Under What Conditions Could Evidence-Based Policy Transfer Take Place?

Policy actors across the EU are seeking ways to reduce territorial inequalities within and across jurisdictions. For example, member state and sub-national governments seek ways to learn from the success of others and to import that success. Therefore, our aim is deceptively simple: generate evidence to identify how EU countries try to reduce territorial inequalities, see who is the most successful, and recommend the transfer of that success to other countries. We then describe how to identify and address key problems in that process, including: how to define inequalities, identify policies designed to reduce inequalities, link policy intention to outcomes (i.e. separate cause and effect), choose measures to evaluate and report success, and make sure that the policy to be imported is politically as well as technically feasible. We focus on the conditions for evidence-based policy transfer partly to show that they form part of an ideal-type, rather than something we expect to find.