Policy Learning for National Advantage and Sovereign Governance in Non-Western Contexts: Comparing Public Management Reforms in Azerbaijan, Malaysia, and Kazakhstan

Policy transfer literature as a strand within policy studies highlights “national context” as crucial to understanding processes of transfer, convergence, and diffusion across contexts. While the policy transfer framework associated with it more specifically identifies “facilitators” and “constraints” of such national context as key to international policy learning based on doctrines such as NPM (New Public Management) and the like, policy scholars and practitioners have been struggling not only with the puzzle of “who learns what from whom” but also “how are policy lessons learned?” Based on these underpinnings, this paper attempts to compare public management reforms in Azerbaijan, Malaysia, and Kazakhstan, three “upper/middle-income” countries situated respectively in South Caucasus, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia, which share in common features including post-Soviet/post-colonial legacy, relative economic prosperity, and Muslim-majority populations. Relying on the policy transfer framework and ethnographic empirical research in Baku, Kuala Lumpur, and Astana during July 2022 to August 2023, the findings reveal an increasing “creativity” of these regimes in terms of adopting “policy learning” to fit their “sovereignty” agenda, often masking their autocratic nature and likely causing policy communication gaps between political principals, bureaucrats, and the citizenry. The latter coupled with evidence of an increasing influence of ethno-religious dynamics on reform implementation might as well be interpreted as transfer constraints likely to undermine the effectiveness of lesson-learning based on global administrative doctrines in order to sustain their national competitive advantages in the long run.