Finisterra, LX(128), 2025, e36541

ISSN: 0430-5027

doi: 10.18055/Finis36541

Artigo

Published under the terms and conditions of an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

THE PERSISTENCE OF POLICY MOBILITIES:

MULTIPLE ORIGINS, INTERDISCIPLINARY DEVELOPMENTS AND FUTURE RESEARCH

AGENDAS

CRISTINA TEMENOS

KEVIN WARD 1

ABSTRACT – Starting with the field’s various intellectual antecedents, which reveal the disciplinary elements

combined in its constitution, this paper highlights five key characteristics of policy mobilities. We analyze and explore

each in turn, discussing epistemological and empirical themes as the field has evolved and expanded over the last

twenty-five years. We pay particular attention to contributions from geography and planning, as these studies have

sought to explain public policymaking across diverse policy areas such as economic development, education, health,

transport, and welfare. We argue for the need to revisit the role of the nation-state in policy mobilities research, a

presence that has so far been largely absent in the field. In conclusion, the paper discusses how a focus on scalar politics

through the nation-state can enrich future contributions to the field.

Keywords: Policy mobilities; scale; nation-state; policymaking; informational infrastructures.

RESUMO – A PERSISTÊNCIA DA MOBILIDADE DE POLÍTICAS: MÚLTIPLAS ORIGENS, DESENVOLVIMENTOS

INTERDISCIPLINARES E AGENDAS DE INVESTIGAÇÃO FUTURAS. Começando pelos diversos antecedentes intelectuais

do campo, que revelam os elementos disciplinares combinados na sua constituição, este artigo destaca cinco

características fundamentais da mobilidade de políticas. Analisamos e exploramos cada uma delas, discutindo temas

epistemológicos e empíricos à medida que o campo evoluiu e se expandiu ao longo dos últimos vinte e cinco anos.

Damos especial atenção às contribuições provenientes da geografia e do planeamento, uma vez que esses estudos têm

procurado explicar a formulação de políticas públicas em áreas tão diversas como o desenvolvimento económico, a

educação, a saúde, o transporte e o bem-estar. Argumentamos a necessidade de revisitar o papel do Estado-nação na

investigação sobre as mobilidades de políticas, uma presença até agora amplamente ausente no campo. Em conclusão,

o artigo discute como um foco na política escalar através do Estado-nação pode enriquecer as contribuições futuras

para o campo.

Palavras-chave: Mobilidade de políticas; escala; estado-nação; formulação de políticas; infraestruturas

informacionais.

RESUMEN – LA PERSISTENCIA DE LA MOVILIDAD DE POLÍTICAS: MÚLTIPLES ORÍGENES, DESARROLLOS

INTERDISCIPLINARIOS Y AGENDAS DE INVESTIGACIÓN FUTURAS. A partir de los diversos antecedentes intelectuales

del campo, que revelan los elementos disciplinares combinados en su constitución, este artículo destaca cinco

características fundamentales de las movilidades de políticas. Analizamos y exploramos cada una de ellas, discutiendo

temas epistemológicos y empíricos a medida que el campo ha evolucionado y se ha expandido durante los últimos

veinticinco años. Prestamos especial atención a las contribuciones de la geografía y la planificación, ya que estos

estudios han buscado explicar la formulación de políticas públicas en áreas tan diversas como el desarrollo económico,

la educación, la salud, el transporte y el bienestar. Argumentamos la necesidad de revisar el papel del Estado-nación en

la investigación sobre las movilidades de políticas, una presencia hasta ahora ampliamente ausente en el campo. En

conclusión, el artículo discute cómo el enfoque en la política escalar a través del Estado-nación puede enriquecer las

contribuciones futuras al campo.

Palavras clave: Movilidades de políticas; escala; estado-nación; formulación de políticas; infraestructuras

informacionales.

Recebido: 28/06/2024. Aceite: 31/10/2024. Publicado: 21/02/2025.

Department of Geography, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, M13 9PL, Manchester, UK. E-mail:

cristina.temenos@manchester.ac.uk, kevin.ward@manchester.ac.uk.

Temenos, C., Ward, K. Finisterra, LX(128), 2025, e36541

HIGHLIGHTS

 The field of policy mobilities emerged out of a range of disciplines. We focus on five themes

to characterise the study of policy mobilities.

 The nation-state has always been present in urban policymaking but it has often gone

relatively unstudied.

 Bringing the nation-state back in also necessitates considering the scalar politics of policy

mobilities.

I. INTRODUCTION

How best to explain and understand the emergence and formation of public policy in the twenty-

first century? This is an intellectual challenge, the addressing of which has involved drawing upon

elements of several disciplines. These include architecture, anthropology, geography, history,

planning, and political science. Each of these disciplines includes contributions that address particular

issues related to what they label as “policy”. The combining of these elements over the last couple of

decades has constituted the emergence of the field known as “policy mobilities”. Over a decade ago,

Peck (2011, p. 774) argued, “the mobilities approach resembles a rolling conversation rather than a

coherent paradigm”. This field includes scholars working within Actor-Network Theory (ANT), Science

and Technology Studies (STS), as well as approaches more traditionally associated with policy

mobilities: political economy, post-colonialism, and post-structuralism, and, as a result, it is a field to

which there are several co-existing and overlapping strands.

In this context, we provide an overview of this rather unruly field of policy mobilities. Not the

first of its kind, of course (Baker & Temenos, 2015; Peck, 2011; Temenos & McCann, 2013; Schäfer,

2022), and likely not the last. Nevertheless, in the first section, we bring together the different

intellectual starting points for the field’s emergence, in particular, its reaction against the political

science/public administration work on policy transfer. In the second section, we turn to five themes

that have characterised and structured to date the field we argue: geographies of public policymaking,

the politics of public policy-making, the privileging of “elites”, the role of authenticity, and

informational infrastructures in public policy-making. We could have highlighted many more, and

these are just a taster of the rich and varied work produced within the field. The geographies of public

policymaking highlight the inter-connected and variegated geographies, while the political nature of

‘making-up’ policy focuses on the role of interpretation, mediation and translation. Third, the

privileging of “elites” in the making of public policy and questions of ‘who counts’ as expert is explored.

We then discuss the role of authenticity and of “being there”, such as in examples of policy tourism.

Finally, there is the notion of 'informational infrastructures', which encourage, facilitate, and support

the mobility of public policy. Next, we make the case for bringing back in the nation-state to studies of

policy mobilities. This we do because, of course, it never went away as the object of our analysis.

We argue that one important strand of future policy mobilities research should consider the

processual and relational ways in which multi-level governance is at work in the making of policy.

While the nation-state is and always has been present in the making of urban policy, it has not always

been visible. Furthermore, the nation-state’s presence is geographically variegated. Its lack of visibility,

however, does not mean that the nation-state is any less powerful in the making of policies, and it can

have profound effects on whether policies become ‘best practice’ or are able to be made mobile.

Therefore, we argue that more attention to the nation-state in research on policy mobilities can help

to draw out important political (both big P and little p politics) processes though which ideas are given

the power of mobility. In the conclusion, we discuss how bringing in the nation-state also necessitates

grappling with the scalar politics of policy mobilities.

II. POLICY MOBILITIES: BEYOND A “ROLLING CONVERSATION” TO A SPRAWLING, INTER-

DISCIPLINARY ‘FIELD’

Where to start? Geographically and intellectually? In asking and seeking to answer these

questions in relation to “policy mobilities”, we do so from within the field we seek to represent. Critical

Temenos, C., Ward, K. Finisterra, LX(128), 2025, e36541

review exercises of this sort are never neutral, despite what their authors might sometimes claim. We

acknowledge our position as urban geographers of particular intellectual stripes (post-structural

political economists) in the generation of this field, together with many others of course. Hence, what

follows makes no claim over objectivity, but rather reflects our organising and tidying of a still growing

and unruly set of contributions, with the aim of opening up (not closing down) debates and discussions

over the field’s future.

Let us rewind twenty-five years. The very early 2000s saw a small number of studies of national

welfare reform in the UK and the US (Theodore & Peck, 2000; Peck, 2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2003, 2004).

As explained at the time, the focus was on the “phenomenon of rapid international (and increasingly

‘interlocal’) policy transfers in welfare-to-work/workfare” (Peck & Theodore, 2001, p. 429). In the

comparison of the UK and the US, they joined a long tradition of studies from across political science,

public administration and sociology (Dolowitz & Marsh, 1996; Rose, 1991; Wolman, 1992). Yet the

focus was also quite different from these past studies. It questioned the taken-for-granted assumptions

in these disciplines over how something called ‘policy’ moved, or transferred, from one location to

another. That large and still growing body of work on policy transfer spread across political science

journals continues to seek to model and to theorize the process of transfer, creating typologies of the

actors and institutions involved, identifying the power relations through which it occurs, and

specifying the conditions under which it occurs (Benson & Jordan, 2011; Dolowitz & Marsh, 2012).

Peck (2011, p. 774) has termed this approach “the rational-formalist tradition of work on policy

transfer”. For consideration of the evolution of this field in relation to policy mobilities literature, see

McCann and K. Ward (2012) and Cook (2015). Those working out of other disciplines, such as

anthropology, architecture, and history, have studied the role of professions in making policy across

geographical locations, contributing to the shaping of the field (Cook et al., 2015; Gómez & Oinas, 2023;

Harris & Moore, 2013; Healey & Upton, 2010; Nasr & Volait, 2003; Stanek, 2020; Shore & Wright, 1997;

Ward, S., 2007). This focuses on multiple actors and their relationships to places beyond which they

live, and work has shaped the relational-constructivist approaches to understanding urban planning

and public policy making (Baker et al., 2020). Additionally, most recently it has been the turn of those

in criminology, education and sociology to contribute (Ball, 2016; Laing et al., 2024; Lewis, 2021;

McKenzie, 2017; Newburn et al., 2018; Pitton & McKenzie, 2022; Savage, 2020; Savage et al., 2021).

Thus, and perhaps trite to note, the field subsequently labelled “policy mobilities” materialised

out of a set of already existing interests. What often sets apart these “new” fields from their intellectual

predecessors is their combinatory nature, and so it has been with how policy mobilities has reworked

previously unconnected (or under-connected) work across disciplines, as the last twenty-five years

has seen a still growing body of work emerge on different areas of public policy. In some of the earlier

formulations, Cook (2008, p. 776) outlined his approach as one based on the ontological understanding

of “processual and contingent disembedding, mobilisation and re-embedding of policies”. Peck (2011)

subsequently characterised this “new generation of social constructivist work” as:

much more attentive to the constitutive sociospatial context of policy-making activities,

and to the hybrid mutations of policy techniques and practices across dynamized

institutional landscapes. Here, the movement of policy is more than merely a

transaction or transfer but entails the relational interpenetration of policy-making sites

and activities, spawning phenomena like global policy ‘models’, transnational

knowledge networks, and innovative forms of audit, evaluation, and advocacy. (Peck,

2011, p. 774)

As one might expect, we have seen the number of contributions using the term “policy

mobilities” increase, in part because the questions behind its initial emergence remain pertinent. So

we have witnessed a concomitant growth in themes that give the field shape and structure. Five have

proven particularly important, we argue.

First, we have seen the challenging and questioning of the assumptions over the inter-connected

and variegated geographies of public policymaking. This has argued for a complex map of policy

emergences and movements between and within those cities labelled as being in the Global North and

South as well as amongst cities within the Global South. Examples of this work include Bok (2015,

2020), Bunnell and Das (2010), Chang (2017), Croese (2018), Jirón et al. (2022), Montero (2017,

2018), Mukhtarov et al., 2017), Silvestre and Jajamovich (2022), and Song et al. (2018). This eschews

any past work that starts by assuming some cities in the Global North are naturally those from which

others should learn. They demonstrate, as Robinson (2015) notes, the myriad ways that policy

emerges from cities located outside of the Western canon of global cities as well as the richness that

Temenos, C., Ward, K. Finisterra, LX(128), 2025, e36541

reorienting the map from whence best practice policymaking originates can bring to the field

(Robinson, 2005).

Second, Ward (2006, p. 71) has emphasised that the “process of ‘making up’ policy is an acutely

political one”. That is, their arrival locally involves active drawing together interpretation, mediation

and translation (Lane, 2022; Prince, 2017; Robinson, 2015). It can also involve acts of ignoring and

representation (Bunnell & Das, 2010, Montero 2018). There is nothing “natural” about the

construction of some policies as succeeding and others as failing, for example. Rather, the ascribing of

a policy to one of these two categories reflects the privileging of some relations over others. Power

geometries are at work in structuring those policies that move from one place to another and the

nature of their journeys. The arriving at or making up of policy is also then a profoundly geographical

process, in and through which different places are constructed as facing similar problems in need of

similar solutions. This aspect of failure and success is one with which the field continues to wrestle

(McCann & Ward, 2015; Temenos & Lauermann, 2020). Temenos (2024) has recently argued for the

need to disaggregate the notion of “failure” into its discursive and material elements. This is part of a

wider trend in the field towards acknowledging the affective, discursive and emotional aspects to

policy mobilities (Baker & McGuirk, 2019; McKenzie, 2017). Here, the argument is that both the

discursive and material elements reflect the spatializing of atmospheres of feeling in explicitly political

ways. Their encountering is through a connection to history and place, engaged in outcomes shaped

by political will (Bok, 2020; Doucette, 2020; Wilson & Darling, 2016).

Third has been the seeming focus on policy elites of one sort or another in much of the field. That

is, a focus on the production of something called neo-liberal “hegemony” through an attention to the

work done by those in consultancies, governments, and think tanks. While work in this vein continues

to be important in the field, of course (Prince, 2012; Vogelpohl, 2019), during the last decade or so,

attention to others involved in the making and questioning of public policy has emerged (Baker et al.,

2020; Lauermann & Vogelpohl, 2019; Temenos, 2016, 2017). Often self-labelled as studies of “counter-

hegemony”, this is an attention to those “ideas … [that] … question and challenge contemporary policy

orthodoxies” (McCann & Duffin, 2023, p. 85). McKenzie et al. (2021, p. 397) argue, “unusual suspects

in disparate locations can now access and wield influence in policy processes, perhaps as never

before”. Temenos (2017, p. 585) has used the language of “countermobilities” to capture and highlight

the “resistances, disruptions and alternative pathways used in activism for policy reform by people in

disparate locations”. As McCann (2011, p. 122) has argued, “these actors frequently inhabit and seek

to utilize the infrastructures that also make more traditional policy transfer possible, particularly the

Internet.” In some cases, work in this vein has drawn upon parallel traditions over trans-national and

trans-urban activism and social movements (Laing et al., 2024; Temenos, 2017; Thompson, 2020).

Fourth, González (2011) developed the notion of ‘policy tourism‘, where policy makers and

those responsible for implementing policy travel to the ‘original site’ to see in-person how policies

work. Using Barcelona and Bilbao, González (2011, p. 1414) highlights how these cities (as well as

“British or American cities”), “with high levels of political and financial autonomy and charismatic

leaders … are coming up with creative neo-liberal solutions, which are emulated by foreign

policymakers”. In the field, this notion is both foundational and omnipresent, characterising most

studies (Cook & Ward, 2011; Ward, 2011). Subsequent work has also taken up the conceptual

development of this notion (Wood, 2014). For example, Baker and McGuirk (2019, p. 561) argue “for

greater attention to the active and affective production of authenticity as a means to better understand

policy tourism and its significant effect on policy learning and mobility”. Challenging the notion of

presentism, that all policy making is referent only to itself, Cook et al. (2015), amongst others, have

sought to historicize matters (See also Lees & Warwick, 2022; McCann & Duffin, 2023; Temenos, 2024).

They reveal the importance of professional study tours, early examples of policy tourism, in the

evolution of UK planning.

Fifth, and finally, is the notion of ‘informational infrastructure’ introduced by McCann (2008,

2011). This underscored an earlier, shorter definition (McCann, 2008), where he emphasized the role

of these infrastructures in the facilitating and mediating of the role of experts and expertise, arguing

they are “highly political rather than merely informational” (McCann, 2008, p. 899). Identified are

three types of “agents of urban policy transfer” (McCann, 2011, p. 114): “educators and trainers,

professional organizations and supralocal policy organizations, and the popular media”. Together with

a range of objects (presentations, reports, etc.) and spaces (conferences, tours etc.), they act as a means

of making policy mobilities possible (and probable). While most of the subsequent policy mobilities

appears to have taken the existence of these informational infrastructures almost as a given, there has

been relatively little development of the notion itself (although see Cook & Ward, 2012; Franco & Ortiz,

2020; Temenos, 2016; Temenos & McCann, 2014; Ward, 2024).

Temenos, C., Ward, K. Finisterra, LX(128), 2025, e36541

III. BRINGING BACK THE NATION-STATE

If place, power, actors, expertise, and infrastructures go into how we analyse and we understand

the ways in which public policy making is constructed and mobilised, the multiple assemblages of

policy mobility can reveal multifaceted processes, shedding light on seeming absences. For us, one key

element has been the nation-state. Therefore, we argue that there needs to be a reconsideration of the

role of the nation-state in policy mobilities. Much of the initial work in the field over two decades ago

sought to challenge the methodological nationalism that tended to characterise work in political

science and public administration (McCann & Ward, 2011). In eschewing the ontological privileging of

a particular scale, work in the field turned its attention towards inter-local or inter-urban policy

mobilities. Within policy mobilities, then, we have seen a large and significant programme of work on

urban policies (Fischer, 2014; McCann, 2008; McCann & Ward, 2011; Montero, 2017; Peck & Theodore,

2012; Temenos & McCann, 2014; Wood, 2014). Indeed, we would go so far as to argue that this shift

from one scale to another was foundational for the emergence of the wider field, as suggested, for

example, in the use of the global-urban shorthand (McCann & Ward, 2010). The “nation” was literally

absent. However, we want to argue for a rethinking of the place of the nation-state in policy mobilities,

as part of a wider argument over rethinking the notion of “scale”. We have long argued that policy

mobilities approaches can, and in some cases have, extended

geographers’ ongoing conceptualization of scale as socially produced, relational and

territorial, interconnected and malleable… From this perspective, the national scale and

the national states are no longer primary agents in the production of policies and places,

as the policy transfer literature suggests, even as it also acknowledges that is would be

wrong to discount national influence on urban policy (Temenos & McCann, 2014, p.

347).

To do this, we draw upon the 1990s debates over the role of the nation-state under globalization

(Leitner, 1990, MacLeod & Goodwin, 1999). Here, arguments centred on its form and function. The use

of the shorthand of the “hollowing out” was not to argue that the nation-state was no longer important

or present, although there were some who pushed that point, but rather that its role had qualitatively

changed. The nation-state remained important under globalization, while we also witnessed the

emergence as important sites of decision-making and policy-making sub-national and supra-national

scales (Brenner, 2004; Cox, 1993). The point of departure became about how different state sites were

co-present in a combinatory manner. This was a more open, processual and relational theorization of

the role of the nation-state, one from which we argue we might usefully learn in thinking about a future

strand of policy mobilities research. As others have begun to argue (Lorne, 2024; Schindler et al.,

2018), how the nation-state remains present in the making of public policy is in part reflective of the

extent to which a country’s governmental systems is centralized/decentralized. Indeed, some of the

earliest work in policy mobilities examined the role of two nation states – the UK and the US – and the

emergence of welfare reform (Peck & Theodore, 2001; Theodore & Peck, 2000). Moreover, in the UK,

in a highly centralized system, the Business Improvement District policy introduced in the early 2000s

was in effect a national urban policy (Ward, 2006). This is in contrast to the Canadian and US systems,

out of which Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) emerged (Hoyt, 2006). What we are suggesting

going forward is an attention to those elements of government co-present in the making of policy

mobilities, and that includes the various ways in which the nation-state is involved, directly and

indirectly.

The absent presence of the nation-state in policy mobilities research has often begged the

question of what is ‘urban’ about policy mobilities? Research covering transnational activism as a route

of mobilising (commonly national) policies, grapples with but rarely theorises the tensions between

the need to change national policies and their embodied everyday effects often encountered in urban

spaces. Studies of drug policies have highlighted this tension (McCann, 2008, McCann & Duffin, 2023;

Swanson, 2013, Temenos, 2017, 2024). The apparent re-emergence (because, of course, it never truly

disappeared) of the nation-state in urban policymaking has gained momentum since the 2016

adoption of the New Urban Agenda, UN Habitat’s initiative to guide signatories in developing national

urban plans for the 21st century.

For cities in the Global South, whose infrastructural development programs are often dependent

on international development aid, this has entailed a kind of formalisation of the role of the nation in

guiding how development resources were spent in urban areas, with an implication being that there

would be more transparent processes through which decision-making would happen in urban

Temenos, C., Ward, K. Finisterra, LX(128), 2025, e36541

development. While cities in Global North countries have tended to engage this through renewed calls

for more control of resource spending on already devolved powers. For example, in the UK, the

emergence of ‘city deals’ that have devolved certain health, transportation, and other infrastructural

decision-making powers, have seen city mayors arguing for more control over national budgets, and

those that have seen some of the better successes at this model of governance indeed have had fiscal

powers devolved to parallel policy-making powers. The adaptation of the city deal ‘model’ from the UK

to Australia also allowed the federal government to have a more direct hand in policy areas usually left

to regional state government (Pill & Gurran, 2023).

The urban remains important both as a dynamic site in and through which relational processes

of social and economic reproduction are realised, as well as a scale at which relationality is rendered

legible. The urban then has ontological, epistemological, as well as empirical value bound up in the

field of policy mobilities. Thus, while every study of policy mobilities certainly does not have to be an

urban study (and in fact some of the foundational studies of policy mobility were not urban at all (i.e.

Peck, 2001a), it is important to acknowledge the field’s intellectual debts.

IV. CONCLUSION: REVEALING THE NATION-STATE, REVISITING SCALE?

In this short article, we have introduced and reviewed the field of policy mobilities. Given the

generative contributions to date, what might be its future trajectory? There are many possibilities, of

course. A series of relatively recent interventions have each made the case for some particular futures

over others (McCann & Duffin, 2023; Prince, 2024; Ward, 2024). The strand we identify here likely

says as much about our own disciplinary and intellectual predispositions and preferences as they do

about some already existing future research agenda, the discovery of which is only a matter of time.

In a recent commentary considering the influence of Leitner (1990), which argued for a multi-

scalar relational analysis of urban processes to understand contemporary urban geographies, Martin

(2024) noted that Leitner’s paper

received more citations in the last five years (2018-2023) than in the first five years

after publication (in both cases omitting self-citations). This signals the persistence of

its approach, which has helped to shape several decades of attention to the complex

interplay of structure and agency in constituting places at multiple scales. (Martin,

2024, 2)

In this instance, the engagement with relational scalings of the city in the 1990s in urban

geography then gave way to tumultuous debate on scale in the early 2000s (Brenner, 2001; Marston,

2000). MacLeod and Goodwin (1999, p. 505) emphasised the ongoing “reluctance to engage explicitly

with the critical issue of scale” in urban geographies. Post 2010 saw a turn further away from

discussions of scale in urban geography, including the then-nascent literature on urban policy

mobilities.

However, if we recognise the multi-level nature of policy mobility and aim to meaningfully

engage with calls to decentre the map, then focusing on the nation-state, as a relational object of

analysis will also require scholars of urban policy mobilities to take Leitner’s argument seriously and

grapple with scale. As Andersson and Cook (2019, p. 1364) argue, “cities do not exist in a spatial and

scalar vacuum and policy mobilisation is not always focused on cities”. Furthermore, local-level

policymaking is not always the focus of urban policy mobilities studies (Temenos, 2024). Andersson

and Cook (2019, p. 1364) further argue that policy mobilities research should look for “insights into

the spatial, scalar and institutional dynamics of policy mobilisation”. Thirty-five years on then, it is

perhaps time for urban policy mobilities, and urban geographies more broadly, to take on a reckoning

with the seemingly straightforward, yet frustratingly elusive, concept of scale and the city.

AUTHOR`S CONTRIBUTION

Cristina Temenos: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft preparation, Writing – review

and editing. Kevin Ward: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft preparation, Writing –

review and editing.

Temenos, C., Ward, K. Finisterra, LX(128), 2025, e36541 
 
7 
 
ORCID ID 
 
Cristina Temenos   https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1635-3823  
Kevin Ward   https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3810-0889  
 
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 
We would like to thank the editors and reviewers of the Special Issue for their invitation to contribute and 
their helpful comments. Cristina Temenos would like to acknowledge the support of grant MR/V02468X/1. 
 
 
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