex, contextually-rooted understanding of the interactions within and between supranational and national actors. We adhere to ethnographic accounts of policy change processes which emphasise policy mediation, dialogue, translation, compromise and resistance. We focus on social policy in terms of its ‘deep uncertainties’ or ‘displacements’ of the taken for granted (Rustin and Freeman, 1999, p12).