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Volume 37.5 September 2013 151026

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12044

Circuits of Knowledge and Techniques:

The Transnational Flow of Planning
Ideas and Practices
PATSY HEALEY

Abstract
This article considers the conceptual and methodological tools which may help to focus
the critical analysis of transnational flows of planning ideas and practices in the present
period. The discussion starts from the rejection of the modernization myth with its
linear concept of a single development trajectory and reviews the philosophical
background to the array of alternative conceptions which have displaced it. It then
examines three, often overlapping, fields of intellectual development which offer
promising concepts for exploring contemporary transnational flows of planning ideas
and practices: actor-network theory (especially with respect to the way ideas and
technologies get to travel and get translated), institutionalist versions of policy
discourse analysis (discourse structuration and institutionalization, in particular), and
discussions about circuits of knowledge and hegemonic projects in the globalization and
international development literatures. Drawing on these, I suggest that critical analysis
of such flows should give special attention to the origin stories of such ideas, their
travelling histories and the translation experiences through which exogenous
planning ideas and practices become localized. I conclude by commenting on what
may be distinctive about transnational flows in the present period, why undertaking
critical analysis of such flows is valuable, and key methodological attitudes to keep in
mind in conducting such analyses.

The ow of planning ideas and practices

These days, ideas about what places could and should be like and how to develop and
manage them seem to flow around our globalized and interconnected world with
increasing speed and ease. Yet research also make us aware of the significance of the
resistances, contingencies and adaptations which shape the meanings and impacts such
ideas have when they arrive in a particular locale. These flows and the tensions they give
rise to are no new phenomena. Palmyra, on the margins of the Roman Empire in the
second century AD, adapted Roman ideas of what a great city should look like to the
practices of a Middle-Eastern trading centre. Peter the Great borrowed from all kinds of
Western European models to design and produce St Petersburg. The colonial regimes of
the age of empires (the mid-nineteenth- to the mid-twentieth century) energetically
promoted ideas about how cities should be laid out and how urban land and property
rights should be organized. These have left legacies that affected countries are still living
My thanks to the editors of this special issue for inviting me to participate in the IBG-RGS Symposium in
September 2010, and for their careful editing work since then; also to the comments of other symposium
participants and authors. Thanks also to the three IJURR referees for their helpful comments.
2013 Urban Research Publications Limited. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA

The transnational ow of planning ideas and practices

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with, in various ways. Such colonial networks also sometimes became channels for
reverse flow, such as the idea of the bungalow, a housing form with origins in India,
which morphed into an idealized building model in Britain (King, 1984). These days,
there are all kinds of transnational flow patterns, as new and old centres of hegemonic
domination export and are looked to for policy models and experiences (Ward, 2002;
Stone, 2004; McCann, 2008).
Such flows raise questions about why certain ideas and practices develop hegemonic
power, in the sense that they are taken to be the apex of desirability and appropriateness
in places which may be far from their original invention. Today, in the urban policy
field, cities such as Barcelona, Freiburg and Vancouver are held up as exemplars of
urban regeneration, environmental care, urban planning and drug-management policy
(McCann, 2008; UN-Habitat, 2009; Healey, 2010). Vidyarthi (2010) asks how it came
about that, in post-independence India, American conceptions of how to design a good
neighbourhood were taken up as an ideal building form. He describes the political ideas
and professional networks the circuits of knowledge (Featherstone and Venn, 2006;
McCann, 2008) through which the concept was transferred to this different context,
and the local contingencies which encouraged its enthusiastic adoption. Similar analyses
of the practice of participatory budgeting (Abers, 1998; Souza, 2001) or the provision
of micro-credit enabling poor people to invest in their own dwelling units and business
initiatives (Roy, 2010a) show how some concepts become ideas in good currency. Such
concepts often seem to float around in an ether of good ideas, circulating in a
particular political, policy or professional discourse, detached from any connection to
their origin and the conditions which made them practically useful in the first place.
Such questions are not, of course, specific to transnational flows. Transnational and
global flows are a special case of the more general question of how manifestoes,
propaganda and expert knowledge create images of good development and good
development practices and how these are then taken up, circulated and adapted in
different contexts. Their value as a focus of attention at the present time is that ideas
about how to plan and manage cities are flowing vigorously around the world (see, for
example, Czarniawska, 2002; UN-Habitat, 2009; Healey and Upton, 2010; Peck and
Theodore, 2010), connecting material and institutional worlds which are often very
different and calling into question their content and value.
This article centres on conceptual and methodological tools which may help to focus
the critical analysis of the transnational flow of planning ideas and practices in the
present period. At the moment, the scholarly ether in the social sciences is awash with
new directions and intellectual projects, many of which overlap in their focus and
analytical recommendations. In this article, I explore three different methodologies,
each with its particular trajectory, which offer resources for analysing the flow of policy
ideas and practices. All three strands of analysis have developed as an alternative to
positivist social science and to linear notions of social progress associated with the
twentieth-century impetus to modernization. After briefly describing what these ideas
displace, I summarize the broad philosophical ground on which they are situated. I
then discuss three fields of theory/analysis which seem particularly helpful in their
methodological suggestions actor-network theory (ANT), interpretive policy analysis
(IPA) and work on mobilities and circuits of knowledge. I conclude by commenting
on what may distinguish the present period in terms of the transnational flows of policy
ideas and practices and why critical analysis of such flows is valuable, rounding off with
some general points which should focus our critical attitude as we probe this broad and
multifaceted phenomenon.

The modernization myth in the planning and development eld

The dominant idea which infused the urban and regional planning field, broadly
understood, in the mid-twentieth century, was of a linear, human-centred world of
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societal progress. The utopia aimed for was framed in Western terms. The challenges of
urbanization resulted in the planning goal of advancing such progress by developing
cities and regions that were more prosperous, more socially just and provided good
amenities for daily life and for conducting business. It was assumed that the built
environment could be idealized either in a form which combined rural attributes with
urban amenities (the suburban lifestyle of single-family dwellings, and neighbourhood
amenities), or a high-density, high-rise combination of light and air with cosmopolitan
urbanity. Images of urban form, promoted through international networks of architects,
and movements such as CIAM (Congrs International dArchitecture Moderne) (Gold,
1997), flowed vigorously around the world, influencing the conceptions of politicians
who came to power with projects to modernize their country or city (see Hall, 1988;
Ward, 2002; Nasr and Volait, 2003).
On a broader scale, ideas about territorial development also travelled widely. Among
the most influential were concepts of growth poles, of urban and regional settlement
hierarchies and gravity models developed from particular American and European
geographies, and a form of integrated regional development as expressed in the work of
the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a major project of the US New Deal programme
initiated in the 1930s (Selznick, 1949). But these images of urban form and spatial
development were not the only concepts that flowed around. There were also ideas about
appropriate ways of organizing government for urban and regional development tasks,
and for territorial development generally, as well as ideas about law and government
procedures, and about the role of an expert planner as above politics.1 Friedmann
(1973) provides a revealing account of and critical reflection on his own experience in
the 1950s and 1960s as a carrier of such ideas, through US aid networks, into Latin
America.
Several intellectual perspectives and normative orientations were wrapped up in such
ideas. The first was an ambiguous ontology of systemic structures searching for
equilibrium populated by atomistic individuals. Social systems were imagined as single
integrated wholes, which could or should develop over time to arrive at better
conditions for human life in cities and regions. This better life was conceived in two
versions, one as the climax of capitalist evolutions, achieved through the organization of
market processes responding to the aggregate behaviour of self-regulating individual
consumers, or as the triumph of a communistic society of small-scale self-regulating
social units centred on artisan production, arrived at through the (never achieved)
evolution of state-centred socialism. Both versions understood development primarily
in material, economic terms. Socio-spatially, a hierarchical organization was assumed.
Epistemologically, this conception of a universal, linear and hierarchical pathway to
development was underpinned by a celebration of scientific and expert knowledge,
conceived in a positivist mode. This contrasted knowledge (systematized, technical)
with experience. Formal science was privileged over practical knowledge (see
Bernstein, 2010). Such a conception handled time using methods of comparative statics,
with evolutionary pathways either assumed or inferred.
These planning concepts thus carried with them very distinctive perspectives,
originating from intellectual and political debates in Europe and North America. Despite
contestations in their home territory, such concepts were carried by the networks of
colonial and postcolonial administration, by the alliances of cold-war global politics, and
by the professional training and networks of different expert groups (development
economists, architect-planners, civil engineers). Examples include practices of land-use
zoning, with their assumptions of individualized and formally recorded land and
property rights, and the notion that spatial plans should be drawn up after undertaking
systematic expert surveys, and/or after following careful methods of relating overall
1

The notion of the planner as a technical and politically neutral expert was widely held (see Ward,
2002; Watson, 2009; see also Harrison et al., 2007, in relation to South Africas planning history).

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goals to analysed options in order to arrive at the content of formal plans which should
guide development.
The way many of these concepts landed and were realized in particular places across
the world has been subject to intense criticism in the past few decades. Over and above
the critique arising from the revolt of colonized peripheries, a key criticism centred on
the assumptions about a linear development pathway. These tended to blind those
promoting such concepts to the development dynamic evolving in very different cultures
and histories (see Cornwall and Coelho, 2007; Watson, 2009; Perera, 2010). Where
experts were more aware of such differences, they often failed (and still fail) to notice
the assumptions built into their ideas about particular techniques and organizational
forms. Yet for some planners involved in transferring planning concepts from one place
to another, these encounters were an important learning experience. Otto Koenigsberger,
himself a kind of displaced person, developed a philosophy of action planning from
his experiences in India and elsewhere (Ward, 2010). John Friedmann re-oriented his
philosophy of development as a result of his experiences, to emphasize a much more
relational ontology and epistemology on which he built his innovative contributions to
regional development and planning theory (Friedmann, 1973; 1987). Both concluded
that many of the deeply embedded assumptions carried within the development concepts
they had been using were inappropriate to the contexts and situations they faced.
These experiences raised questions about the general universal applicability of
planning concepts and about their value even in the situations where they had been
initially articulated. Practical experience served, in effect, as a kind of test of theories,
not in the laboratory of secluded science (Callon et al., 2009), but in the so-called
developing world, where it was politically difficult for reality to answer back. Back in
their homelands, critical practitioners such as Koenigsberger and Friedmann struggled
to be heard. The legacy of the modernist perspective had, by the second half of
the twentieth century, become firmly embedded in modes of thought in the different
social-science and built-environment disciplines, in institutionalized practices, in
organizational forms and in the expectations of citizens and politicians. It would take
much longer and require a major philosophical shift before the bastions of modernization
were more generally undermined.

The late-twentieth-century philosophical shift

In the twenty-first century, new generations of urban and regional scholars and
practitioners were intellectually inspired by the critique of the philosophical
underpinnings of modernist ideas and have been vigorous in searching for new modes of
thought and action in the many alternative strands of philosophy and social theory, and
in learning through practical experimentation. Much of the debate to be found in the
scholarly literature available in English is framed within a Western philosophical frame
and experience. It nevertheless seeks to expose the individualist and materialist
dimensions of modern Western thought, to challenge its limited perspective on the
human condition and uncover its particular intellectual and political history. There are so
many conceptualizations around, some unwittingly overlapping and others energetically
competing, that it is very difficult to keep track of them all (Friedmann, 1998). This
makes it perhaps even more important to probe carefully the assumptions carried by a
planning concept as it travels around. Such critical probing is one of the key demands
generated by the broad philosophical shift which weaves through many of these
alternative strands (Bernstein, 2010). By the end of the twentieth century, the cultural
turn in geography had foregrounded this shift, while in the fields of planning and policy
analysis, the shift was expressed in communicative planning theory, interpretive policy
analysis, actor-network methodologies, French poststructuralist ideas and some versions
of complexity theory (see Hillier and Healey, 2008; 2010). Although there seems no
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general agreement about what to call this shift non-representational, post-positivistic,

postmodernist, poststructuralist, evolutionary complexity, and so on its outlines are
not difficult to discern.
In terms of ontology, many now see a world of multiple, overlapping systems
(structures, networks), with varying degrees of openness, and variable space/time reach,
through which what gets to be understood, materially and mentally, as place and territory,
are constructed and recognized. It is a world of human and also non-human agency, in
which people are not simply autonomous individuals with single identities. Instead,
they/we often have multiple identities, formed in socio-environmental contexts.
Identities and meanings are constructed relationally, in interaction with others in the flow
of life through time and space. Past time, through such relations and identities, flows
forward into future time. The tension between constraint and agency initiative is
conceptualized not by a strong contrast between macro structure and micro agency,
but by a recognition of the continual interaction between active, inventive agency and the
wider systems and forces which are shaped by and shape the opportunities available
to agents.2 In such open, dynamic, pluralistic contexts, hierarchical organizational
socio-spatial forms are challenged by all kinds of other sets of relations and systems, and
multiple potential pathways to better futures. Systems are no longer imagined as
discrete, integrated and equilibrium-seeking, but as overlapping and conflicting in
different ways. In constructing identities, individuals and social groups have to work
through this multiplicity as they shape subjectivities and develop agency, often
maintaining conflicting identities within themselves.
Epistemologically, such a relational view emphasizes that knowledge is much broader
than that developed through the procedures of scientific inquiry. It includes knowledge
developed through experience and social interaction, and assumes that people and
collectivities develop skills in sorting out what is accepted as true and good in any
knowledge claim. What is understood as universal in any context therefore has its
contingencies (Healey, 2012). What we can know knowledge is thus not a mirror
which reflects the external world as it is, but is actively constructed in the flow of
practical endeavour (Rorty, 1980; Bernstein, 2010), even in the work of scientific
laboratories. The analysis of change through time needs, in these perspectives, to be
analysed by focusing on the evolution of relations, and on flows and mobilities, rather
than fixities and stabilities (Latour, 2005; Featherstone and Venn, 2006; Hannam et al.,
2006; Murdoch, 2006; Peck and Theodore, 2010).
From the perspective of these ideas, the whole notion of development becomes
problematized. What is meant by it? What material work do concepts and practices
of development and planning perform in particular contexts? Which relations,
connectivities and proximities (Amin, 2002) are privileged and which are neglected?
Who stands to gain? Who may lose and what may be lost if particular concepts,
techniques and practices are let loose in specific situations? How do particular pasts and
histories flow through and into ideas about futures? Places and territories, in this
perspective, are brought into being through processes of recognition (willing into
being). Such processes have histories and specificities but are also the result of active
human agency, in learning and articulating development possibilities in different ways
to those previously dominant (Healey, 2007; McFarlane, 2009; 2011). In this way,
development futures are path contingent but not completely path dependent. They are
shaped by the pathways they have travelled along. And when travelling planning ideas
land, they become entangled with other relational threads and webs in particular social
sites, creating what some call assemblages (Ong and Collier, 2005; Hillier, 2007; Prince
2010). This implies that analysts need to give much more attention to specific
experiences as these have evolved, rather than to the articulation of general rules and
universal statements about phenomena.
2 There is, of course, a vigorous debate in sociology and the sociology of science over different ways
of recognizing and analysing this interaction (see, for example, Seidman, 1998).
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Exploring the ow of planning ideas and practices

The philosophical shift outlined above is full of suggestions for such probing of policy
ideas and the way they flow from centres of articulation to other institutional sites,
from the framing of a programme to concrete actions which affect lives and livelihoods.
Within the different social-science fields, many who have made inspirational
contributions to more structural analyses of social dynamics now argue for more
empirical research on micro-practices (see Swyngedouw et al., 2003; Massey, 2005;
Jessop, 2008). But what is involved in researching the relations through which policy
ideas develop, become consolidated into concepts with the capacity to travel from place
to place, and have impacts at a distance from their initial formulation? To an extent, we
could adopt the methods of the historian, but what stories do we tell and how should we
structure them?3 Two strands of conceptualization have proved particularly valuable in
such analyses in the planning and development fields actor-network theory (ANT) and
interpretive policy analysis (IPA).
These two strands share a relational and constructivist ontology and epistemology and
are broadly examples of historical/sociological versions of institutionalism (Hall and
Taylor, 1996). Both are concerned with how ideas, techniques and practices are formed
and are then spread more widely. Both are focused by a concern to understand how
knowledge, discourses and institutions are constructed and transformed, treating
knowledge as produced through diverse modes and in diverse arenas. Both advocate
case-study research informed by ethnographic and/or historical/evolutionary methods
(Latour, 2005; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2006). Both emphasize attention to
micro-practices, drawing on Foucauldian inspiration. Actor-network theory developed
from the study of how scientific knowledge is produced and how it then gets to act in
and on the world. Interpretive policy analysts are interested in the formation and
institutionalization of policy discourses, communities and practices (Wagenaar, 2011).
Such analysts generally take a policy discourse to include its performative dimensions
as well as the language used in policy texts and speech acts.
There are, however, significant differences between these strands, which will be
drawn out below. Furthermore, their analytical scope tends to centre on transformative
interactions and struggles within a specific institutional context. Other strands of analysis
focus more directly on the way ideas and techniques travel, and then arrive in many
different destinations. One has developed from work on the way policy ideas spread and
become embedded globally (see Roy, 2009; 2010b). Another has arisen within the
critical literature on international development (see Cornwall and Coelho, 2007). This
work looks at competing circuits of knowledge, an interest which has also developed
among a group of geographers interested in mobilities and circuits of policy
knowledge (Featherstone and Venn, 2006; Hannam et al., 2006; McCann, 2008; Peck
and Theodore, 2010). Below, I comment briefly on this third strand of ideas.
Actor-network theory (ANT)

These ideas developed within the sociology of knowledge and the analysis specifically of
the formation and flow of scientific knowledge. They are associated especially with the
work of Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and John Law. By the early 1990s (and particularly
in relation to environmental issues), ANT-inspired research was flowing over into the
analysis of the formation of policy knowledge, techniques and rationalities.4 This
linkage has been emphasized in recent work by Callon et al. (2009), by Latour (2005),
3 See Ward (2002) and Huxley (2006) for different ways of writing planning history.
4 See the work of Murdoch (2006), which started through researching changes in agricultural
management practices in the United Kingdom; Graham and Marvin (1996), who were interested in
the way in which infrastructures were shaping how cities were managed; and Tait (2002) on
centrallocal relations in development plan making.
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as well as in empirical work by Czarniawska (2002) and Murdoch (Murdoch and Abram,
2002; Murdoch, 2006). By the late 1970s, sociologists studying scientists at work were
emphasizing the social construction of scientific knowledge and the existence of
epistemic communities within which scientific problems and results were framed and
validated (Knorr-Cetina, 1999). Callon and Latour became interested in the relation
between the wider context that framed the problems to which scientific groups gave
attention, the practices of the secluded spaces within which scientific work was
conducted, and the way the results from such spaces flowed back into and contributed
to transforming the wider world. They focused particularly on the power dynamics of
these processes, and how power was generated and carried from one institutional site to
another.
Callon et al. (2009) focus in particular on three processes of translation involved in
such flows. By translation they mean the processes through which an idea or technique
moves from one site to another. The first translation involves a movement from the wider
world to the secluded world of a laboratory or similar specialized community. The
second translation refers to what happens within this secluded space, leading to a
consolidated finding, or technique or concept. Such spaces are often termed centres of
calculation. The third translation refers to the passage point of this finding, technique
or idea, from a centre of calculation to the wider world, which by this time has itself
moved on. ANT analysts consider how authority for new concepts is generated via
creating networks of interested parties (or inserting a concept into an existing network),
and enrolling these parties into a recognition of the value and importance of a new
concept or technique (Latour, 1987; Murdoch, 2006: 65). In this way, the concept
accumulates power. It becomes active, able to act-at-a-distance from the site of the
laboratory or centre of calculation. Concepts that become powerful also reorganize
(translate) how other problems are seen among the interested parties, and how ideas and
objects are combined into new associations (or assemblages) of actors and things
(stuff). These processes of translating concepts into networks allow them to travel,
potentially changing both the networks and the landscape of significant concepts
and techniques among a particular socio-political formation within which they are
inserted. The notions of getting others interested5 and enrolling, of translating and
travelling, provide helpful ideas for the analysis of the transnational flow of planning
ideas and techniques. Methodologically, those studying how these processes of
enrolment, translation and travelling develop are encouraged to focus on relations and
interactions, to follow the actor as networks are constructed and refocused, and as new
identities and objects are formed. The existence of structures and systems (institutional
configurations), actor-network theorists emphasize, should not be pre-specified by
analysts. They should be analysed instead through the way they act as constraints on the
flow of activity in particular situations, and as products of this flow over time (Latour,
1987; 2005; Murdoch, 2006).
Those using actor-network concepts in the planning field have been particularly
attracted by the attention to the way technologies are formed, packaged up and get to
travel (for example, Graham and Marvin, 1996). Murdoch, in his work on policy ideas
within the British planning system (Murdoch and Abram, 2002), then elides the idea
of a technology into that of a policy rationale which is imposed from a centre of
calculation (a national government department) to frame how a local authority conducts
its planning functions.6 But policy ideas are more fluid substances than technologies. It
is less easy to treat them as a machine-like black box and to follow their trajectory as
they diffuse into wider worlds. They can easily be reshaped by the dominant forces
which play around the networks within which an idea travels. Key values may be shorn
5 See interessement (Callon et al., 2009: 61), which they translate as getting the interest and
adhesion of inuential actors. Murdoch (2006) uses the term getting interested.
6 There are parallels here with analyses of governmentalities, but such analyses are even closer to
IPA work.
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off and an idea or technique reworked and reinserted into an alternative rationale and
political project. Ideas launched into new arenas by the mobilization of energetic
networks may lose their power to act-at-a-distance and become resources within very
different struggles and contexts. Also, ideas whirl around within policy and practice
communities in a generalized ether where taken-for-granted metaphors and referents
mix with the latest fads and fashions in modes of expression. Actor-network methods
may help to identify how certain ideas are inserted into this generalized flow of ideas
within particular epistemic communities.
Follow the actor as a method becomes much more difficult when tracking ideas. This
is especially true for transnational flows, where the worlds within which an idea arrives
and has effects may be far removed from the world which generated the momentum in
which an idea was given initial shape and meaning. Some planning historians have
focused on actors, as they have carried ideas from place to place (for example, Hall,
1988). There are also accounts by people who actually carried a planning idea from one
place to another. Friedmann (1973) tells us how he took US ideas about the promotion
of economic development to Latin America, and what he learned from this experience.
Whitzman, an activist developing the practice of Womens Safety Audits in Toronto,
provides an account of how the idea fared once it was taken up by the United Nations and
then disseminated, in part through her continuing involvement (Whitzman and Perkovic,
2010).
Interpretive policy analysis

However, there is never a clean slate position and, with respect to policy ideas, few
concepts which get leverage spend much time in isolation in the secluded spaces of
think-tanks. Instead, they circulate around the messy worlds of political life, each with
its complex intellectual culture and history, and its struggles between agencies and
between institutions. While the emphasis of ANT on the materiality of the way findings,
techniques and ideas are formed and flow, and the methodological insistence to
investigate rather than assume specific institutional dynamics, are valuable resources, the
tools of ANT give less emphasis to institutional dynamics, and the way the experience
and creations of one time and place become embedded both in the moulding of travelling
ideas and their travel experience and in what happens when they land.
This is the terrain that scholars in the tradition of interpretive policy analysis seek
to explore, through work on policy discourse analysis and the struggles over the
rationalities and mentalities of different political or policy communities. This trajectory
of knowledge development has grown from within the fields of policy analysis and public
administration, a subfield of political studies/science. Inspired by the broad philosophical
position outlined above, and in various ways by the work of Giddens, Foucault, Gramsci
and Habermas, IPA has become a dynamic field of critical policy analysis, now with its
own journal and annual conferences.7 As a field, it has several strands (Wagenaar, 2011),
but the general focus has been on the construction and mobilization of meaning,
producing policy discourses that then become institutionalized into practices. Such
discourses then have consequences in terms of policy agendas, resource allocation
and governance practices (see Fischer and Forester, 1993; Fischer, 2003; Hajer and
Wagenaar, 2003; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea, 2006; Wagenaar, 2011). This work has
overlapped with the planning field in particular through the work of John Forester and
Maarten Hajer.
In analysing policy discourses, IPA researchers look inside the micro-dynamics of
how new perspectives are articulated, and the tropes, metaphors and storylines which
evolve to hold a discourse together. While sometimes evolving in the (slightly more)
secluded spaces of academia or other research institutions, such perspectives are
7 See the journal Critical Policy Studies and the annual IPA conferences.
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commonly formed in campaigns and struggles for dominance within the sphere of
political life. Context and constraint, in these struggles, co-evolve in the formation of
discourses. Diffuse, competing pieces of argument and notions of problems, solutions
and appropriate actions, are fused within the politics of struggle and then consolidated
into identifiable points of view, framing positions and ideologies. In this way, a policy
discourse comes into view and develops structuring properties. Once recognized within
the arenas and networks involved in their formation, such a discourse may become
an active force, a rationale or governmentality, having existence both in the ideas
mobilized and in the practices, policy communities and publics that cluster around the
discursive idea. Depending on how specific struggles are played out, a policy discourse
may have either stabilizing or transformative consequences in the worlds within which
its formation arises, and these consequences may be either regressive or progressive.
Hajer (1995) calls these processes of formation and transformation discourse
structuration and discourse institutionalization. Transformative discourse structuration
and institutionalization reframe the governance rationalities (or mentalities) within a
particular policy field. They impact on the culture of policy communities and of the wider
polity. Actors in particular institutional sites then carry with them meanings and practices
that evolve as these transformation processes play out.
The interest in policy discourse formation is linked to a relational view of governance
processes. This implies an emphasis not on formal government organization as such,
but on the networks and nodes (or institutional sites) through which policy ideas
and programmes become formulated and translated into the arenas where specific
governance actions are given precise shape and carried out.8 Recent work has focused on
the staging and setting within which the performances in nodal arenas are mounted
(Hajer, 2009), and the way in which authority for a new perspective is generated through
processes of validation and legitimation (Healey, 2007).
There are clearly strong parallels between this perspective and ANT. IPA gives greater
attention to how storylines are constructed, the struggles involved in institutionalization
and the structuring properties of systems of meaning. ANT pays more attention to the
role of material objects, from machines to texts, in producing transformative effects. In
relation to the transnational flow of policy ideas, there is a greater recognition in IPA
work that ideas can flow about in ways which are not necessarily tied to particular
networks, feeding a climate of concepts, techniques, arguments, metaphors and
storylines which people draw down into a particular situation, the ether I referred to
earlier. This leads to an interest in policy or political cultures, the validation and
legitimation practices which shape and are shaped by specific processes of discourse
formation, flow and institutionalization, and how access to such cultural knowledge is
regulated. Such a concern with political cultures not only provides resources for
analysing why particular discourses have become dominant; it also helps explore what
happens when exogenous ideas come to land in new environments. Sorensen (2010),
for example, conducts a sensitive analysis of why the idea of compact cities took its
time to arrive in Japan, and how it was then interpreted and used in the context of
specific concerns about shrinking cities in northern Japan.
Circuits of knowledge

Both ANT and IPA analysts underline the importance of critically examining the
rationalities locked into planning ideas and practices as they flow transnationally, and
the struggles involved as particular ideas are drawn into localized in new situations.
8 There are strong links within this approach between the analysis of discourse structuration and
institutionalization and a normative interest in processes of collaborative/deliberative policymaking,
which cultivate collective knowledge development and learning experiences (see Healey, 1997/
2006; Innes and Booher, 2010).
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McCann (2008) provides a rich account of how people advising the City of Vancouver on
their drug-management policy sought out and drew in expertise from other parts of the
world, to create a practice which then itself became an internationally recognized
exemplar. Stead et al. (2010), drawing on the European policy transfer literature,
provide a neat study of the different ways in which two Eastern European countries
reacted to German aid provided to improve the organization of metropolitan transport
systems. One listened shrewdly and used the aid to learn more about what might really
work in their national context. The other borrowed a concept wholesale and learned
only later through experience that it did not work in their situation. Perera (2010),
drawing on his experiences in Sri Lanka, recalls the struggles to displace a regional
development approach devised by international engineers, which involved displacing
and recreating many rural settlements, and what it took to develop an alternative
approach that was more sensitive to Sri Lankan specificities.
However, the process of travelling itself involves social interactions which may have
transformative effects. The social processes through which channels of flow networks,
circuits are constituted may take on many forms, mobilizing and connecting particular
institutional ensembles as these evolve. In the case of transnational flows, despite the
existence of transnational policy communities, these ensembles need some capacity to
overcome considerable social and physical distances through time (Stone, 2004). Actornetwork theorists tend to assume that networks and circuits are formed through the flow of
a new concept. A new scientific finding, technique or technology generates a new network
that carries it along, becoming more robust as it is tested against the materialities and
mentalities of wider worlds. Interpretive policy analysts are more prepared to explore the
broader institutional context within which new ideas are formed and struggle to flourish,
but typically examine changes within a particular context. They tend to assume a complex,
dynamic landscape of pre-existing, but evolving, institutional nodes and networks, which
a new policy idea may transform, but which may also merely be absorbed.
An interest in transnational flows plays out on a broader, more global scale. As Roy
(2009; 2010b) and Watson (2009) argue forcefully, this involves more attention to the
dynamics of globalizing forces and the political and economic struggles which create
and shape the global circuits of policy knowledge (McCann, 2008; McCann and Ward,
2009) through which many policy ideas pass. McCann and Ward (ibid.) look at the
travelling history of business improvements districts and new urbanism concepts,
primarily in a North American and European context. Tait and Jensen (2007) also
examine the business-improvement-district idea, along with that on urban villages.
Prince (2010) analyses how ideas about the promotion of creative industries arrived in
New Zealand. Roy (2010a; 2010b) provides a rich example of such circuits at work in her
analysis of the way the idea of making micro-credit available to the very poor was
captured by the World Bank, and circulated through its powerful aid channels, framed
by a neoliberal Washington consensus, and how this is being challenged by its
Bangladesh originators through an alternative network. There are other obvious global
players in flowing ideas, techniques and practices transnationally, including the United
Nations and the International Monetary Fund. But these are not the only circuits,
powerful though they are. Political networks, professional networks, networks of alumni,
bilateral aid and investment relations, digital networks of various kinds and academic
studies (that is, journal articles and books) are also significant. The international
development field is rich in the analysis of the institutional dynamics of such circuits
(for example, Cornwall and Coelho, 2007). Within geography, a recent literature,
building on actor-network theory, is also developing, which aims to challenge technical
models of policy transfer dominant in the rational choice literature. Instead of a focus on
transit and transaction, Peck and Theodore (2010: 170) emphasize a perspective
which centres on mobility and mutation. By this they refer to the ways in which policy
ideas and techniques may change as they travel. McFarlane (2011) focuses explicitly
on how the movement of ideas is accomplished, and in particular on the role of
intermediaries, models, texts, and so on, in constituting channels of flow and what
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Patsy Healey

actually flows. This emerging policy-mobilities perspective tends towards a more

structural perspective, being concerned in particular with the global spread of
neoliberal practices.
Making use of multiple perspectives

The importance of examining transnational flows at the present time lies not only in
their significance for contemporary urban and regional development dynamics. As
Koenigsberger and Friedmann found out, such experiences have strong potential to
challenge taken-for-granted universals wrapped into policy ideas being promoted
transnationally, simply because they are likely to be a world away from the contexts in
which the ideas were developed. Despite the reservations of ANT theorists such as
Latour (2005), the examination of transnational flows of policy ideas helps to overcome
a tendency in some urban and regional development research to focus solely on the
micro-dynamics of agency, with less attention to the complexities of the systemic and
structuring dynamics which shape the worlds in which agency gets to work. Such an
awareness is important in order to understand, for example, the extent to which resources
available through aid and trade are tied to the promotion of particular ideas and
practices. Even where there is no such aid/resource linkage, a critical analyst and
practitioner needs to avoid too great an enthusiastic innocence when coming across a
new idea. Through what routes, for example, has the Brazilian concept of participatory
budgeting travelled from Porto Alegre to turn up in countries such as the UK (Souza,
2001)? What remains of the original rationality and what has been accumulated on the
voyage? Why, where and by whom has it been drawn down at the present moment, and
with what political or policy work in mind?
The three groups of perspectives outlined above all provide productive ways for
researching transnational flows of policy ideas which go beyond a positivist and
technical perspective. Peck and Theodore (2010: 169) seek to outline the vibrant
heterogeneity emerging in the field they identify as critical policy studies. I have tried
in this article to widen this heterogeneity, to help identify overlapping concerns and
clarifying what each has to offer. There may also be some merit in combining
approaches. Tait and Jensen (2007) have already argued that ANT and IPA approaches
can usefully be combined in the analysis of the flow of planning concepts. I suggest that
some combination of actor-network-theory methods and interpretive policy analysts
concepts, enriched with the more structural sensibility of those concerned with circuits
of policy knowledge in international development experiences, might help evolve a more
perceptive critical probing of the transnational flows of planning ideas and practices,
both in work on contemporary flows and in the history of planning ideas. From the
perspective of those interested in the flows and interactions of planning ideas and
planning practices, critical probing could usefully focus on the relation between:
The origin stories of planning ideas and practices which get to flow, and which
fail to flow (see Hebbert and MacKillop, 2013: 154258; Jacobs and Lees, 2013:
155983), beyond their origin context, the rationalities or mentalities wrapped up in
such stories and the forces which project them into movement; actor-network theory
and interpretive policy analysis are helpful here.
The travelling histories of ideas and practices, the circuits of knowledge which
carry them along and what is accumulated and what is shed as ideas flow along a
circuit, and how these interact with and are co-produced by the travelling experience;
actor-network theory and work on knowledge circuits are helpful here.
The translation experiences through which exogenous planning ideas and practices
become localized, that is, drawn down, adapted and inserted into struggles
over discourse formation and institutionalization in new contexts; interpretive policy
analysis is helpful here, but both the other two bodies of literature provide valuable
insights and empirical experiences.
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Of course, the translation experiences can also be understood as experiences of

institutional formation, which may then take on a life of their own and take off on their
own travels, as in McCanns Vancouver case. Nor are these three probes specific to the
transnational flow of policy ideas and practices. But taken together, and keeping their
relations in view, they provide useful insights and methodological prompts for analysts
and practitioners. In particular, the probes help to keep analytical attention focused on the
complex interaction between agency innovation and systemic, structuring dynamics. To
conclude the present article, I now turn to the other two questions raised at the beginning.

Analysing transnational ows of

planning ideas as a research focus
What, then, is distinctive about the flow of planning ideas and practices in the present
period, and in particular about transnational flows? This is a big question to which many
have suggested answers. Somewhat tentatively, I offer the following summary. First, and
especially in Western intellectual and policymaking circles, there is a sense of the acute
uncertainty and riskiness of futures, whether conceived in economic, environmental,
social or political terms. By contrast, in some other parts of the world, notably in China,
a modernization dynamic is widely imagined and pursued. Yet former hegemonic
bastions have lost confidence in the universal relevance of their ideas and experiences.
Secondly, and through the philosophical shift outlined above, there is much greater
awareness of the situated contingencies which shape what we know, how we validate
relevant knowledge and legitimate governance action. This awareness underpins
recognition of a multiplicity of ways of viewing and acting in the world. Coexistence in
shared spaces, a key challenge which generates the kinds of governance action known
as planning/urban planning/spatial planning, and so on (Healey, 1997/2006), either
entails working with such multiplicity, conceiving of social formations in pluralistic
ways, with multiple rationalities in play, or it implies a retreat to a kind of monism in
which one rationality is allowed to dominate (Connolly, 2005; Sen, 2006; Bernstein,
2010). Whichever route is taken, there is widespread recognition that social formations
are built through struggle, between conflicting positions and rationalities, but that these
struggles are not only framed in the Marxist imagination of classes formed by their
relations to the means of production. There are all kinds of fractures and forces which
shape struggles over identities and epistemologies. This implies that the situated
contingencies, the particular histories and geographies of contexts within which planning
ideas are shaped and adapted, and get to flow around, need to be given careful attention.
It is this perception which has encouraged so much recent interest in the social sciences
in the study of micro-practices.
Thirdly, the challenge of accelerating urbanization in many non-Western parts of the
world provides a demand for greater understanding of urban development processes, and
how to manage them. It is not surprising in this context that places which are getting
richer look to Western experience of how to accommodate the demands of the
increasingly affluent while addressing the massive increases in the need for basic
services in huge urban metropolises. Yet these phenomena are very varied and differ
widely in terms of scale and institutions from those which evolved more slowly in North
America and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Fourthly, Western expertise itself has become institutionalized into a fragmented
landscape of competing centres of technical knowledge, divided by national intellectual
traditions and by the fragmentation of systematic knowledge into very many
disciplines, each with their own circuits of knowledge development and dissemination.
It is really hard, in this context, for city managers in India, Peru, Indonesia or Zambia, for
example, to assess where helpful expertise might be found. Reliance on familiar
networks, and on dominant geo-political aid, trade and political alliances may then
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Patsy Healey

structure the expertise which arrives in a locality, limiting and narrowing the range and
depth of knowledge and understanding available to localized practices and movements
for change.
Fifthly, the combination of a culture of innovation, which celebrates the new at the
expense of a historical imagination, combined with the internet and the digital
technology which enables ideas, experiences and commentaries to travel instantly from
place to place across the globe, encourages a kind of contextless bricolage, or playing
with the new. This may help to release imaginations and unsettle old hegemonies. It may
promote all kinds of experiments in innovating new ideas and practices. But such a
culture may fail to critically explore what lies inside the Trojan horse of an imported
idea and miss the seductive colonizing voice that lies within the circuit that carries an
idea into a new context. In other words, promoting innovation and experimentation
without attention to shrewd probing and time for learning, before and through
experience, not only increases the risks of regressive failure (causing more harm than
good) but may encourage the penetration of new hegemonies, rather than releasing
progressive tendencies honed to local aspirations and contingencies. An understanding of
this is important if we accept, as my sixth point, that what is happening in the present
period is not merely about the globalization of economic and cultural relations and the
recognition of global environmental threats, but a tectonic shift in the geo-political and
geo-economic landscape, in which new hegemonies and new circuits are in formation.
We need to cultivate the capacity to see these emergent patternings as they evolve, if
regressive tendencies are to be resisted.
In such a context, all our intellectual presumptions and institutional habits are
unsettled, wherever we are located in these multiple, shifting worlds. As many social
scientists are now arguing, to grasp the challenges and threats such an evolutionary
transformation brings with it, too much attention to recasting our philosophies and
theories brings only limited leverage. Instead, we would do well to learn from practices,
from empirical engagement in specific situations. If we seek to scrape away at the
assumptions built into the situations we are most familiar with, it is especially valuable
to encounter the far-away, where very different modes of thought and institutional
habits help us call into question what we had previously thought was a normal and
universal part of going about in the world.
A research focus on transnational flows of policy ideas and practices should therefore
help to expand horizons and develop the critical antennae with which to identify and
assess the potentials in evolving modes of policy thought and practices in different
contexts. Rather than analysing why good governance formulae of one kind or another
fail to take hold in new situations, as a modernist perspective would advance, or
expecting innovations to come merely from creative meshing of ideas from an ill-defined
ether of possibilities with local transformative energies (adding yeast to an
assemblage), a more evolutionary focus seems appropriate. By this I mean giving
careful attention to the complex, pluralistic evolving dynamics within which new
planning/policy ideas and practices pass from the institutional sites from which they
originate into the diversely articulated wider worlds and circulation systems through
which collective bundles of policy knowledge are produced and travel around, and to
what happens when these are accessed by those facing particular challenges in very
different contexts. Such research is likely to reveal not only the continued power of old
hegemonies, but the emergence of new centres of calculation and new circuits of
policy knowledge. Actor-network theory, interpretive policy analysis and the new
interest in circuits of knowledge provide helpful methodological resources for this
research enterprise.
To conclude, scholarly work which helps those interested in the analysis and practice
of planning and public policy to learn from experiences outside the old hegemonies
should prove very valuable in both the old hegemonic heartlands and in parts of the world
seeking to escape and counteract their dominance. It should contribute to a greater depth
and precision in understanding what it means to probe planning and development ideas
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1523

and experiences. It should help to situate such ideas and experiences in specific contexts,
and to understand the complex dynamics of competing sources of systemic power as
these co-evolve with the capacity for localized learning and experimentation. Such work
requires the careful analysis of the concepts, rhetorics, categories and labels mobilized in
travelling ideas, techniques, institutional designs and practical advice to assess the
assumptions wrapped up in them about contexts, about causeeffect relations, about
what is valuable in outcomes, and so on, and about the institutional work such concepts
might perform when translated into particular situations. This kind of analysis implies
avoiding prior over-generalization and doctrinaire interpretations when exploring a new
situation, or the arrival of a new concept. Instead, we should ask the pragmatists
question: What could/did this idea/technique perform here and now?
Yet while being open to empirical manifestation, it is also important to keep in mind
the Foucauldian point, that modes of thought and institutional practices are deeply
embedded in layers of prior history which are not easy to access (see Huxley, 2013:
152741). A critical sensibility to such potential embedding remains a helpful attitude to
encourage probing into these depths, as long as we avoid a rush to judgement and an
urge to map and label phenomena with a prior vocabulary of categories. Armed with
such attitudes, and using the intellectual tools outlined in this article, it should be
possible to tell rich stories and to probe in more insightful and critical ways, so that we
can see our complex interconnected world or worlds and emerging futures more
perceptively and learn better how to act in them to achieve progressive, if diverse,
development outcomes.
Patsy Healey (Patsy.Healey@newcastle.ac.uk), School of Architecture Planning and
Landscape, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK.

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