Читать книгу How Cities Learn - Astrid Wood - Страница 19

How Cities Learn considers the role of temporality and historicity in policy mobilities. It illustrates that learning is a progressive conversation in which slowly, incrementally policymakers warm to an otherwise foreign notion and through these continuous exchanges, ideas, practices and programs are relocated and localized. This research will take a broader perspective to show that policy flows through “waves of innovation” (McCann and Ward 2010: 175) which only seem to be arriving more frequently. There are peaks – periods of rapid diffusion facilitated by either need or opportunity, or both – and valleys – periods when circulation is minimal. In South Africa, the learning about BRT was longwinded and drawn out, incremental and at times delayed. How Cities Learn illustrates that regardless of the speed of circulation, policy implementation remains cumbersome because policy is always political, meaning that it takes time to localize policy.

Arguments supporting a crisis-driven approach towards policymaking through the hurried acquisition of international policy models, are frequent in the policy mobilities literature (Brenner et al. 2010; Brenner and Theodore 2002; Clarke 2009; Peck 2002, 2003, 2011a; Peck and Theodore 2001; Theodore and Peck 1999, 2001, 2011; Ward 2011). The term “fast policy” (Jessop and Peck 1998; Peck and Theodore 2015) has been used to characterize the rapid introduction of off-the-shelf prefabricated best practice policies. Much of the fast policy discourse rests on the prevalence of knowledge sharing between the UK and the US in the 1980s and 1990s. This scholarship proposes that explosive tactics create momentum to drive through systematic transformation, suggesting that a more incremental approach could not sustain implementation procedures (Peck and Theodore 2010a, 2010b). In so doing, it takes for granted these processes as hectic and hurried arguing that ideas and innovations are appropriated because of their prevailing success elsewhere, which make them easily executed within local policymaking cycles.

Departing from the prevailing logic in the fast policy literature, in Chapter 6 I demonstrate that the learning process is in reality often lengthy, incremental and at times delayed. The dissemination of Singapore’s electronic road pricing system for taxing vehicular movement through the city provides an illustration of the multiple temporalities of policy learning. Whereas in London, a version of the pricing system was appropriated successfully, in New York, the Mayor’s proposal was defeated by the state legislature (Chua 2011). These arguments illustrate a difference between the speed at which a policy moves and the velocity at which it is implemented. Unlike Kingdon’s “policy window” (1995) which assumes a random confluence of people, choices, problems and solutions that come together at a particular juncture to enable learning (and if that window closes, the opportunity is missed), my findings suggest that ideas are acted upon through multiple temporalities. Policy adoption is an inherently political process and thus the speed at which a policy is adopted is distinct from its measures of long-term efficacy. The achievements of a new transportation system, be it related to its financial viability or impact on the city, may take two decades to become apparent and thus divorced from their assumed likelihood of success at the time of adoption. It seems then that there are a number of different speeds and temporalities through which policy flows.

Chapter 6 considers the multiple temporalities through which circulated policies emerge and remerge before adoption, reasoning that without these multiple attempts, policy adoption is unlikely to occur. The arguments that follow bridge the lacuna between historical and policy mobilities studies, illustrating the gradual, protracted and idiomatic manner through which transnational best practice proceeds, in contrast to the spontaneous and hasty process documented in scholarly literature on policy mobilities. Regardless of the speed through which best practice spreads, policy application remains cumbersome because policy is inherently political, involving people and personalities as well as regulations and restrictions. While it may seem as if circulated policies shorten the gestation time from policy introduction to policy adoption, these repeated attempts ensure that the turnover only appears accelerated.

The remainder of the book considers these issues in further detail.