Spatial governance and planning policy transfer in the Global South. The role of international agency and the recirculation of policies

The transfer of policy knowledge, approaches and practices has become ubiquitous across different policy areas. Municipalities, regional authorities and national governments routinely search for inspiration and solutions to their policy challenges abroad, including in the fields of spatial governance and planning . One of the most important reasons behind this trend – on the demand side – is the growing complexity of spatial development challenges in an increasingly volatile and uncertain world facing globalisation and now also deglobalisation trends, multiple crises (political, economic and environmental challenges, housing shortage, migration, disruptions of global value chains, etc.) and the growing interdependency between policy sectors and levels of government. Under these conditions, the tasks that decision and policymakers face are increasingly multifarious and compound, which requires new knowledge, diverse skills and templates for policy. At the same time, policy transfer is also driven by the supply side as new technologies and ideas to tackle urban challenges emerge, for instance based on big data, smart city platforms, sponge city solutions, renewable energy, circularity, or – more on the process side – on digital citizen engagement tools or co-creation and deliberative innovations, just to name a few. Importantly, the international circulation of policies is supported by an elaborated and expanding network of global and local knowledge transfer channels. This includes the proliferation of transnational city networks (such as United Cities and Local Governments, Eurocities, C40 Cities, the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate Change and Energy, etc.), the diffusion of spatial policy handbooks and catalogues of good practices produced by international organisation and research consortia (e.g, UN-Habitat and the World Bank, but also the ESPON programme, Urbact and the European Urban Initiative), the multiplication of international fora, conferences and study visits as well as of bi- or multi-lateral agreements between governments at different levels to promote exchange of planning and governance knowledge. This policy transfer infrastructure enables processes of diffusion and learning among planners and policymakers, which can be supported by advocacy networks and powerful multinational companies, but can also entail a more coercive or strongly incentivised and formalised modes of transfer of urban solutions, based on conditionalities related to membership of certain organisations (like the European Union for instance) or access to international funding schemes. On the one hand, policy transfer in the fields of spatial governance and planning can trigger innovation and learning, which improves the capacity of organisations at different territorial levels to deliver better strategies, policies and plans, make urban planning more democratic and bottom-up and overall, better achieve its political goals. On the other hand, it may be subject to pitfalls, as governments too often rely on policy transfer to legitimise domestic decisions and consider it a sort of ‘silver bullet’ to address or cover for domestic policy failures. This can lead to ‘copy-pasting’ of solutions from one context to another, or to blind emulation without necessarily considering the need to adapt the transferred policies and practices to the new local specificities, resources, capacities, and institutional idiosyncrasies, running the risk of policy failure due to misinformed or incomplete transfer or ‘fast-track institutionalisation’ processes. Whatever the outcome may be, it is important to highlight that in practice spatial governance and planning policy transfer seldom manifests as the simple transfer of a solution from a ‘place A’ to ‘place B’. It is a complex process involving many actors and requiring a more or less tortuous ‘translation’ of policy solutions to fit the recipient context. As such, it is a process embedded in multilevel power relations and dynamics, and subject to multiple interests including international organisations and powerful, globally-operating consultancy companies, financial organisations and think tanks. This entails biases towards certain approaches and solutions over others, which are seldom recognised and obscured by the glossy and naively positive communication on those transferred solutions conveyed through ‘sanitised’ best practice accounts or by leveraging on ‘comfortable landscapes’, such as the one framed by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. In turn, this has in various circumstances led to the emergence of a so-called ‘urban solutionism’ whereby ‘quick fixes’ to complex urban problems are circulated and advocated by international organisations, often disregarding any knowledge on how to address the underlying causes of contemporary urban challenges. One consequence of these multilevel power relations and dynamics and of the action of international organisations is that global policy transfer processes tend to be biased towards a rather unidirectional transfer of knowledge from the Global North to the Global South, reflecting the lack of attention paid to the specificities of urban planning within the latter and leading to a diffusion of ‘pasteurised’ urban solutions. This calls for a more critical view of the policy transfer processes in the Global South, as well as for a higher consideration of the policy transfer processes of spatial policy and planning knowledge within the cities and countries of the Global South and from the Global South to the Global North. Against this background, and echoing the recent claims towards a ‘Southern turn’ in planning research, this special issue aims to shed light on the under-researched issues of South-South and South-North circulation of policy knowledge in the field of spatial governance and planning. In so doing, through the collected contributions, we explore the following research questions. • What are the mechanisms and drivers of the circulation of spatial policies and planning knowledge within and out of the Global South contexts? • Who are the actors behind this process(es) and what are their agendas? • What are the factors that mediate the process of policy transfer and influence their impact on the ground? • What are the patterns of adoption and translation of internationally sourced spatial planning solutions within and from the Global South? In the remainder of this editorial, we will provide a brief overview of the policy transfer literature, and argue in favour of the opening of a ‘Global South’ perspective on the matter. Drawing on this, we set the objectives of this collection of papers against the existing knowledge gap and provide the readers with a roadmap to navigate the contents of the special issue. The editorial is rounded off by a number of future research perspectives, that ideally could together contribute to shape a preliminary research agenda on the matter.