Mobile Keynesianism: Linking policy mobility and state transformation in New Zealand, 1930–70

Abstract

The study of policy mobility has revealed the rich geographical life of policy, demonstrating the very real ways in which policy enacted in one place often references policy enacted elsewhere, and how in doing so, it changes and evolves as it is constantly adopted and adapted. One of its contributions has been the elaboration of neoliberalism as an interconnected process of neoliberalisation producing its variegated geography. But the policy settlement that neoliberalism replaced in the capitalist world, Keynesianism, is still approached in comparative or institutional terms rather than as a process. Applying a policy mobility lens to the study of Keynesianism is an opportunity to correct this. But this historical case is also an opportunity to consider policy mobility anew. Drawing on the relational urbanism that also contributed to policy mobility studies, this paper builds on topological approaches to argue for analysing mobile policy as a consequence and cause of the reworking of relations between and within policy territories. Using the Keynesian policy shift that occurred in New Zealand between 1930 and 1970 as a case study, it shows how relations were transformed but ongoing, and these transformations are both driven by and a consequence of mobile policies; that Keynesianism as an international phenomenon was a reworking of relations necessarily both between and within territories; and that Keynesianism produced a space of technical expertise and authority that continues to shape policy today.