This article examines the relationship between evidence-based policy-making and policy transfer. The policy transfer framework has been widely employed across a range of disciplines in recent years, yet has also attracted criticism for its failure to adequately explain why policy officials engage in transfer at all. This article considers the changed political landscape after the election of New Labour in the UK in 1997 and argues that the policy transfer of welfare-to-work policy ideas from the USA was at least partly driven by pressure to develop evidence-based policy. In doing so, this article provides two new contributions to the literature. First, it asserts New Labour's injunction to use evidence-based welfare policy provides an important explanation as to why UK officials adopted US welfare approaches. Second, using a series of interviews and document analysis, this article finds that, in addition to welfare policy ideas, UK policy officials adopted policy evaluation techniques from the USA.

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Recent scholarship in public administration has drawn attention to the proliferation of transnational policy‐making processes and administrative practices. Although policy transfer and transgovernmental scholars have recognized the influence of these practices on domestic policy outcomes, little is known about how distinctive configurations of cross‐jurisdictional policy networks form. This article addresses this issue by exploring three novel transgovernmental policy networks situated in the Anglosphere: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Drawing on constructivist perspectives, the article holds culture, values and norms as critical to the coalescence of Anglosphere policy networks and an important additional explanation of how transnational policy communities emerge. These hitherto unreported networks facilitate, first, the transfer of policy ideas to resolve domestic policy problems and, second, collaborative mechanisms to resolve transnational challenges. Consideration of these novel public sector ‘assemblages’ deepens our empirical and theoretical knowledge of the new spaces of transnational administration.

This article looks at the formation, evolution, operation and outcomes associated with a hitherto unexamined elite policy transfer network. The Windsor Conference, as it is known, is an Anglophone international policy network that is populated by the mandarins of labour market and social policy institutions in the Anglosphere countries of Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. This article presents the preliminary findings of qualitative research undertaken with senior policy officials active in the network. The research highlights the impact that transnational policy networking can have on the dissemination of policy ideas, especially amongst a cohort of elite policy officials. These findings offer an opportunity for critical reflection on the intersection of the concepts of policy transfer and transgovernmentalism, and it is contended that the research yields valuable empirical insights into the murky processes of transgovernmental policy transfer, policy learning and discrete regulation.

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Science diplomacy is coming to the fore as a formidable dimension of inter-state power relations. As the challenges of the world increasingly transcend borders, so too have researchers and innovators forged international coalitions to resolve global pathologies. In doing so, new channels of influence and opportunity have opened up for states alongside the 'traditional' modes of foreign diplomacy. Understanding how these channels influence global socio-economic outcomes is thereby crucial for scholars interested in the still-ambiguous structure and processes of global governance. This article advances understanding of the domains of science diplomacy by drawing attention to the 'political intercostalities' of state actors, scientific communities and other transnational actors within the new architectures of global governance. Here we trace the growing array of informal international associations alongside transgovernmental policy networks and 'global public-policy partnerships' that deal with highly specialised and technical matters of international policy and how they are drawn into science diplomacy. This article thus presents a research agenda for a particular mode of 'impact' in politics and international studies.