Evaluating the Cross-National Transferability of Policies: A Conceptual Framework

When seeking to harness entrepreneurship and enterprise culture, governments often seek to transfer policy measures successful in another country to their own. Until now however, governments have often lacked a practical evaluation framework for selecting policy measures and then appraising the feasibility and transferability of such measures. The aim of this paper is to fill that gap. Reviewing the literature on cross-national policy transfer, this paper provides a pragmatic evaluation framework for selecting policy measures and appraising their feasibility and transferability from one country to another. This details how successful policy transfer and cross-national policy learning must be informed by prospective policy analysis and testing the features of the specific policy initiative against the specifics of the national context and circumstances, and then establishes the criteria and processes through which potential policy adopters can identify promising policies used elsewhere to tackle similar problems in their own country and assess their 'goodness of fit' prior to transfer to national realities.