Wilkinson 2003; Maunganidze and Del Mistro 2012; Schalekamp and Behrens 2008), government efforts to reform the taxi industry (Schalekamp and Behrens 2013; Schalekamp et al. 2010), cycling (Jennings 2015) and transit-oriented development (Bickford and Behrens 2015), also provide the bedrock for this analysis. Additionally, it overlaps BRT adoption with broader considerations for rapid urbanization across the continent, infrastructure development and its potential for poverty alleviation, climate change and resilience, especially in disenfranchised communities, and the juxtaposition between urban economic vitality and social justice.
This book employs “policy mobilities” (Peck and Theodore 2010a; McCann and Ward 2011) to contribute to transport geography by examining how policymakers address issues of mobility and immobility, and how these decisions are made in reference to similar practices taking place elsewhere. It explains the process by which BRT has been embraced, encompassed and even at times excluded by local policy actors, their interactions with global advocates and inter-referencing across space and time. In so doing, it attends to the ways in which transportation solutions are engineered in relation to socio-political spaces, specifically interrogating the process through which certain transportation innovations are deemed best practice.
How Cities Learn makes four key contributions to the policy mobilities literature by examining the process from one location: South Africa. First, it highlights the ways in which particular models of best practice travel, not autonomously by virtue of their own universalist qualities, but rather via a complex political economy, both internationally and domestically.
Second, the book exposes the pivotal role of often overlooked local actors in the mobility and adoption of best practice. While it might seem as if international intermediaries are the primary actors involved in BRT replication, How Cities Learn demonstrates the power of the local. Although strong personalities were at times persuasive in pushing BRT from the outside, their dominance was balanced by the bureaucratic structures that endow local implementers with the power and responsibility for initiating a new planning project. Notably, this approach highlights the factors motivating policy actors and the wider political relationships that facilitated the reception of BRT. This in turn expands our understanding of the varied direction, speed and influence of global and local influences shaping the contemporary city.
Third, the book unpacks the exchanges between actors in South African and other southern cities and, in so doing, exposes a politicized process that preferences certain sites over others, inculcates a particular understanding of best practice and otherwise mediates policy flows. The politics of south-south cooperation was used to support exchanges with South American cities while overlooking opportunities to learn from African and Indian cities. These glimpses into the process of BRT adoption in South Africa help us understand the process by which policy and policy actors connect and disconnect topographically through their physical travels, as well as topologically through relational comparisons made in city rankings and league tables.
Fourth, the book uncovers the temporalities of policy learning which are often overlooked in the policy mobilities literature. The experience of BRT in South Africa reveals persistent introduction and alteration before adoption finally ensued; innovations spread across the globe through a series of unremarkable events and repeated suggestions that ultimately sanction it as a best practice to local policy implementers. Accordingly, I argue that failure is central to policy promotion by creating a process whereby learning is deliberate and delayed, assembling alongside earlier encounters to prolong the employment of international agencies. The book demonstrates that there is much to be learned by thinking through the practices of ostensibly ineffective, fruitless or aborted mobility. This contribution also raises questions about success and failure in policy mobilities, a topic of increasing importance among scholars.
Using Policy Mobilities as a Methodology
The physical, social and theoretical movement of ideas, objects, people, and places can be difficult to study because they are constantly in motion, positioning and repositioning, erratically and sometimes irrationally. Policies-in-motion demand mobile methods, a methodology “better suited to mobile times” (Clarke 2012). My research methods are therefore simultaneously “on the move” (Cresswell 2006), including physical travel on buses and between research subjects and sites, and “moored” (Hannam et al. 2006) in the offices of policy actors and in the operational BRT systems (Wood 2016). More than simply uncovering the movement, however, this study unravels the intricate connections and dependencies between ideas, objects, people and places, relationships essential for the acceptance of mobile knowledge (Büscher and Urry 2009; Urry 2007). This methodology resonates well with Law and Urry (2004) who reason that existing methods rooted in places insufficiently address fleeting temporality or transplanting places; that is that we must follow the chains, paths, threads and intersections in order to address the transitory nature of mobility.
For policy mobilities, two approaches – “follow the policy” (Peck and Theodore 2010a) and “follow the project” (Peck and Theodore 2012), which combine multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995) with the extended case method approach (Burawoy 1998, 2009) – are typically employed. Peck and Theodore (2012) suggest that the researcher (and their research) travel alongside the policy, concentrating on the power and politics of translation. Such a methodology, Peck (2011b) reasons, enables researchers to contemplate the role of policy networks and epistemic communities that form connections for enabling policy movement, experimentation and mutation across different cities. This methodology can be challenging, however, because as Peck and Theodore conclude, “it is not always possible to ‘be here’, when in the study of global policy networks there is a constant imperative to also ‘be’ somewhere else” (2012: 25). They therefore advise that researching mobile policies need not always be a multi-sited venture, but it will often necessitate “methodological travel, along the paths carved by the policies themselves” (2012: 24). Most importantly, the methods used should be sensitive to both the peripatetic nature of policy models and their affiliated policy actors as well as to the unpredictable character of espousal and emulation.
I study policy mobilities from the perspective of the adopting locality and examine the means by which a policy from elsewhere was introduced, shaped and localized by local policy actors, their interactions with global advocates and inter-referencing across space and time. Rather than observing or shadowing people’s movements, as Marcus suggests in his understanding of “following the people”, this study asks people to interpret and reflect on their own decisions and learning processes. Similarly, it does not simply “follow the thing” from Bogotá to South Africa per se; instead my perspective looks at how South Africans interpreted the mobility and assembly of BRT. This study “follows the mobility” by tracing the adoption of BRT from the assembly of policy model, through to the actors who first introduced BRT to South Africa, before focusing on the adoption process. This methodology draws on the experiences of the actors involved in the circulation and adoption of BRT, learning from their experiences and interactions with the South African version of BRT. It entails incorporating the site of origination with the site of adoption and the various stops along the way, all of which influence the uptake of a particular policy approach.
Previous studies following the products (Choy et al. 2009; Cook and Harrison 2007) and policies (Goldman 2005; Roy 2010), suggest a sense of completed transfer in which the learning has concluded and the adoption accomplished. But the story of BRT in South Africa is neither concluded nor accomplished. It therefore requires a retrospective trail – beginning with the adoption process and tracing back to the initial learning – to allow for reflection by policy actors, on the false starts, and slow decision-making that lead (or not) to BRT implementation. It is possible that the research process itself may have contributed further to the multifaceted and constantly mutating nature of policy mobilities: perhaps in the course of the interview, a policy actor may decide to change the trajectory of future emulation, or they may appreciate the influence of distantiated sites thereby enticing future learning. This supports McCann and Ward’s (2012) call for researchers to move with the actors to understand how people, policy and place are made mobile. Rather than simply
