Abstract
How do “good policies” spread and gain traction? Do policies have geographies, or are they borderless? Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore pose these questions as they “jump on the jet streams” of two significant and highly mobile policies, following them as they crisscross Latin America and beyond: conditional cash transfer and participatory budgeting. “Fast policy” is a hot tool in today’s wild neoliberal era of post-welfare social experimentation, for which the new common sense is that society could be better managed by infusions of “best practices” and non-state philanthropy that circumvent bloated/irresponsible/politicized government and instead offer market incentives directly to the local. Following these two significant cases, Peck and Theodore interrogate the policy construction, transfer, and adoption processes to better understand the complex social field of policy.
These popular policies arose from different political currents. Conditional cash transfer (or CCT) was cooked up with the “flavor of neoliberal reformism,” steeped in the idea that the poor can best pull themselves out of poverty by receiving cash as an incentive that will help them change their “poor” behavior. CCT has already traveled from Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro to New York City and across fifty countries. Participatory budgeting, by contrast, emerged from a “spirit of insurgent localism,” challenging rigid hierarchies by offering representative locals the power to decide how to best allocate local resources. It started in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and has since moved to Chicago and thousands of other localities. In studying this global project, Peck and Theodore make it clear they are not evaluators measuring efficacy with a universal set of norms and measures (indeed, theirs is a critique of such technocratic practices); instead, their task is to understand and analyze policy transfer as a complex social field reflecting multivalent regimes of power.
Their “follow the policy” method requires an “open-ended embrace of methodological experimentation and reflexivity,” specifically what they call the “distended case study,” a variation of Burawoy’s heralded extended case study method. This approach works in large part because Peck and Theodore have much experience in analyzing the rise of neoliberalism around the world, having produced some of the most influential publications defining this field of study. Fast Policy is a natural extension of their previous work, pursuing policy manifestations of this variegated neoliberal world. But, they argue, it is only by observing the social practices of moving and making policy (through listening to the people spawning, brokering, and resisting these policies) that we can understand this project of fast policy transfer, its origins and boosters, and its basis in the tumultuous politics of post-welfarism, wavering between progressive populism and corporate market fundamentalism.
For example, participatory budgeting emerged in a fresh environment of progressive politics in Porto Alegre, Brazil, built from the shards of a violent, authoritarian governmental legacy. PB appeared at first as a powerful tool for locals to gain access to the decision-making process over their city budgets. But as it morphed into something less emancipatory, institutions such as the Brazilian federal government and the World Bank seized it for their own purposes. Similarly, the idea of circumventing anti-poor banking systems sounds like creative populism if CCT could actually direct cash into the hands of the cash-poor; but in the hands of the World Bank, it has become a new tool of discipline, they argue, imposed upon local governments and the poor. The devil is in the (political-economic) details, in the imposed conditionalities, and in the ways in which poor communities, technocrats, and local NGOs push back or re-commandeer programs to their liking.
In Oportunidades (CCT in Mexico, starting in 1997) or Bolsa Familia (CCT in Brazil, also 1997), the poor were paid to enroll and keep their kids in school, go annually to the local health clinic, and so on. In New York City (Opportunity NYC, 2007), the conditions for cash transfer included parents keeping their jobs, kids attending 95 percent of school days, attaining certain scores on annual math and English language arts tests, attending/affording regular medical check-ups, and so forth. But the program’s early outcomes reflected the irrationality of this post-welfare era: First, the poor’s behavior rarely had an effect on job security, health care provisioning, and school policies that discriminated against poor children. Second, even the elite’s behavior didn’t comply to the wishes of such fast policies: Opportunity NYC’s early rounds had a budget of $10.2 million to deliver $14 million of resources to low-income families, with an additional cost of $9.6 million for the consultants to evaluate it!
The NYC’s struggling CCT program is a “sober reminder of the challenges of ‘off-the-shelf’ policy borrowing,” Peck and Theodore conclude. They remind us how such interventions are necessarily adapted, rejected, reversed, and hijacked. (For example, after a string of failures of CCT programs, a radical/sensible variation emerged from Indonesia, Mexico, and Namibia that transferred cash unconditionally to the poor, much to the shock of the World Bank.) Overall, their book breaks new ground on the topic of transnational policy networks, revealing how power works through these technocratic, expert-driven networks. Fast Policy is a brisk, engaging read, full of analytically rich and empirically driven substance that teaches us much about new experiments of statecraft, their lure and agendas as they travel, and the tensions which arise as they confront the structural inequities that they are often designed to mask or ignore.