Reconceptualizing transfer pathways: policy transfer and armed UAV proliferation

ABSTRACTWhile policy transfer remains a widely used approach for understanding public policy formation, several conceptual shortcomings limit the approach’s capacity for explanation. Notably, the concept of “transfer pathway” lacks a precise conceptual definition and empirical specification, limitations reflecting broader gaps in the policy transfer literature. This article contributes to the study of policy transfer by explicitly defining transfer pathway and demonstrating how a more expansive transfer pathway conceptualization can increase analytical granularity. Conceptual insights developed here are empirically applied to U.S. State Department announcements in late 2020 to sell armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), first to the United Arab Emirates and then Morocco. Such cases illustrate two novel transfer pathways, the tortuous pathway and the foreign policy pathway, offering a sketch of how governments transfer policies in the foreign and security policy domain. By employing process tracing, specific causal process observations associated with the arms transfer processes in each instance can be identified to better understand specific transfer outcomes.KEYWORDS: Policy transfertransfer pathwayUAVarms salesforeign policy Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Different “objects” subject to transfer include abstract objects (e.g., ideas, ideologies, discourses) as well as more concrete ones (e.g., policy designs and instruments, administrative regulations, governing structures).2 Citation figures as of September 2023.3 Newmark’s “diffusion continuum” identifies policy diffusion and policy convergence, respectively, as the broadest forms of denoting policy spread, followed by policy transfer. Per Newmark, policy transfer is a “more specific form of policy diffusion” since it accounts for when “conscious knowledge of policy is used in policy development elsewhere” (Citation2002, 171).4 Reviews by Newmark (Citation2002), Knill (Citation2005), Marsh and Sharman (Citation2009) and Stone (Citation2012) detail the complementary nature of diffusion and policy transfer.5 Along with policy mobilities, geographers and sociologists have also sought to build on policy transfer logic by developing notions of policy assemblages, mutations and circulation (McCann and Ward Citation2013; Baker and Walker Citation2019).6 This contrasts with closed compound words (which omit the space between two source words), hyphenated words and portmanteaus.7 As a policy process theory, MSA’s “most valuable attribute” remains “its ability to deal with timing – that is, the joining together of circumstances at a particular point in time” (Howlett, McConnell, and Perl Citation2016, 279–280).8 Kingdon (Citation2003) uses the concept of ‘spillover’ to convey how success in one policy area creates opportunities for success in other policy areas.9 Between the FMS ($55 billion) and DCS ($115 billion) programs, the U.S. government manages approximately $170 billion annually in the sales of defense equipment to foreign partners (U.S. Department of State Citation2021a).10 See Cooper (Citation2014) for a discussion of national security directives and unilateral presidential power regarding arms transfers and national security.11 See Congressional Research Service (Citation2021a) for a discussion of recent US-UAE defense cooperation and Congressional Research Service (Citation2021b) for a discussion of the congressional review process of arms sales.12 Per media accounts, Morocco used armed UAVs for the first time in 2021, purportedly against Polisario Front leaders representing the region’s indigenous Sahrawi people and staking a claim to territorial sovereignty.Additional informationNotes on contributorsStephen CeccoliStephen Ceccoli is the P.K. Seidman Professor of Political Economy at Rhodes College, Memphis, TN, where he teaches in the International Studies Department. His research interests include domestic and comparative aspects of regulation, public opinion and policymaking. He is the author of Pill Politics: Drugs and the FDA (Lynne Rienner) and has published in various journals, including International Studies Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, Political Behavior, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and Policy Studies.