K. Lalenis – författare

This title provides insights into the empirical experiences of countries adopting policy institutions from other countries, in order to improve the performance or legitimacy of their own institutional structures. Both students of public and private administration, planning, political science, political geography, and comparative law recognise this issue as of high and increasing relevance. The volume presents a conceptual framework to grasp the potentials and limitations of institutional transplantation and features a collection of characteristic case studies drawn from 14 different countries on the actual process of institutional transplantation. These accounts cover a large variety of institutions including spatial and transport planning, education, housing, welfare, privatisation and political representation. The concluding chapter provides an overview of the advantages and dangers involved in adopting foreign policy institutions and the state of the art of our understanding of policy transfer and lesson-drawing in the context of the relevant academic disciplines.

Inevitably, at a panel discussion not too long ago comparing planning cultures the discussion turned on the issue of globalisation. As a member of the panel, this author asked those in the audience who lived and/or worked in a country different from their country of origin to raise their hands. About half of the audience of well over one hundred academic teachers and researchers from all comers of the world, the present author included did so. Next he asked who had a spouse or partner from a country different from their country of origin to also raise their hands. About half of the audience, the present author included, raised their hands. This is the soft side of globalisation. The soft side of globalisation is important. Exchanges, personal mobility, international romances, multi-culturalism and multi-lingualism (inevitably meaning non-native speakers struggling to keep up with native English speakers) are part of the academic scene, so much so that we can hardly imagine it to be otherwise. These are not entirely new phenomena, but they have become ever more prominent, relying on an ever more elaborate institutional infrastructure of exchange programmes, international journals, associations and the global conference industry. It was at the AESOP (Association of European Schools of Planning) congress at Bmo in the Czech Republic in July 2000 that the plan for this book was hatched.