Beyond Mapping Policy Networks: The Micro-Politics of Networks and Policy Transfer

• In Event: 58.075 - Neoliberal Policy Network Governance and Counternetworks of Resistance: Actions and Reactions From Across Policy Arenas

Abstract

Objectives. The facilitator on table one will present the key concepts from three research papers that provide some conceptual background for those new to the literature on “new governance” and policy networks.

Overview of three-paper presentation: The authors of paper #1 study how networks and intermediary organizations (foundations, philanthropy, think tanks, media, etc.) interact with local urban regimes and school districts in the U.S. More specifically, they are interested in the role these organizations play in knowledge mobilization around market and incentivist reforms. They study how these intermediary organizations “mediate” policy in four U.S. school districts; Denver, New Orleans, New York, and Washington, D.C. Though the influence of intermediary organizations varied by location, they were generally successful in promoting incentivist policies, and while aware of research on such policies, they largely responded to it in ways that justified their respective reforms.

Authors of paper #2 explore how the use of Bourdieu’s field theory can help understand why a specific intermediary organization, think tanks, may be more successful than universities at engaging in policy advocacy within policy networks. Think tanks have become what Medvetz (2008) calls boundary organizations, gaining influence in the media, political and market social fields. Using field theory, the paper explores the trade-offs as educational researchers attempt to exert more influence in social fields where think tanks currently have gained dominance.

Author #3 provides a network ethnography of a particular policy network in India and a particular “transfer agent” (Ramya Venkataraman) central to the network who reinforces a set of neoliberal ideas. Many researchers of policy networks have moved beyond the mere mapping of policy actors and organizations to understanding the relational and embodied labor that occurs behind each network node. The author defines network ethnography as following policy both virtually (through the internet and social media) and face-to-face (interviews with network actors and attendance at network events). Global networks, through the policy pipelines they form, reinforce a set of ideas and discourses about school reform. They institutionalize a set of beliefs, values, cultures and particular forms of behavior. Some of these beliefs revolve around the alleged failure of the State, government schools as ineffective and unfair, privatization though PPPs, the need for measurements of outcomes, the deployment of IT, etc. In this paper, the author draws on network ethnographic data to illustrate how this process takes place.

Significance: The focus of these three articles is not merely on mapping policy networks, but rather raising important questions about how networks transfer ideas and practices though policy actors, the role of intermediary organizations in this process, and more specifically, the extent to which think tanks are replacing universities as knowledge brokers within these networks.

Authors

• Gary L. Anderson, New York University

• Pedro Jose De La Cruz Albizu, New York University

• Andrea Lopez, New York University