The Local Politics of Policy Mobility: Learning, Persuasion, and the Production of a Municipal Sustainability Fix

Abstract

The authors draw on the concept of a 'sustainability fix'-a political discourse which allows development to proceed by accommodating both profit-making and environmental concerns-to analyze how municipalities muster support for development in the face of worries about negative environmental impacts. The case of Whistler, British Columbia, a tourist resort with an official orientation toward sustainable development, is used to illustrate the politics of balancing economic and environmental commitments. The authors deepen the sustainability fix concept by addressing: first, how such a fix is achieved through the assemblage of local and extralocal resources-specifically, 'imported' policy models which direct attention to certain definitions of problems and legitimate specific types of policy solutions; and second, how the politics of municipal policy-making is about more than contention and how it involves the sort of ongoing and broadly defined learning that has been largely undertheorized in the local politics literature. A key point is that local politics and policy making are always also extralocal in various ways. They involve a local politics of policy mobility. The authors expand on this premise to show how Whistler's model of sustainability planning has recently been circulated to other municipalities with similar social, economic^ and environmental conditions.

Post-war planning and policy tourism: the international study tours of the Town and Country Planning Association 1947–1961

“…Increasingly interdisciplinary in nature (Cook, forthcoming), this work originates in human geography and now involves those in cognate disciplines such as architecture, anthropology, planning and political science. It has focused on a number of areas of urban policy: creativity (Peck, 2012;Prince, 2012Prince, , 2014, drugs (McCann, 2008), economic development (Cook & Ward, 2011, 2012a, 2012b, sustainability (McLean & Borén, 2014;Temenos & McCann, 2012), transportation (Wood, 2014) and welfare reform (Peck & Theodore, 2001, 2010b. Under the rubric of urban policy mobility studies, this set of literatures has explored how and why certain models have, in the words of Pow (2014, p. 288), been given a "'license to travel' that enables [them] to secure a pool of receptive audiences worldwide."…”

The Mobility and/or Fixity of Urban and Planning Policies – The Role of Divergent Urban Planning Cultures

“…In their analysis of the making of Whistler (Canada) as a 'sustainable city ' Temenos and McCann (2012) are more precise in this regard as they analyze the 'local politics of policy mobility'. However, what is partially missing is an idea of how local politics, which means actors, institutions and relations between stakeholders, are framed by historically developed common understandings of the values and goals of urban development, of the role of the state in steering development and the relation between the local state and civil society.…”

“…Peck (2002) also speaks of 'fast policy regimes'; these are 'policies that work', which are globally circulating and adopted to change policies in certain places. McCann (2011;Temenos and McCann, 2012) alludes to the idea of 'policy mobilities' in order to explain the construction of cities through being part of spatially wider flows of capital, knowledge, and information. In his approach he tries to gauge the impacts of the 'global circulation of urban policies' on the making of certain cities and to examine more precisely which actors, institutions, processes and technologies are involved in the mobilization of urban policies.…”

“…In recent critical geographical and urban research literature the accelerated circulation of policy ideas and 'good' policy models has been theoretically packed into different concepts or notions like 'policies in motion' (Ward, 2006), 'policy mobilities ' (McCann, 2011;Temenos and McCann, 2012) 'trans -urban policy pipelines' (Cook and Ward, 2012), 'urban assemblages' (McFarlane, 2011;McCann and Ward, 2011b), or 'circulation of knowledge' (Robinson, 2011). From a basically political economic point of view, most of the scholars scrutinize, -which actors, institutions, organizations and technologies are involved in the development and dissemination of urban policy models, -who is benefiting from them in terms of power in certain locales, -which socio-spatial consequences the circulation of policy models in certain cities/regions produces, and more fundamentally, -how changes in urban governance and the making of cities could be explained.…”

The role of organizational culture in policy mobilities – the case of South Korean climate change adaptation policies

“…These practices include the formulation of policy documents, the development of measures and tools, and the negotiation with cooperating political institutions. Organizational culture, however, has not been addressed in the ongoing policy mobility debate, even in those studies that examine the translation of mobile policies in those institutional contexts that differ from political institutions or policy communities that shaped and circulated mobile policies (Peck and Theodore, 2010b;Söderström et al, 2013;Machold, 2015;Zapata and Zapata Campos, 2015;Albrecht, 2016).…”