Global Ideas Meet Domestic Policy Processes. The Case of Social Protection in Zambia

Within the increasingly global ‘agora’ of social policy-making, social protection has been constructed as a global policy idea by a broad epistemic community of transnational agencies, including the World Bank and DFID. In their efforts to shape new forms of welfare in Africa, these transnational actors have engaged a range of strategies, including financing, evidence-based advocacy and coalition-building, framing social protection as ‘an African success story’. Against this background, the paper develops a framework that integrates theories of policy transfer with a multiple streams approach in an original way to analyse the interaction of such global policy ideas with domestic policy processes. Through a comparison of social cash transfers and social health insurance in Zambia it argues that the efforts of transnational actors to promote global policy ideas interact with the existing interests and ideas of national political elites. The paper also extends the analysis to the local level, which is currently missing from most studies of policy transfer, finding that policy implementation is a site of continued contestation and policy translation. This multi-level study conducts an in-depth qualitative investigation drawing on 96 key informant interviews, 16 focus group discussions and document analysis to provide a holistic assessment of global policy transfer through a constructivist lens. The case demonstrates that social and political receptivity to a global policy idea in national contexts, specifically Zambia, is determined by the level of alignment with domestic political interests – including survival strategies, as well as elite and popular paradigmatic ideas – shaping which global policy ideas travel and in what form.