Globalization has brought about increased political, economic, and social interconnectedness but also a speeding up of cross- and transnational interactions and processes. Policy agendas and blueprints, for instance, can now quickly whiz around the planet, carried by globetrotting technocrats, activists, journalists, intellectuals, and other opinion shapers. Making sense of policy development in this context requires a new analytic lens, one that breaks with the long dominant methodological nationalism that assumes self-contained geographic spaces within which decision-making occurs. However, although globalized perspectives seem essential for our globalized times, the resilience of nationally specific institutions, policy regimes and forms of capitalism rebuff claims of convergence. How to wrap one’s scholarly arms around the nationally specific and the global poses an analytical and methodological challenge. How can we conceptualize processes that generate both common and diverging trends? And how can mere mortals, writing books limited by page length and the patience of readers, capture both sets of dynamics––the power of hegemonic policy models yet also the continued influence of domestic social and political forces over whether these models are embraced and in what form?

Peck and Theodore’s Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism offers its greatest insights on the transnational side of the equation, even as the authors pioneer a mode of analysis that attempts to mesh the local with the global. The authors follow the travels of two policy ideas—conditional cash transfers (ccts) and participatory municipal budgeting (pb)—that, as they wend their way around the globe, transform and are transformed by both the specific political contexts in which they alight and the dynamic interactions between sites of deliberation and decision-making. They therefore offer a perspective on policy mobility that goes well beyond linear diffusion from one site to another, or the imposition of policy reforms on hapless states by powerful multilateral actors such as the World Bank. Instead they emphasize the multi-nodal networks that link sites of policy debate and decision-making in ways that promote continual experimentation and re-envisioning of policy models. Thus, instead of assuming that policy ideas generally move from north to south, or from multilateral organization to southern state, they map the movement of these ideas across the south, or from south to north, and back again. The recursive circulation of reform recipes reflects the emergence of a transnational “social world” of decision-makers and shapers—domestic and international technocrats, politicians, evaluation agencies, academic and other self-proclaimed policy “gurus,” advocacy groups, and others—that incubates and spreads policy models while also providing sites and means for their reworking.

Here is where “fast policy” occurs, which the authors argue cannot be reduced to the accelerated velocity of policy ideas, even as the speed with which both ccts and pb spread around the world is an important part of their account. They view fast policy more broadly as a “policy-making condition” marked by transnational dialogue between increasingly cosmopolitan actors looking for “ideas that work” and can be speedily adopted. Related to these imperatives is deference to “best practices,” particularly as they are packaged and promoted by multilateral organizations and their “knowledge banks,” and the hegemony of policy evaluators who claim to scientifically demonstrate the worth of particular policies, as evidenced in the rise of randomized control trials of ccts and other reforms. With so much expertise marshaled on behalf of favored policy proposals, the research and development period of policy reforms can be foreshortened, as can democratic debate over them, with initiatives quickly adopted to satisfy whatever mix of domestic and international imperatives are behind them.

In following what happens to these policy models as they take shape in specific domestic contexts, Peck and Theodore uncover what they regard as surprising mutations that, in some instances, contradict the original models, or at least what is presented as the orthodox approach in each policy area. As participatory budgeting moved from Porto Alegre to new sites around the world, it lost much of its radical democratic potential, becoming instead a de-politicized tool for “good governance.” The neo-liberal foundations underpinning conditional cash transfers were weakened as governments in countries such as Brazil or Indonesia embarked on reforms that downplayed or outright repudiated the use of conditionality. The authors not only candidly admit surprise at these discoveries but also incorporate their surprise into the arguments of the book. Eschewing simplistic claims about the hegemony of neo-liberal reform models, the authors instead argue that, while the specific form taken by these local mutations was not expected, such mutations make up an essential feature of the fast policy ecosystem. Adopting the term “transduction” from genetics––how the introduction of new genetic material into a cell spurs change and adaptation—they see these shifts in form and purpose as examples of what happens when an “off-the-shelf” policy idea meets domestic institutions, the balance of social forces, and an array of idiosyncratic factors that shape the trajectory of policy reforms.

The fate of orthodox policy models “in the wild,” as they term it, is presented in largely ad hoc terms. Local social, political and economic conditions matter, but the authors do not attempt to explain, in a more general way, why ccts and pb took the forms they did in diverse contexts. Given the large number of ccts programs (nearly 50) and the adoption of pb by thousands of municipalities, it makes some sense that their purpose is more “an exploratory mapping of nodes, networks, and netherworlds” [xix] in these two policy fields. Yet, leaving the local under-theorized points to a limitation of fast policy as a framework of analysis. Fast policy offers an insightful way of characterizing and analyzing the transnational sphere, but appears less helpful, on its own, for thinking about what happens in the badlands of domestic politics. The authors expect to see experimentation and invention that is informed by or hemmed in transnational forces, yet the fast policy framework offers few tools for thinking about how domestic social, economic, or political forces influence the specifics of policy reform.

To give a concrete example of how this truncates the analysis, the authors argue that fast policy has often undercut democratic processes and instead encouraged technocratic forms of decision-making. Yet those attuned to the historical roots of social policy in the region might instead argue that the development of ccts and other social programs in recent years reflects the real, yet imperfect, democratization of the region, which has spurred efforts by political parties to pass and claim credit for reforms. ccts appear to be a useful tool of electoral politics, in that they reach deep into households, forging ties between individuals and the state. The potential electoral payoff of such policies may, in fact, help explain the speed with which they were adopted. As the authors note, Brazil’s President Lula Da Silva wanted quick results for domestic political reasons. Another politician promoting a form of ccts, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, also sought silver-bullet policy reforms as he faced term limits and was envisioning a potential presidential bid. In short, although transnational factors may facilitate fast policy by offering officials ready-made policy “solutions,” domestic political imperatives that are under-analyzed with this framework may also be essential for making sense of the speed and character of the policies adopted.

It should be said, however, that many domestic shapers of public policy have been well-theorized and empirically studied—too often in work that either neglects the transnational dimension or relies on existing approaches to studying diffusion. Peck and Theodore have developed a rich and original approach to thinking about how transnational networks and relationships have profoundly transformed policy-making in the contemporary period. Future work could bring their insights about the geographically unbounded policy imaginary into studies that more systematically examine the domestic shapers of public policy.