Introduction

I came to Croatia for the first time in May 1993, to work as a volunteer with the Croatian non-governmental organisation (NGO) Suncokret (Sunflower). I spent some nine months in total in a refugee camp in Savudrija, on the Istrian coast close to Slovenia, temporary home to some 2,000 refugees, mainly from central Bosnia. I moved to the Croatian capital Zagreb in 1994 working on a UK government-funded research project ‘Social Reconstruction and Social Development in Croatia and Slovenia’, later extended to cover Bosnia and Herzegovina. I continued to be active in and around Suncokret and the Anti-War Campaign, Croatia, helping to form, in 1997, the Centre for Peace Studies, a Croatian NGO that continues to exist today. Between 1998 and 2003 I worked intensively on designing, implementing and evaluating social welfare reform projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia. In November 2003, I was appointed to a research position in the Institute of Economics, Zagreb, a public research institute. I continue to be based there, researching, among other themes, social policy; activism and social movements; clientelism and political capture; poverty and social exclusion; and policy translation.

Rather than exploring a single, time-limited, period of fieldwork, my chapter addresses some of the deep uncertainties and heartfelt dilemmas inherent in living, acting, observing and writing in conflict and post-conflict environments over a long period of time. My combination of activist, advocacy, consultant and academic roles, the fact that however much I integrate into Croatian society I remain a foreigner fully formed as a scholar in the imperialist-colonialist West, and the ways in which I have intervened critically in a number of debates in Croatia and the wider post-Yugoslav space all serve to multiply the ‘messiness’ inherent in research in and on violent spaces that is a recurring theme throughout this book.

This chapter applies a post-disciplinary perspective to researching violent conflict, emphasising political and ethical dilemmas. It is organised around the concepts of ‘ambivalence’ and ‘positionality’ that have helped to frame some of my interventions in the public sphere. I refer to these in the plural form in this text as part of an ongoing commitment to pay attention to ‘the multiple, the plural, the contradictory and the awkward’ (Clarke et al, 2015a, p 44).

Settling and unsettling policy and its study

Policy matters. In part at least, this is because policy involves social processes that are intertwined with people's lives, often in very profound, sometimes oppressive, and even violent, ways. This book is concerned with policy movement, including the mobility of policy across borders and boundaries. Associated in different ways with the dynamics of globalisation, the role of supranational organisations and agencies, or the spread of ‘best practice’, the trans-border, trans-boundary, movement of policies is visible on a large scale – whether this is the spread of Conditional Cash Transfer policies (see, eg, Ferguson, 2010; Lavinas, 2013), the rise of ‘austerity’ (Clarke and Newman, 2012; Blyth, 2013) or the propagation of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (Gabay, 2012).

When policy moves, it is always translated: that is, it is made to mean something in its new context. Policy is never a singular entity: it is put together – or assembled – from a variety of elements that are always in the process of being reassembled in new, often surprising, ways. This concern with movement, translation and assemblage is central to our challenging of more conventional views of policy mobility, such as ‘policy transfer’, ‘policy diffusion’ or ‘policy learning’. Our concern is with the limitations of what we see as a conventional and linear approach to the policy process that too readily treats policy as a finished object. Instead, we will suggest that policy always involves practices of translation as policies are interpreted, enacted and assembled. Hence, we share, but also attempt to go beyond, a conception of policy as moving horizontally, across sites, and vertically, from policymaking centres to ‘implementation’ on the front line. As Kingfisher (2013: 3) argues:

Introduction

In this final chapter, we return to thinking and writing collaboratively in order to develop our approach of ‘making policy move’ in several ways. First, we reflect on the four ‘case study’ chapters to draw out some general observations about what has been gained by putting our vocabulary for policy analysis to work. Then, we explore the implications of thinking through assemblage and translation for ‘policy otherwise’: asking what sorts of possibilities such an approach brings into view. In the third section, we take these concerns back to the case study chapters to ask what ‘policy otherwise’ might look like in those settings: how might they be assembled and translated differently? These comments are intended as brief reflections that point to the possibilities of ‘otherwise’, rather than programmatic statements, strategies or grand plans. Finally, we end – as our collaboration began – in conversation, with a transcription of a discussion at our last meeting (in Veszprém, Hungary) in February 2014. In that conversation, we explore some of the key issues and concerns that have shaped our work together and worry about some of their implications. This seems like an appropriately conversational and open-ended finale to an unfinished – and unfinishable – project.

Tales of translation and assemblage

In the four substantive chapters, we have put elements of our vocabulary of ‘policy in motion’ to work in exploring four very different cases: global education policy in Ladakh; policy consultancy in South East Europe; the translation of social inclusion between the European Union (EU) and Hungary; and the managerialisation of universities in England. These are diverse cases – in their subject matter, in their settings and in our approaches to them. Nevertheless, we are convinced that each of them bears witness to the value of examining policy through the lenses of assemblage and translation. Most obviously, approaching policy through translation illuminates what is at stake as policy travels from place to place. Ideas of policy transfer and diffusion largely ignore what happens as policy travels and transmutes in linguistic, symbolic and cultural forms – as it is actively translated between one site and another (in which the intimate relationships between language, culture, power and politics are always in play).

Introduction

The chapter offers a set of concepts that we have found useful in rethinking policy and its movement beyond orthodox ‘policy studies’ approaches. We are, of course, not alone in trying to escape the limitations and assumptions of this orthodoxy; indeed, critical alternatives have been proliferating over the last 30 years or so. In different ways, these have tried to unlock or displace the rationalist, linear, positivist and depoliticising tendencies of the world of policy studies. We share many of these concerns and have a strong sense that our own development is inextricably intertwined with interpretivist, Marxist, feminist, post-structuralist and other strands of critical thought that have reworked the task of studying policy. Yet, we are also struck by a puzzle that emerges in critical approaches.

One of the recurring dynamics of critical policy studies is the unlocking of the narrow confines within which ‘policy’ is conventionally enclosed – the rational, technocratic world of policymaking, policy implementation, review and reflections on the ‘unintended consequences’ or ‘unexpected failures’ of the original policy objectives. The ‘scene’ of policy in these orthodox approaches is an orderly one: predictable groups of actors (political representatives, government officials, consultants, advisors, state employees and more or less grateful recipients) populate this scene. Critical approaches to studying policy have disrupted this scene: exploring how economic, social and political forces come to affect the making of policy; suggesting that states are more complex and contradictory entities; asking how populations are imagined and enacted in policy; questioning the ways in which policies position and discipline categories of people; and examining how policies work to enact or advance some social interests despite their technocratic neutrality. In such views, policy is rarely rational, never merely technical and always political in some larger sense. Interests, identities and intentions are intimately entwined in the processes and practices of policy.

The puzzle, though, emerges at this point: is policy merely the carrier of such interests, intentions or identities? If we know that a policy furthers the interests of capital, advances a neoliberal conception of the subject and enacts patriarchal authority, then attention tends to move away from policy to these larger forces, tendencies or dynamics.

An introduction

This chapter is born out of the ambivalence I confess to feeling as a result of having undertaken a range of tasks covered by the term ‘consultant’ for a number of international organisations in South East Europe and beyond since about 1997, reaching a peak in the early 2000s, mainly concerned with aspects of social welfare reform. It reflects on the limits of the ‘consultancy’ role, building on earlier works that, using different registers, explored the growing salience of consultancies in transnational social policymaking (Stubbs, 2002, 2003). I continue to argue that engaging in consultancy gave me access to material that, as a researcher, I was highly unlikely to be privy to, and provided much-needed insights into the ‘black box’ of policy translation missing from more institutionalist accounts. Subsequently, my involvement, with others, in a critique of the very programmes that I had helped to put in place, however, merely served to compound ambivalence upon ambivalence.

This text revisits some of my consultancy experiences and examines them through a translation lens, suggesting that transnational reforms are always translated and never merely transferred or transplanted. The chapter reflects some of my current concerns with understanding reform attempts in the ‘semi-periphery’ of South East Europe as arenas of struggle, neocolonial ‘contact zones’, sites of diverse performances, on- and off-stage interactions, and improvisations marked by ‘radically asymmetrical relations of power’, containing elements ‘ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination’ (Pratt, 1992: 7).

The chapter explores two broad sets of reform efforts in which I was involved. The first relates to a relatively minor role I had as a consultant on a United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)-led Regional Consultation on Child Care System Reform in South East Europe, culminating in a conference in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, in 2007. Here, I use material first prepared, jointly, with Reima Ana Maglajlić, who was a consultant on the same programme (Stubbs and Maglajlić, 2012, 2013). The second relates to the UK Department for International Development's (DFID’s) efforts in the early 2000s to reform social welfare systems in Bosnia-Herzegovina (B-H), discussed in a paper co-written with Noémi Lendvai (Lendvai and Stubbs, 2009b).

Policy moves. It moves from place to place: from the head offices of supranational organisations to the (more or less) grateful recipients in faraway elsewheres; or from the strategic stratosphere to the gritty encounters of the front line. Policy moves – and the fact of its movement makes things happen. What happens is not necessarily what was intended, or what was planned. Policy moves – and moves on, colonising new spaces and new settings with the promise of improving things. All of this is well-known – in the world of policymaking and moving, and in the world of policy studies. However, this book emerges from a sense of puzzlement: ‘How does policy move?’; ‘Who and what makes it move?’; ‘What happens as it arrives and settles in those “elsewheres”?’; ‘What keeps it moving?’; and ‘What happens to it as it moves?’ Linked to this sense of puzzlement – and the questions that preoccupy us – is a sense of frustration: why are these not the organising questions of policy studies? Why do the questions and answers of so much academic work on policy leave us cold? This mix of puzzlement and frustration brings us to this point: writing a book about making policy move.

Over the last decade, we have found ourselves in recurring conversations and collaborations, despite our geographically and institutionally distributed lives. Those conversations have continually returned to the puzzles and the frustrations that link us. In that time, we have shared our frustrations, exchanged sources of excitement and inspiration, and explored ways of thinking about how policy moves and what happens as it does. In particular, our conversations have led us to this collaboration – in which we try to see what happens if we use the ideas of translation and assemblage (and others) to think about policy moves. Doing a book is itself a practice of translation – in which we move from talking to ourselves (and small audiences at conferences and workshops) to addressing unseen others. Translation – as we suggest in the book – is a risky practice: much can be lost in translation and unanticipated meanings and effects can be gained.

Introduction: situating South East Europe

It is far from clear where South East Europe begins and ends. It is as much, if not more, a geopolitical construct as it is an identifiable geographical space. It may best be conceived as an emergent subregional space, more ascribed by outside forces rather than celebrated as a region from within. These ascriptions are, themselves, contradictory and somewhat Janus-faced, with a rather pejorative construction of the Balkans, only slightly amended in the European Union's (EU) notion of the Western Balkans (former Yugoslavia minus EU member state Slovenia and plus Albania), standing in some tension with an idea that the countries of the region are next in line for EU membership. These tensions relate to real political processes, which tend to fuse and confuse the border between truly ‘domestic’ and truly ‘international’ policy processes, between a status of ‘rejoining Europe’ or remaining as one of ‘Europe's others’. At times, nation-state building processes have led to a scramble for positioning regarding what has been termed ‘Euro-Atlantic integration’ in which countries and territories seek to out-do their neighbours in meeting broad conditionalities for EU and NATO membership. At other times, quite specific political choices have led to rather idiosyncratic developmental paths being pursued, producing new hybrid political economies merging a rather clientelistic ‘crony capitalism’ (Bičanić and Franičević, 2003) with the existence of authoritarian nationalisms and parallel power networks (Solioz, 2007). Sometimes, both tendencies appear to co-exist in a rather uneasy relationship not easily challenged by a rather crude ‘stick-and-carrot’ approach from the EU and other regional players (Bechev, 2006).

The wars and conflicts since 1991, and the reconstitution of various states, mini-states and territories with a rather complex relationship to each other, indicate how political, social, cultural, economic and institutional arrangements have been profoundly destabilised, and subnational, national and regional scales and their interrelationships are still heavily contested (Deacon and Stubbs, 2007; Clarke, 2008). The complexities of governance arrangements in the region certainly stretch the logics of a ‘multilevel governance’ approach popular within Western European political science, although whether or not this stretching reaches ‘breaking point’ is contested (see Stubbs, 2005; Bache et al, 2007). The complexities of state fragmentation and state-building consequent upon the wars of the Yugoslav succession remain unfinished.

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).