Geographies of policy : from transfer-diffusion to mobility-mutation

The paper develops a geographical approach to the issues of policy transfer and transformation, taking the form of a critical dialogue with three literatures at the borderlands of political science, comparative institutionalism, and political sociology. Making the case for moving beyond rational-choice frameworks and essentialized, formalist representations of policy transfer, the paper advocates a social-constructivist understanding of policy mobilities-and-mutations, sensitive to the constitutive roles of spatiotemporal context.