Finisterra

THE PERSISTENCE OF POLICY MOBILITIES:

Kevin Ward — 2025-02-20

Starting with the field’s various intellectual antecedents, revealing the disciplinary elements combined in its constitution, this paper highlights five important characteristics of policy mobilities. We analyse and explore each in turn, discussing epistemological and empirical themes as the field has evolved and grown over the last two and a half decades. We pay particular attention to the contributions from those in geography and planning, as this work has sought to explain public policymaking across such diverse policy areas 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, an absent presence in the field thus far. In conclusion, the paper ends by discussing how focusing on a scalar politics through the nation-state can enrich future contributions to the field.

HOUSING LOW-INCOME PEOPLE IN GLOBALIZING TAIPEI

Yi-Ling Chen — 2025-02-20

The idea of “becoming a global city” has strongly influenced the urban policies in Taipei, since the 1990s. The Taipei City Government has implemented several mega projects in the city; claiming to improve Taipei’s global status, such as building the highest building in the world and creating a new financial district. Meanwhile, the squatter settlements, which used to be a part of Taipei’s landscape after 1949, have rapidly disappeared and are displaced by luxury buildings and parks. Globalizing Taipei has become the fertile ground of housing speculation and has led to serious problems with housing affordability. Recently, the post-2005 housing boom has triggered a strong social rental housing movement. This article will first examine how “global city discourse” has influenced the urban projects in Taipei, since the 1990s. Then, it will explore the status of low-income housing in Taipei’s urban policies. This paper will draw on several theoretical concepts, including policy mobility, global cities, the right to the city, neoliberalization in East Asian cities, and worlding cities, to discuss the problem of low-income housing in globalizing Taipei.

GENEALOGY AND CIRCULATION OF THE CONCEPT OF SMART CITIES IN CHILE:

Constanza Ulriksen Moretti — 2025-03-01

Although there are studies that describe the circulation of the concept of Smart Cities (SC) in Chile, there is a lack of research that investigates how this concept arises in the Chilean context. Based on the policy mobility approach and Foucault's genealogical method, this article shows the multiple origins of the term. Using mixed methods (analysis of the social network Twitter, ethnography of events, content analysis and interviews with key informants), the results show the national innovation and productivity agenda as the main ancestor, Spain as the main international reference, as well as some reappropriations of the concept, the "National Plan for Intelligent Territories". These results complement and add new elements to the analyzes of the circulation of the concept, accounting not only for the power relations behind the deployment and installation of the Smart Cites concept in Chile, but also that the term arises from the economic and innovation sphere and not from the urban sphere. While in the Global North the concept of Smart Cities appears as a narrative that seems to permeate urban policies and is even called “new urban policy” or “Smart City Policy”, in Chile it does not represent a new type of urbanism or a new “model” of urban development, but rather an urban narrative for the development of technological industries in the city.

EXPERIMENTATION AND POLICY MOBILITIES:

Diogo Gaspar Silva — 2025-02-20

Research on policy mobilities has focused much of its attention on studying how policies-from-elsewhere are learned, mediated and translated into different contexts, either focusing on early (a priori) and late (a posteriori) stages of policymaking processes without encompassing their full scope. In conceptualising policymaking as inherently indeterminate, open-ended and processual, this article introduces the ways in which pilot policy experiments mediate the intersections between a priori and a posteriori phases of policymaking processes. Drawing on the case of three Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) policy programmes in Greater Barcelona (Spain) and Greater Lisbon (Portugal), we discuss the importance of pilot policy experimentation through four key practices: Concept testing, generative learning and knowledge exchange, stakeholder engagement and policy translation. While not always comprehensive, teleological or hermetically separate, these practices serve as a heuristic framework to illustrate how policy experimentation shapes the learning, mediation and translation of urban policies across different policymaking stages. In so doing, we invite policy mobilities scholars to explore further the experimentation with urban policies as arenas in which policies-from-elsewhere are locally constituted and reconstituted across the diverse stages and temporalities of policymaking.

“SEEING LIKE A PROJECT”:

Mafalda Corrêa Nunes — 2025-02-20

This article seeks to contribute to the academic debate about policy mobility processes in the field of culture-led regeneration (CLR), focusing on how this policy model is understood and realised through project-based collaborative governance processes established in the framework of EU projects. It uses the Horizon 2020 project “ROCK” as a case-study, to explore how particular local and supra-local governance dynamics shaped CLR in Lisbon, through selective processes of inclusion and exclusion of actors, ideas and practices. Within the EU, CLR is taking place in contexts where a project logic is prevalent, with associated constraints in the duration, structure and requirements of specific funding programmes. This case-study shows how this can lead to short-sighted, instrumental, fragmented and temporary forms of governing CLR, that influence how different actors and perspectives are engaged in these processes. The current tendency for “seeing like a project” in EU urban development action, is seen to limit what and who is seen throughout these processes, contributing to the reproduction of biased CLR narratives and fast policy initiatives that may be unsuited to local realities and capacities. The article suggests a need to move beyond project-based thinking and to strategically and consistently invest in collaborative governance approaches that open space for plural visions and practices to influence the speed, the content and shape of CLR initiatives.

IMPORTING, FAILING, LEARNING.

Fatoumata D. Diallo — 2025-02-20

Policy transfers and mobilities literature have tackled several aspects of policy learning and policy failure in contexts of transfer. However, there is still room for more knowledge on the modalities of learning as an aftermath of the imported policy failing in its new context. This article offers answers through the exploration of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) projects’ implementation in two cities: Cape Town and Lagos. The article puts forth two main lessons about learning from travelling policies. Primarily, it confirms that policy failures occurring in both cities can be attributed to the modalities of policy transfer surrounding BRT, a popular urban traveling model. We affirm that the standardization processes of traveling policies can induce policy myopia once they’re implemented in new contexts and eventually lead to partial or complete policy failure. The second argument is that policymakers learn as they try to readjust the policy. While this new knowledge can be observed through the crafting of new solutions which are more sensitive to local realities, learning can also be hard to notice as the high political stakes surrounding traveling policies tend to prevent policymakers from making abrupt changes that would represent an admission of failure. This contribution is an invitation to explore policy learning resulting from the implementation of travelling policies from a comparative perspective and over the course of longer timeframes.