Learning Mandarins: Elite Policy Transfer Networks in the Anglosphere

The modern era of public administration has been revolutionised by the widening accessibility and availability of policy-relevant data from overseas. While policy transfer scholars have sought to model and analyse the impact of international policy ideas on domestic institutions, much remains unknown about the drivers of policy learning and, in particular, how international institutional relationships form and operate over time. This paper describes the emergence and evolution of inter-government policy networks across Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. It finds that, over the past twenty years, mandarins of some of the most significant government institutions in these countries have jointly established distinctive, and highly exclusive, policy learning networks with their counterparts. It is contended that knowledge of the form and function of these networks offers a transformative insight to our understanding of the policy development process broadly and the policy transfer process specifically.