China's Governance Openness and Reforms : A Case of Policy Learning in Practice (Hardcover)

This book aims to make a theoretical, empirical, and prescriptive contribution to the contemporary study of policy learning. In the first regard, it observes that-despite bold claims to the contrary-most studies of policy learning are characterised by their mono-cultural understanding of the process of policy-oriented learning reflected in an obsession with the destination of transfer rather than its original policy setting or settings. This betrays an absence of strong comparative investigation of the process of learning. Moreover, existing approaches to the study of policy transfer networks (the process of policy learning) are limited by their narrow epistemological perspectives as in the main they tend to lend undue focus on actors, ideas/interests or structure. Most significantly, the absence of logistic relationships between different schools of policy learning has never been emphasized. Following the work of Marsh and Smith on policy networks (2000), this book contends that these elements cannot be separately analyzed. It therefore advances an interactive model of policy transfer networks that investigates the process of learning through three interactive dimensions: between structure and agents, network and context, and network and outcome. [Subject: Chinese Studies, Asian Studies, Governance, Public Policy]