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European Planning Studies
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An Insider's Look into Policy Transfer in Transnational Expert Networks
To cite this Article: , 'An Insider's Look into Policy Transfer in Transnational Expert Networks', European Planning Studies, 15:5, 687 - 706 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/09654310701213996 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09654310701213996
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European Planning Studies Vol. 15, No. 5, June 2007
EUROPEAN BRIEFING
An Insider’s Look into Policy Transfer in Transnational Expert Networks MARTIN DE JONG & JURIAN EDELENBOS Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
ABSTRACT Much of the recent academic literature on spatial planning in Europe focuses on either cross-national comparison of planning frameworks and planning practices or on transnational and transregional initiatives and their impact on planning in European countries. From those publications, it can be gleaned how similar themes are translated differentially in different national contexts. Although it is also a great source of European integration and harmonization, the phenomenon of the knowledge exchange within transnational expert networks of European planners at the level of cities has received less attention. In this paper, the knowledge exchange among planners in such a network is studied, highlighting the role of “transfer agents” (academic and/or policy experts operating in communities in different policy arenas) in the exchange process. It builds on the insights from existing literature on policy transfer and policy learning, and tries to add a new perspective on this body of literature from an insiders’ perspective, i.e. participatory observation. The idea is that policy transfer can be fruitfully approached as a process of knowledge and information transfer between producers, senders, facilitators and recipients. Often this exchange is to a very large extent a process of absorbing appealing labels for policy solutions from the international or national policy levels, and then adopting an interpretation of it suitable to one’s own context. The authors try to give meaning to this exchange process by using two mechanisms, i.e. social interaction and conceptual replication. By combining these two mechanisms the authors try to uncover which policy lessons are being transferred among seven European cities that joined the expert network on European sustainable urban development (Pegasus).
Introduction The impact of transnational planning discourses on national planning practices and the national application of European planning reports have been a central topic in the
Correspondence address: Willem Martin De Jong, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands. Fax:þ31 15 2786233; Tel.: þ31 15 2788052; Email: w.m.
[email protected] ISSN 0965-4313 print=ISSN 1469-5944 online=07=050687–20 DOI: 10.1080=09654310701213996
# 2007 Taylor & Francis
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world of European spatial planning academia in the past few years (Tewdwr-Jones & Williams, 2001; Gualini, 2001; Faludi & Waterhout, 2003; Rivolin & Faludi, 2005; Giannakourou, 2005). It has either focused on (1) cross-national or cross-regional comparison of planning frameworks and planning practices or (2) on the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) and its impact on planning in the various European countries. Related, an extensive literature has developed in which different national or regional systems of innovation and their impact on entrepreneurialism are compared (Castells & Hall, 1994; Lundvall, 1992; Cooke, 2001, 2005; Iammarino, 2005; Kalantaridis, 2006). From those publications, albeit in different ways, it can be gleaned how similar themes are variously translated in the different national and regional institutional contexts. European integration and harmonization imply an increase in the intensity of crossnational comparison and transnational exchange, but not necessarily a growth of policy convergence among all involved planning systems. Domestic systems persist and incorporate European themes following their own institutional logics (Knill, 2001; De Jong et al., 2002). Although it is also a great source of European integration and harmonization, the phenomenon of the knowledge exchange within transnational expert networks of European planners at the level of cities has received less attention. In this paper, the knowledge exchange among planners in such a network is studied, highlighting the role of “transfer agents” (academic and/or policy experts operating in communities in different policy arenas) in the exchange process (Van Bueren et al., 2002; Stone, 2000, 2004). Recent work in the policy sciences has introduced the concept of “policy transfer”, which can also be fruitfully approached to processes of knowledge and information transfer in the world of spatial planning. Often this exchange is largely a process of absorbing appealing labels for policy solutions from the international level, comparing one’s own implementation experiences with those of peers working for other constituencies at the same level and then adopting an interpretation of it suitable to one’s own context (Mossberger, 2000; Wolman & Page, 2002; De Jong, 2004). Although they were not the first to write on the subject, since Dolowitz and Marsh wrote their seminal and regularly criticized articles on the characteristics of “policy transfer” (1996, 2000; Greener, 2002; Lodge, 2003; James & Lodge, 2003), the subject of transferring policy models, ideas and institutions between authorities has received a steadily growing amount of attention. The authors of this article take the above three new insights on policy transfer as a point of departure. It is their conviction, however, that by describing the processes of knowledge and information exchange in a particular transnational network of experts from the perspective of participatory observers more light can be thrown on the mechanisms linking social interaction among participants on the one hand and processes of conceptual replication of novel policy ideas on the other hand. For over 2 years, they have been witness of the meetings of the “Pegasus project”, in which experts from seven European cities engaged in multilateral lesson-drawing. The authors argue that their role as observers within the network has helped them enormously to spot the intricacies of knowledge and information exchange and to show how the two dimensions of social interaction among participants and conceptual replication in the course of time are related. These two dimensions, (1) social interaction between participants in the network and (2) conceptual replication
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of ideas in the course of time (among the participants), have been borrowed loosely from the neo-Darwinian literature interpretation of processes of social and conceptual learning (Toulmin, 1972; Campbell, 1987; Hull, 1988; Dennett, 1993, 1995; Plotkin 1994), because this combination offers underlying explanatory mechanisms for why and how lesson-drawing occurs and it attempts to make conceptual development explicit. The authors do not claim that these links are systematically made in this study, but in the fifth section of this article they will argue that these links have been made plausible and that more rigorous testing by means of gaming-simulation could be conducted in the future. Empirical evidence for this case study was obtained from three sources. Both of the authors were independent academic advisors in the Pegasus-project and could therefore, through participation in most workshops and editorial board meetings, gain an understanding of the social processes internal to the project. In fact, the researchers were to some extent subject of their own research, which is common in participatory observation and action research (Brock & McGee, 2002, Greenwood & Levin 1998, Elden & Levin 1991). Second, the full source material produced by the project (all interim versions and the final version of the final report of the project, the workshop reports produced by each city and two newsletters) was studied in order to detect and analyse the shifts in the predominant terminology and thus flesh out the conceptual replication dimension. Third, interviews were conducted with key people after the project had ended. This was to fill in remaining gaps and check if interpretations the authors had of events were adequate. In the next section, the authors sketch their theoretical framework that starts from gained insights of existing literature on policy transfer and gives a twist to it by combining it with the dimensions of social interaction and conceptual replication. In the third section, the so-called Pegasus project, around which the empirical study in this article centres, is introduced. The aim of this project, which ran from August 2002 to November 2004 and involved seven European cities, was to pass on Rotterdam’s experience of integrated area-based urban development to six other European cities (Seville, Malmo¨, Oslo, Vienna, Birmingham and Genoa) by holding workshops in each of the cities. In this section, the authors mainly focus on the dimension of social interaction. What matters specifically is how the various participants interacted with each other in the course of the project and how this had an impact on the learning experiences of each of them? In the fourth section, the focus is on the processes of conceptual replication, showing how the use of language and conceptual frameworks changed over time and what arsenal of concepts remained at the end of 2004. The authors examine the conceptual replication in the Pegasus project by first looking at the evolution (over time) of the various versions of the Pegasus final report, and secondly at the ideas the various participants came to adopt in the workshop reports on their respective cities. In both cases, a relationship between the social interaction processes and the evolution of the dominant concepts is identified. In the last section, conclusions are drawn on the usefulness and limitations of the approach and research method and thoughts are presented on how to make this line of research more scientifically rigorous.
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Social Interaction and Conceptual Replication in Policy Learning Policy transfer is gaining popularity in the literature on planning and public policy. The phenomenon has gone by different names (such as policy convergence, institutional transplantation, imitation and emulation, poly-diffusion, transnational policy-learning and lesson-drawing), which shows the field is not as unified and connected as would have been good for it (Heritier et al., 2001; Knill, 2001; Watson, 1993; De Jong et al., 2002; Jacoby, 2000; Westney, 1987; Padgett, 2003; Holzinger & Knill, 2005; Radaelli, 2004; Mossberger, 2000; Rose, 1991, 1993; Bennett & Howlett, 1992). In recent years, the picture of how processes of transnational policy-learning evolve and how it is connected with issues of knowledge and information exchange, the role of experts, absorption in the policy-making process, congruence between legal systems and technological, economic and cultural viability of transplants, has become quite of lot clearer. In the authors’ view, at least three crucially important conclusions can be drawn from this body of literature on which this article is built. First, experts acting in transnational networks and communities play a very substantial role in the spread of policy models, ideas and institutions (Van Bueren et al., 2002; Stone, 2000). It is by highlighting the position and activities of these transfer agents in various policy arenas (regional, national, international) and how they exchange knowledge and information with other experts in all these arenas, that the “methodological nationalism” characteristic of the initial policy transfer literature can be compensated for (Stone, 2004). Most of the early empirical studies departed from the idea that nation A borrows a policy from nation B and then adapts it to its own purposes. In many cases, however, reality is also much more “networked” and fluid and cannot be described as a functional or dysfunctional deviation from an original. In a sense, the policy transfer literature is essentially absorbing more insights from the fields of politics, public policy and organization studies (Holzinger & Knill, 2005). Second, and related to the first point, the literature has also made clear that policy transfer can be fruitfully approached as a process of transfer of knowledge, information and experiences between producers, senders, facilitators and recipients. Policy actors can sometimes play a number of these roles depending on the situation, but they are generally more open to insights they acquire from peers who have gone through similar experiences than to knowledge they could derive from scientific journals, even if the truth of the former has usually not been verified (Wolman & Page, 2002). Often these exchanges are processes of absorbing appealing labels for policy solutions from the international or national policy levels, making comparisons with and drawing lessons from colleagues working for neighbouring constituencies at the same level and then adopting an interpretation of it suitable to one’s own context. The above is often described as “polydiffusion” (Mossberger, 2000). Finally, the relevance of specific local contextualization in the adoption of “universal” global best practices has become obvious. It is certainly true, that international organizations are active in promoting international benchmarks and that this practice creates a visible distinction between pioneers, mid-range performers and laggards in adopting global standards for good governance. But apart from the fact that these novel policy models, ideas and institutions must be shaped to accommodate the interests of adopting local recipient actors, the technological, economic, legal-political and cultural environments in various countries and regions are also different. This implies that good practices in their originally proclaimed form are rarely suitable to all circumstances and all
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institutional structures (best practices as such simply do not exist), but always need to be contextualized and institutionalized to become a meaningful part of the entire set of institutional norms and practices of country or region (De Jong et al., 2002; Radaelli, 2004). Literature specifically on policy convergence shows a similar picture: harmonization of national regulations, as in the European Union (EU), is caused by a number of factors related to the specific context and situation of single countries (Holzinger & Knill, 2005). Padgett (2003, p. 242) argues in a similar way that “loosely drafted directives allow member states to domesticate EU legislation in the transportation to national law, thereby reducing the misfit between EU policy and the pre-existing governance regime”. Building on these three insights from existing literature on policy transfer the authors give their theoretical framework further meaning by adding two dimensions, i.e. social interaction and conceptual replication. There is a relatively observable world of social interactions, cooperation and competition between individual players or actors (e.g. organisms, people, organizations or countries) (Brandenburger & Nalebuff, 1996). There is almost always a social network within which actors operate, some of them closer to the centre of the web of interactions than others (Kickert et al., 1997). Actors at every level are always out to preserve themselves and their power, make a profit or even increase their sphere of influence (self-aggrandizement), but they are also stimulated to interact by a certain substantive curiosity, need for recognition and plain necessity because actors are interdependent, i.e. need resources from each other to solve policy problems (Koppenjan & Klijn, 2004). The behaviour of actors is partly regulated by social institutions that have grown gradually, but there are always degrees of freedom when it comes to making individual choices (Kickert et al., 1997). They anticipate and/or react to stimuli in the environment so as to decide on the most desirable course of action for them. Conceptualized in this way, the dimension of social interaction can very well be understood as Communities of Practice in operation (Wenger, 1998; Wenger et al., 2002). Such communities develop around three things: (1) a domain, (2) a community and (3) a practice (Bood & Coenders, 2003). An expert community will only work if the members share a common domain, e.g. similar questions, problems and interests. A clearly delineated domain not only makes the community identifiable to outsiders but also strengthens group ties within it. It needs to be a safe haven where people can not only express their opinions but also revise them. The result is a group or community with its own identity, its own rules, its own modalities and its own language. The members learn from one another’s experience and gradually develop a common frame of reference, enabling them to speed up the learning process. It gradually becomes clear to them that there are no ultimate solutions, quality is multidimensional, and different members often have good scores for different aspects. Lastly there is the “practice” aspect: interaction is designed primarily to achieve improvement or innovation in a particular professional field. Members must have individual links to this practice, which means that they must also have personal knowledge of it, often implicit and strongly embedded in action repertoires (Wenger et al., 2002). Next, the authors distinguish the dimension of conceptual replication. This is less clearcut, as it is a matter of passing on chunks of knowledge, ideas and information from one human brain to another, but it is at least equally important to social and conceptual evolution, relating as it does to passing on and developing concepts and conceptions over time (Campbell, 1987; Hull, 1988; Dennett, 1993, 1995). These chunks or threads of information cannot reproduce by themselves, however; they need hosts or “vehicles”,
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i.e. actors with a brain, which they can “parasitize”. During interaction and exchange of opinion the chunks of information jump from one actor to another, thus increasing the variety of “known concepts” for each of the actors and creating mutations of existing concepts. This dimension of conceptual replication is rather reflected in the utilization of analytical information and knowledge in policy processes. Evaluations often end by concluding that the diffusion levels are not very impressive. Knowledge is often used strategically, instrumentally, for the use of enlightenment, in an ad hoc manner and so on (Weiss, 1977, 1980; Huberman, 1994; Dunn, 1994; Wolman & Page, 2002; Van Buuren & Edelenbos, 2004). Literature on knowledge utilization often poses the question whether, when and by whom scientific knowledge is used. The general impression is that factors such as relevance, credibility, user involvement, communication effectiveness, potential for information processing, clients’ need for information, anticipated degree of programme change, perceived value of evaluation as a management tool, quality of evaluation implementation, and contextual characteristics of the decision or policy setting will be helpful to enhance utilization, but that they are neither necessary nor sufficient (Shulha & Cousins, 1997). Patterns of Social Interaction The Pegasus project community existed for over 2 years. In it, experts from several European cities gathered on a regular basis to discuss issues of sustainable urban development and administrative recipes to achieve that. The social interaction component of international expert communities can very well be understood as Communities of Practice in operation (Wenger, 1998; Wenger et al., 2002). Communities of Practice develop around three things: (1) a domain, (2) a community and (3) a practice (Bood & Coenders, 2003). The Domain of the Pegasus Project The Pegasus project was launched in 2002 by the European network organization Eurocities (a partnership of about a hundred European cities) and funded by the European Commission. Pegasus, just one of the Eurocities projects, stands for “Planning, Environment, Governance And SUStainability”. Its aim was to examine how applicable the “ROM approach” (see later)—in particular as applied by Rijnmond (greater Rotterdam)—is to other European cities. The other members, besides Rotterdam, are Seville, Malmo¨, Vienna, Oslo, Birmingham and Genoa. The project revolved around the “ROM approach” (ROM ¼ Ruimtelijke Ordening en Milieu, Dutch for “spatial planning and environment”). In 1988 the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment introduced a pilot scheme for 10 areas in the Netherlands with complex spatial planning and environment problems. The scheme involves an area-based approach, integrating spatial planning and environmental policy at regional level, ideally resulting in an improvement in the quality of the areas concerned. The ROM approach uses a mix of planning, governance and communication tools and has the following characteristics: . Tackling multiple and interrelated problems in specific geographical areas . Involving all the relevant actors—government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), private-sector organizations and the public—in the process
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. . . .
Achieving win –win solutions which all the stakeholders feel they benefit from Integrating various policy areas such as environment, planning and transport Geared to implementation (getting things done), not just policy-making Developing a communal long-term vision for the development of the specific geographical area . Using a structured, project-based approach to tackle the problems The main aim of the Pegasus project was to find out what and how other European cities could learn from this approach. Ideally, it would produce a set of good practices to help participants to organize their complex planning processes. The Community of the Pegasus Project To this end a number of sessions were held, each hosted by a European city. Each was attended by representatives of the other cities with the aim of exchanging knowledge on a specific urban area, using the host city as the case study. The following Pegasus meetings were held, in chronological order: (1) Launch meeting, 26– 27 September 2002 in Rotterdam: the background and development of the ROM approach were discussed (2) First workshop in Seville, 13 – 14 March 2003 (3) Second workshop in Malmo¨, 10 –11 April 2003 (4) Third workshop in Vienna, 22 – 24 June 2003 (5) Fourth workshop in Oslo, 18– 19 September 2003 (6) Fifth workshop in Birmingham, 21 –22 October 2003 (7) Sixth workshop in Genoa, 19– 21 April 2004 (8) Closing conference in Birmingham, 29 –30 October 2004 The first part of the programme at each of the workshops was set aside for talks by representatives of the host city on policies and activities there under the heading of sustainable urban development and area-based policy: in a word, what they saw as the local and regional equivalent of ROM. Questions from and discussion with the guests followed. Excursions and guided tours of the city were also organized to show the effects of the policies on the spot and give the visitors an impression of how policy was implemented. During the second part of each workshop time was set aside for the practicalities of the Pegasus project and for drawing overall lessons for all the participants on the city under consideration. Not all the members of the project participated in the meetings in the same way and with the same intensity. Bood and Coenders (2003) identify three levels of participation in Communities of Practice. The first group is the core group: often 10 –15% of the members, who take an active part in discussions, drafting and other activities and ensure that the Communities of Practice moves forward. The Pegasus core group consisted of five people, of whom the Spanish project manager (from Eurocities) and the Dutch project co-manager (from ROM-Rijnmond) were the most active and committed. The two of them supervised the project’s organization, logistics and finances and oversaw the content of the final report. The core group played an important catalyst role in the Pegasus project: without their efforts it would have disintegrated a long time ago, which says something about how relative the closeness was.
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The second group can be called the adopters. This is an active group of regular participants in various activities accounting for roughly 70% of the membership of the project. This group consisted of representatives of each of the cities, who played a part in both the local workshops and those of the other cities. They were explicitly tasked, both by the cities they represented and for the Pegasus project itself, to write reports on their own workshops, capitalizing on their learning experiences concerning ROM. The adopters in Pegasus displayed a reasonable level of commitment and the group numbered about 17 in all. Finally, the third group is that of the lurkers (periphery). This is a group of people who took little part, just looking to see what was in it for them, accounting for about 15– 20% of the total. These consisted mainly of the cities’ participants in their own workshops and people who, for example, only once managed to visit a workshop abroad. It also included people who were out to gather a smattering of information, knowledge and practical tips to improve their approach to urban sustainability on their own soil (shopping mentality). They were far less interested in developing a communal framework. The Practice of the Pegasus Project The aim of the launch meeting on 26– 27 September 2002 was to introduce the representatives of the seven European cities involved to one another. The participants were given a first impression of what it was all about through presentations on the ROM approach, which discussed the background to and history of ROM and its main points—in particular the Rotterdam version. The special institutional setting in the Netherlands was also mentioned, namely the fact that the Dutch decision-making culture is one of compromise and consultation (the “Polder Model”). The main aims of the 2-day conference were to develop a group mentality, instruct the participants in the language of ROM and develop a communal focus on an approach to urban issues. Another aim was to reach practical follow-up agreements on when each European city would host the local meetings and broadly what form the programmes for these meetings should take. The following two workshops, in Seville and Malmo¨, were try-outs for the expert network. They were far less structured and not particularly based on the ROM approach. Ample scope was provided for professionals and advisers, administrators and interested outsiders to present information on the local urban situation. There was very little scope for discussing the similarities with and differences from the ROM approach. Evaluations of the first two meetings by the core group showed that these meetings were too casual and unfocused. It was decided to pay more attention to the specific principles of the ROM approach and try to reflect more on process management and link the urban problems of each of the cities to the ROM approach. The core group demanded a more dominant role in deciding on the agenda for the remaining local workshops, causing something of a shock to the next local organizer, Vienna. The ROM approach was placed more firmly on the agenda in the form of presentations on that approach, and time was set aside at the end of the workshop for reflecting on the approach adopted by each city in relation to the ROM approach in a plenary discussion by the participants. This was the moment when the social constellation was altered in such a way that the core group took their central position in the community and through a change in the workshop agendas generated opportunity for the replication of the ROM concepts. As a result of this intervention the workshop in Vienna and the remaining local workshops were more structured. There was still ample scope for presentations and excursions, but these
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focused more on elements of the ROM approach. The interactions between the actors were “loosened”: people began to get to know one another better, discussions were more spontaneous and they focused more on sustainable urban development and collaborative planning. As the social tissue of the group developed, people became more productive and livelier. At the same time it became less of a voluntary affair and the absence of people involved was noticed sooner. Preparing the workshops professionally and running them successfully became a matter of honour for the host cities, which also put more energy into delivering high-quality workshop reports after the workshops. Group cohesion in Pegasus was strengthened by the fact that the members always met for at least 2 days. The group became more close-knit in later phases facilitating knowledge assimilation. A feeling of a shared mission, significance and identity arose. A shared approach to the domain developed, which was regarded by the members (or the majority of them) as a great benefit. At the same time, however, participants delved into the arsenal of policy experiences of their own cities allowing them to put the exclusively Rotterdamcoloured interpretations of ROM in their own perspectives and expose messages of their own and add them to the set of possible courses of action. While most of the expert network members regarded the meeting in Vienna as a breakthrough, this was also true of the penultimate workshop in Genoa, where virtually all the participants actively deliberated on how the ideas could be taken a stage further and what form the end-product should take. Three parallel discussion groups were set up on how to report on “good practices” (these eventually became “Examples”), “the report’s general structure” and “language & symbols”. There was great optimism and contentment among the participants, who had the feeling they had developed into a real network. Less came of the projected follow-up activities—apart from a concluding meeting as part of a larger conference in and about Birmingham, intended more as a promotional event—than had been hoped and anticipated in Genoa. In this lesson-drawing process the original idea that representatives of the six European cities could learn from the ROM approach, gave way to a many-sided or multilateral learning process with more scope for cities to learn from each other’s experiences. Workshop members increasingly tried to contribute ideas to the specific project on which the local workshop focused, and time was set aside for this at the end of the meeting. The initial aim of the social interactions in the network was to pass on the ROM approach for solving local urban problems. The idea that all cities would actually implement these “new” concepts in their own practice turned out to be too ambitious, however. The participant, who had their own needs and interests, checked the knowledge exchanged during meetings to see how it fitted into their own practical and institutional contexts and adapted their interpretations of the ROM concepts accordingly. The concepts in the ROM approach were still at the forefront of the group processes—thanks partly to the efforts of the core group—but the question was less and less whether the approach was applicable to other European urban situations and increasingly whether the group, who used ROM-style terminology, could generate knowledge that could be applied by all, albeit in different ways. Patterns of Conceptual Replication By longitudinally following the several interim version of the final report and by systematically investigating the reports in which each of the participating cities stated
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what they had learned from the projects, the authors were able to derive a clear idea of the conceptual changes in the course of time and how it had impacted on each of the cities at home. During the 2 years that the network was operational it yielded various products. By far the most important one was the final report published by Eurocities, full of tips on and examples of integrated area-based policy. The main text of this report was written by various people in the core group. The examples, which are shown in boxes throughout the text, were supplied by the member cities and edited by the core team where necessary. In addition to the final report, prior to the workshop in the city concerned, each of the cities wrote a starting note setting out the problems and approach there, which was followed after the workshop by a final report on the city incorporating comments and learning experiences from the workshop. In this section the authors first deal with the evolution of the ideas and use of language in the final report by examining significant passages from the various interim versions and the final version. Subsequently, they take a closer look at how far the member cities give evidence of conceptual learning experiences in their workshop reports.
The Conceptual Evolution of the “Final Report” The development of the form and content of the final report in its various versions gives an indication of the importance attached to the ROM terminology and other incoming concepts throughout the process. The report was produced in versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7; then, after the workshop in Genoa, when the core members felt the time was ripe to really finalize the report, versions 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, the draft and the actual final report, which eventually appeared in November 2004 (Pegasus, 2003– 2005). The social context in which the evolution of the final report took place was the core group. This group was surprisingly small and consisted of five people, of whom the Spanish project manager (from Eurocities) and the Dutch project co-manager (from ROM-Rijnmond) held the positions of responsibility. These people came together on a regular basis, first to discuss the structure of the project and later on to write and edit the numerous versions of the report. The lion’s share of the work was done by the Dutch project co-manager from ROM-Rijnmond and the adviser to the Flemish Ministry of Environment and Infrastructure, who were each responsible for many chapters and regularly corrected each other’s work. Two academics from Rotterdam and Delft wrote brief sections on the importance of the ROM approach in the Dutch administrative culture and the art of drawing lessons from the experiences of other cities, and the Spanish project manager provided quality control and comments on the various interim versions. Most of the others did not contribute to the writing, at most making the odd comment on existing texts. Interestingly, the core group did not manage to persuade the representatives of the cities to supply texts, as had been the intention; they did supply texts giving concrete examples and experiences to illustrate the message in the main text, but a lot of energy went into getting them to do so. The initial intention of writing a ROM recipe book for the other cities was replaced half-way through by that of documenting one or more good practices in area-based planning from the point of view of the various cities in each chapter. Ultimately even this turned out not to be feasible, as too little material was supplied and some of the examples were in fact of bad practices. In the end all that was left was one example in each chapter.
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Although people began developing ideas on the subject at the first workshop, of course, the process of writing the final report did not begin until after the Vienna workshop. Until then attempts had been made, more or less fruitlessly, to “introduce” the Rotterdam recipe in the case of Seville and Malmo¨. This one-sided relationship between Rotterdam as the example and the learning cities was typical of the first few versions of the report. About the planning context, ROM’s road map to the future of the area is simply the best possible plan. (version 1.3, p. 5) Statements of this kind gradually make way for more neutral phraseology acknowledging that other cities have experience of integrated area-based planning, just not under the name of ROM. The change in the title points to the same evolution: in version 1.3 it was ROM, the way to sustainable cities: Suggestions in dealing with complex urban issues; Area specific integrated planning as a new participatory way of governance. In the final report it became: The Pegasus Files; A practical guide to integrated area-based urban planning. The project co-manager from Rotterdam, having arrived at the conclusion that the precise approach adopted by ROM-Rijnmond was neither suited to nor desired by other cities, suggested a more process-based, 14-point terminology in Vienna (Area, Background, Trends, Actors, Interests, Vision, Strategy, Agreement, Integrated Approach, Programme, Monitoring and Evaluation, Initiator, Process Design and Programme Organization), which was taken as the basis for the structure of the final report and made it into the final version largely unscathed. That this suggestion was not accepted without a struggle was clear when the Viennese delegation said that they found the approach workable but a bit too “managerial” and they missed the points “Citizen Participation” and “Political/Ideological Choices”. The representatives from Genoa and Seville, however, found the ideas behind this relatively new and very interesting. Another interesting trend in the various versions was the gradual growth of no-nonsense “just do it” language. Versions 1.0 to 1.7 included the following, for instance: Cities are the cradle of human culture and development. In cities all factors needed for both production and progress come together, in high concentrations and great quantities: raw materials, capital goods, physical labour and brainpower, entrepreneurial skills. Unfortunately this concentration of people, activities and goods does not only lead to progress. It also leads to counterproductive infighting over space and other resources, and the production of negative side effects like pollution and waste. Technological developments often provide solutions to these problems: sewage systems and water treatment plants, catalysers on cars, dust filters on chimney-stacks, space saving high-rise buildings and subways. (version 1.7, p. 4) But in the final versions passages such as this were abandoned, and the general tone of the final report was more like the following two: Trust is a major part of a sound process like the one we are describing. In an integrated policy approach many boundaries need to be crossed. This only works when parties feel safe with all these “trespassers”; safe too when out themselves in foreign or even enemy territory. Would you dare openly your own knowledge, your own interests, with others, when there is no mutual trust? Our experience
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has taught us that building a trustful relationship is a crucial element that will help us overcome old fashioned bargaining and classic power play styles and in so doing open new doors to find solutions where traditional policy-making didn’t deliver integrated and satisfactory solutions. (draft version, p. 14) This very complex aspect of PEGASUS needs an approach that in essence is simple: think laterally, communicate freely and act practically. (final report, p. 8) This quotation, which was written after the Genoa workshop and can therefore be counted as part of the final phase, makes a number of things clear. Apart from the switch, urged by many participants, from a solid, almost academic style to pragmatic tips in an at times “just do it!” style, it is noteworthy that a sense of community has developed, betrayed by an explicit “we” exhortation. Also striking is the fact that, whereas in the early life of the community “Realpolitik” and naked power structures were sometimes described openly and accepted as a reality, in the later phases “trust” and “exposing yourself in open, non-strategic communication” came more to the fore. Lastly, it was decided at Genoa to pay more attention to the presentation and layout of the document. Important words are set in a larger font. This latter point is also apparent from the fact that the 15 points from version 1.7 onwards—originally 14, as “Programme” and “Process Design” were replaced, in line with the gradual “softening”, with “Action Programme”, “Mind the Process” and “Communicate”—were divided into “How” questions, “Who” questions and “Steps”, with the How questions marked by a hearts symbol (“taking it to heart”), the Who questions by a hands symbol (“actors raising their hands”) and the Steps shown as footsteps. One of the core team members even wanted to cast the report in the form of a video film, but this idea did not ultimately catch on. The members, especially the core team, were very keen, come what may, to present it attractively, so as to ensure that the ideas could be disseminated to those who were not part of the project. Many aspects of this popularizing tendency were shared by the Spanish project manager and his superior at Eurocities, who had not been part of the community. The content and message of the draft report were satisfactory, but both of them detected a rather “clubby atmosphere” and a use of language that clearly went too far in the direction of AngloSaxon directness and “just do it” mentality. In the final stage before publication they both went through the text in its entirety to make it more professional and make it suitable for a European readership, gauging that Central and Southern European readers in particular would not be happy with the predominant “keep things simple” ethos. It also meant that “building a trustful relationship” (large type) was changed back to “building a trustful relationship”. They employed an Italian member of staff at Eurocities to assist with the editing. Thus towards the end, editorial influence on the final report shifted from the Dutch-Flemish authors to the people at Eurocities, which, as the commissioning body and the body funded by the European Commission and European cities, would also bear official responsibility for the document.
The Conceptual Evolution of the Workshop Reports The workshop reports produced by the various workshop-organizing cities show that the following types of ideas caught on with virtually all of them:
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. Participation: how do you involve particular stakeholders in the process? . Integrated approach: how can light be shed on planning problems from different angles? . Identifying interests: how can an understanding of the interests of each of the stakeholders be gained and how can these be reflected in agreements? That “participation” was an attractive concept in the workshop meetings is clear from the fact that it was often mentioned as a learning experience in the various workshop reports. This was already the case with the Seville report, which was the first to be written and raised the point that there is little if any chance of persuading influential parties to adopt a participatory style without an active facilitating agent (Seville workshop report, 2003, p. 9). Seville used the ROM approach to shed light on their own projects but came to the conclusion that there was not much chance of applying ROM ideas there successfully. The main reasons are likely to have been the unstructured nature of this early event and, as one of its Seville’s representatives said, the political and administrative culture in the region which was not yet ready for participatory approaches. The authors’ also found “participation” in the Malmo¨ report, which was the second to appear: having noted the elements of the ROM method it mentioned participation as the Achilles heel of their approach. As the workshop report said (Malmo¨ workshop report, 2003, p. 10): There is a significant need in these areas, and indeed other parts of the city, to find new ways of creating dialogue with, and empowering local communities. The institutional infrastructure of the city needs to adapt to the modern diversity of Malmo¨. (. . .) As the city attempts to utilise urban brownfield sites, increase urban density, provide new affordable housing, maintain viable communities and attractive living environments and generate a vibrant cultural life there are many contradictions and difficulties to deal with. A ROM-type approach may offer opportunities to develop multi-party partnerships to tackle social, economic and environmental issues in the development of new initiatives on brownfield and greenfield development in and around the city, drawing on the Western Harbour experience. The Malmo¨ and Vienna workshop reports mainly sought to find confirmation for their own approaches but used ROM as a benchmark and an opportunity to strengthen their own practices. The cities stated that, in principle, they tackled their planning issues in the same way as Rotterdam but differed on certain points. Malmo¨ were interested in pinning down goals and interests, recording interests in contracts/covenants and monitoring them. Vienna mainly discussed involving/mobilizing partners and actors, the integrated approach and gaining an understanding of various interests on the part of actors. Along these lines Vienna have in fact engaged in some follow-up activities, such as meeting the wishes of cyclists and pedestrians in the area by providing, for example, cycle tracks and street lighting and dealing with noise and dust problems. The “identifying interests” element of the ROM approach appealed to many members of the expert community, but especially those in Vienna, where they came to the conclusion that some important investors had been involved in the project too late:
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The weaknesses are to be found in the lacking mobilisation of relevant actors (as investors), a quite unclear definition of the interests and aims of the players in the private field, which both is leading to a missing agreement between all relevant partners (Vienna workshop report, 2003, p. 12) Since social interaction among the partners in the network had become more solid and attention was increasingly paid to the specific contexts of cities, it became possible to explore options for improvements in the Vienna case inspired by ROM principles. From this Vienna deduced that more channels of communication needed to be opened up towards the private sector, as the following passage from the workshop report makes clear (2003, p. 13): To draw up a private field does not necessarily mean that “privates” speak the same language. The aim to integrate investors into the project and the aim to participate with the citizenry do structurally not correspond. Though adequate structures have to be found to meet these aims. The tool of the market place—as it was used in the Zielgebiet Gu¨rtel—can serve the function of a door opener, but the following steps of negotiation and integration have to be transparent and foreseeable. Otherwise there occurs the dangerous situation of hidden agendas and distrust. In this respect the communication culture has to be stimulated to achieve eye to eye discussions and agreements. In this respect the phrase of public private partnership has to be taken seriously—for both sides, the public (in this case the local state) and the private— citizenry and firm-owners, investors. The documents show that Oslo displayed an active learning attitude, using Pegasus to see whether they had applied the ROM Steps in their own projects. They were particularly concerned with finding partners and achieving participation on the part of stakeholders. In their own problem situation they initially suffered from administrators’ fear of involving a wide circle of interested parties; others they simply forgot. One of these parties was heard for the first time at the local workshop. The expert community by now had become very tight-knit, which immensely facilitated knowledge assimilation among partners. Oslo also organized extra “learning sessions” in which the Dutch project co-manager of Pegasus gave people from the Oslo administration an additional briefing on the ROM principles and how to involve actors and explore their interests. The Oslo workshop report, without beating about the bush, notes: Subsequently the workshop met representatives of a local community group, a business and one of the City Districts in the valley. While all of them were already doing their own bit to promote “a satisfactory environment in the Grorud Valley”, it was clear that none of them had so far participated much in the Development Programme process. (Oslo workshop report, 2003, p. 12) That this really was a learning experience for Oslo is clear from the fact that there was a turn-around in behaviour patterns (Oslo workshop report, 2003, p. 13): As this report is being written eight months after the workshop, the Oslo team would like to add that things have progressed since. As the holistic plan for the Grorud
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Valley is due to be completed in 2004, it has not been feasible to start from scratch by establishing a covenant between actors on the ROM model. However, some quite successful participatory processes have been arranged in the four areas of the valley selected for special attention. The Birmingham workshop report (2003) is concerned more with positioning the city itself. The inner city project they used for Pegasus had in fact already been completed and judged solid and successful ahead of the workshop. The ROM principles were cited to illustrate how they had set about it. Illustrative of this is the fact that they copied almost the whole of the introductory paper word for word into the workshop report that was drawn up after the meeting in Birmingham. Little actual learning had taken place. The context for the Genoa meeting was highly propitious, because virtually all participants deliberated actively on how the ideas could be taken one step further and what general lessons could be drawn from the expert meetings. There was great optimism: the group had the feelings something important had been developed and that they might grow out to become a lively and lasting expert network having an impact on actual policy-making. Genoa applied the ROM ideas in order to get a process that had got bogged down up and running again. They were particularly interested in approaching relevant actors (key figures). Rotterdam’s Tweede Maasvlakte example (the Mainport Rotterdam Project) particularly appealed to Genoa, especially since their problem situation revolved around the difficulty of reconciling the economic goals (industrial development) with the goals for the living environment. Here an integrated approach helped: Discussions between project partners also addressed the problems arising from the separation between decision-making competences of the local municipal government on the one hand (responsible for the management of the city), and the Harbour Authority on the other, that is responsible for managing the harbour, while acting on behalf of the national (central) government, and specifically the Ministry for Transport. In view of the strong interdependence between the city and its harbour, such separation between competences was felt to be detrimental to the need to develop a common vision and to come to an agreement between stakeholders and actors operating in the area. (Genoa workshop report, 2004, p. 24) The city of Rotterdam, lastly, used the Pegasus project to give a fresh boost to the ROM concepts, which dated back to the 1980s and had worn a bit thin, by giving them some international exposure. A participant from the Netherlands described working with a creative designer, as was done in Vienna, as an eye-opener. A visionary designer comes up with an appealing idea that is used as an initial vision in the process to get stakeholders moving. Thus the initially one-sided donor of ROM concepts became a recipient of ROM-style ideas that emerged from a multilateral learning process. Conclusions and Implications for Further Research Departing from the notion that processes of policy transfer can often be explained by following transnational transfer agents in action, that these exchange and compare policy models, ideas and institutions with each other that they subsequently take back home again and help adjust to the local context, the authors have studied such a
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network in action from very nearby. In the previous sections, they have described an expert community discussing and engaged in multilateral learning regarding integrated area-based urban development for over 2 years. First, the social interaction patterns and how they evolved have been explained on the basis of personal observations by the authors. In this manner, a picture grew of how they worked together towards individual learning experiences for each of them and a common end-product for the project as a whole. Then, the processes of conceptual replication were studied through the analysis of written artefacts, especially the shift in the use of concepts, wording, symbols and style. This obviously was not done by means of participatory observation (although being a member of the network did provide the authors access to documents which otherwise would probably have remained in closed drawers), but by means of digging thoroughly through various interim versions of reports and final reports. Apart from the fact that such empirical descriptions of each of the two earlier mentioned dimensions separately gives a colourful picture of what policy transfer looks like from the inside out, linking the two should add theoretical value to the study. Combining the two dimensions, social interaction and conceptual replication, might expose the mechanisms by which knowledge is generated and diffused between participants. It makes explicit what planning concepts gain predominance in the debate in the course of time and what patterns of social interaction cause the changes. The authors are fully aware that their findings are somewhat sketchy, based on a single case study, and can by no means be generalized. As participatory observers, the authors have drawn inspiration from Brock and McGee (2002), who proclaim that self-awareness grows as a result of exposure to real-life processes and experiential learning leads to critical reflection on the events. The assumption is that the authors get an opportunity to reflect on experiences and increase the validity of their scientific argument. However, reliability is weakened, since replicability is as good as 0. To reach robust conclusions on the drives and skills of transfer agents and the ways in which they build up their networks, comparable studies will have to be conducted of similar transplantation processes. An alternative plan of attack to increase replicability of results is to develop gaming-simulations in which participants play certain actor roles and linguistic and conceptual developments are objectively measured through time and connected with events that took place in the game. If several runs of such games are played with different participants playing the same actor roles, more robust outcomes can be generated on the link between social interaction and conceptual replication. The authors have obviously not gone that far in this paper and can only claim to have made a beginning to understand the evolution of policy transfer processes. In spite of that, they take the freedom to formulate some observations as to how the two dimensions were linked. Their first observation is that after a comparatively slow start-up phase the expert community gathered around relatively generic appealing concepts such as “participation”, “integrated approach” and “identifying interests” taken from the original Dutch ROM process. These turned out to be catchier and more attractive than others. They are specific enough to lead to a mode of thought, but not specific enough to preclude a variety of different interpretations for different people and contexts. This conclusion is very much in line with previous findings mentioned in the second section of this article. In addition, after feelings of mutual understanding, trust and shared interests through cooperation in the network had developed, the feeling of shared purpose and domain sharing, both characteristic of expert communities, led the experts to place high trust in
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the value of their multilateral learning processes, more so than in purely academic events or writings. One could say that site visits show a desire to verify the truthfulness of claims made by the hosting city, but overall the pattern matches that found by Wolman and Page (2002), who claim that peers and colleagues in neighbouring constituencies are considered the most reliable source of inspiration for opinions on promising policy models, ideas and institutions. It also intriguing that as time went by, trust as such not only grew among the members of the community, but the concept of “trust” during policy-making processes for sustainable area based development in the final report also came to replace a focus on selfinterest of policy actors. Seeing a link here between social interaction and conceptual replication is tempting, but cannot be proven. A second observation is related to network development inside expert communities in general and this Pegasus project in particular. The shape this community acquires as a result of social interactions has a decisive impact on the later adoption by cities of the dominant concepts as they grew from the network. The authors observed that the successful concepts were picked up especially by members who joined meetings on a regular basis (“adopters”). This group consisted of representatives from each of the cities, who played a part in both the local workshops of their own cities and those of the other cities. They were explicitly tasked, both by the cities they represented and for Pegasus itself, to write reports on their own workshops, capitalizing on their learning experiences concerning ROM. The adopters in Pegasus displayed a reasonable level of commitment and the group numbered about 17 in all. Within this group of adopters, certain cities were more involved than other cities. The cities that were committed most were Oslo, Vienna, and Genoa, whose representatives promoted the Pegasus ideas actively at home or were asked/allowed to do so by their political masters. Notably, these cities were also the ones who embraced these concepts in some form in their own policy practice. It can therefore be concluded that a connection between social interaction patterns and conceptual replication is at least plausible. It is also conceivable that the need felt for conceptual innovation at the city’s homefront had a decisive impact on the role played in the interactions within the Pegasus project. At any rate, these findings are compatible with the “actors pulling in” thesis proposed in De Jong et al. (2002), where it is claimed that negotiating policy actors in receiving constituency work out a policy transfer product through a process of tinkering or “bricolage” and pull only those elements from the “original” that they find useful. Lastly, critical events and the roles and stakes participants had in them, especially those in the core group, can explain why learning processes evolved as they did in the reports. In the description of the interaction processes, it can be seen that the workshops in Vienna and Genoa were experienced by most participants as turning points. In the former, it was the core members responsible for the final report taking control of the discussion and making sure the ROM-terminology came more to the fore. The results can be found back in the evolution of the intermediate versions of the final report, which took the direction of working out the ROM points from then on. In the latter, it became obvious that the original idea that representatives of the six other European cities could learn from Rotterdam’s ROM approach, gave way to a many-sided learning process with more scope for cities to learn from each other’s experiences. This was basically a switch from a unilateral approach (how to implement ROM at home) to a multilateral learning approach (what does the Pegasus approach mean for us and what lessons can we draw from each other). This transformation was reflected in the later editions of the final report where examples for all of the ROM points were taken from several different
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cities and where the role of ROM in the title of the report was replaced with Pegasus. Local experiences in each of the participating cities coloured which knowledge was diffused into their local policy arena. Learning proved more than just a matter of getting the best practice of ROM “into people’s heads” and passing them on to the representatives of the European cities concerned: it was a process in which everyone could draw lessons from anyone else’s experiences and was able to contribute to improving the common European development of sustainable urban development and implementation of sustainable urban development at home. Whether this increasing commonality among the partners at a generic conceptual level implies growing policy convergence at home, is questionable. The follow-up actions undertaken in each of the seven cities would rather suggest that vital institutional differences remain. For those who believe European integration and harmonization implies that European cities should become more similar this may be a disappointment. Planning convergence is not really what European cities and regions are headed for. For those who have placed their faith in continued variety, it is rather a relief. Continued variety has a greater potential to offer innovative solutions to evolutionary problems, as we know from biology. That is certainly an asset planners and planning theorists in all of Europe can foster.
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