Policies do not emerge spontaneously. Policy planning does not usually start from a blank board, and with a unique set of considerations. Instead, when people plan policies, they borrow items from other places and adjust them to suit their local environment. In this process, something new usually emerges: the new policy is not the same as what was borrowed.

This book looks at what happens when policies move. The analysis relies on two key concepts: translation and assemblage. Assemblage turns attention away from actor-centric models, and it tries to establish a more organic understanding of policy-making. Policies are shaped by buildings, by current legislation and documents, and by diverse groups and agents. For this reason, it is not sufficient to analyse policies only as things that have been created intentionally by a few distinctive actors. Another core concept, translation, is defined in the book in quite general terms. It is suggested that all policies entail translation, not only those needing translation from one language to another.

The book has been jointly written by four authors: John Clarke, Dave Bainton, Noémi Lendvai and Paul Stubbs. In the introduction, the authors describe how the book had its origins in collective discussions, from when the authors, despite their diverse backgrounds, noticed that they were interested in looking at what happens in policy translations. These origins in intellectual curiosity and in joyful discussions can also be found in the finished product. The main chapters of the book, the introductory chapters and the conclusion, have been written jointly by all the authors. Between these, there are chapters giving case study examples of policy movement, written by the authors individually: policy consultancy in South East Asia (Paul Stubbs), managerialisation of universities in England (John Clarke), the translation of social inclusion between the European Union and Hungary (Noémi Lendvai) and global education policy in Ladakh, India (Dave Bainton). The findings from these case studies are then collected together in a conclusion written together. By structuring the argument in this way, the book ends up presenting a lengthy discussion about the overall importance of studying policy movement. Naturally, one usually finds quite a lot of this kind of discussion in the introduction and conclusion. Nevertheless, many of the case study chapters also devote quite a lot of space for bringing up this similar topic.

My impression was that the book would have benefited from having more extensive and in-depth empirical analysis. In its current form, it might be useful to see this book as a manifesto: it claims that there are reasons for why policy movement should be looked at more in terms of translation and assemblage; meanwhile work is left for future researchers to put these wishes into practice.

What are the reasons, then, for authors to claim that we should build a more nuanced view about policy movement? They are highly critical towards some current forms of discussion about policy transfer, diffusion and learning: policies should not be understood as items, that can be packed into a box in one place and then unpacked somewhere else. Instead, the authors claim that we should pay more attention to how policies change when they enter into relations with actors, objects and institutions. Even though all policy actors form a complex and nuanced network, it is nevertheless worthwhile to try to grasp what happens in these interactions. In the best-case scenario, this outlook would allow us to find some common elements from situations that would otherwise seem to be random and unique. The authors argue that policy moves in many dimensions: it crosses borders and boundaries, and, in these situations, it is translated in many ways, some more unpredictable than others. Noémi Lendvai's chapter about policy translation across languages from the European Union's policies for social inclusion and its translation into Hungarian offers an interesting description on the workings of this process. Lendvai argues that translation from an EU language did not only transmit and transfer policies, but the process of translation both moved and created policies, and changed their content.

Assemblage is a term popularised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The use of this term allows the authors to argue that there are heterogeneous elements in policy. Different people and groups, objects, places and texts all influence policy formulation. John Clarke's chapter about the managerialisation of English universities shows that the reform process included many, sometimes even contradictory, processes. There existed a double movement: one aiming to centralise managerial power, and another to disperse managerial techniques. Clarke believes that by looking at this transformation through translation and assemblage, one can better recognise the unstable and unfinished condition of the current university systems. Power, in this case, seems to work in complex ways, but these are not completely unpredictable and unique. Paul Stubbs’ case study about the reforms in South East Europe seems to reach a rather similar conclusion: modernisation processes included both catching up with the imagined West as well as increased peripheralisation. For this reason, the performance of reform in the region involved work with the political imagination and re-imagination.

The authors state that one of the aims of the book is to help us in thinking about policy otherwise. If we are aware of the current ways of policy translation and assemblage, we can also conceptualise different ways in which policies could be created. By analysing policies through assemblage, one can understand better why the boundaries of politics and policy have been set in a certain way, and why some disruptive practices are being made to look irrational and others rational. Meanwhile, if the authors’ main thesis about translation and assemblage being found everywhere is correct, there still exists a large, unmapped terrain we can explore to understand why policies are created in the way they currently are.