Fast Policy by Jamie Peck and Nick Theadore is a timely intervention in the debates surrounding the growing links that bring policymakers into contact with the policy and practices of other political jurisdictions. To do this, Fast Policy offers readers two in-depth case studies: one on the development and spread of conditional cash transfers (CCT); the second, on the development and spread of participant budgeting (PB). Fast Policy makes a point to emphasize that neither of these models travelled intact from their sites of invention in Latin America to their destinations throughout the globe. Rather, translations and modifications occurred as they moved and were subsequently promoted by international institutions, networks and entrepreneurs; and, most importantly, as they entered and were implemented in their destination jurisdiction.

Peck and Theadore define fast policy as ‘social practices and infrastructures that enable the complex folding of policy lessons derived from one place into reformed and transformed arrangements elsewhere’ (xvii). Based on this definition Peck and Theadore establish a case for the use a social constructivist approach to the study of policy transfer. The logic being that a social constructivist approach is able to capture the degree of the ‘social embeddedness of policy mobility, the institutionalization of fast-traveling practices, and grounded process that enable accelerated cross-border learning’ that occurs when policies travel (xvii). The goal being to use the text to illustrate that while ‘the policymaking imagination may be globalizing. . .the stubborn reality is that making policies work very often remains a hands-on, messy, and very much “local” affair’ (xvii). This is itself a ‘continuous and often contradictory process-cum-practice of translation’ (xxvii).

Fast Policy argues that this ‘new approach’ to the study of policy moment is able to overcome weaknesses found in the diffusion, policy transfer and learning literatures. For Peck and Theadore the primary weakness of these literatures is that they are all ‘constrained by varying degrees of adherence to optimizing “logics of choice” in which “imitation, copying and adaption” are [seen as] the consequence of rational decisions by policy makers’ (13). This is itself problematic due to what Peck and Theadore characterize as a belief in a policymaking process that is ‘highly mechanistic and focused on formal attributes. . .of policies and programs’ (13). In contrast Fast Policy proclaims that a better way to study policy movement is to use a social constructivist approach (that applies concept of mobilities, see McCann and Ward, Reference McCann and Ward2011), embedded into a modified ethnographic extended case method (ECM). For Peck and Theadore, this approach should allow scholars to focus on the contextualization of the movement, adaption, and implementation processes in ways neglected by previous studies.

The remainder of the text is ostensibly dedicated to applying their ideas to the analysis of the origins (Latin American) and spread (globally) of conditional cash transfers (CCT) and participant budgeting (PB). They begin their study by analyzing the Bloomberg Administration's (New York City) attempt to develop a pilot CCT program (Opportunities NYC) based on and inspired by the concepts associated with Mexico's Oportunidades program. From here Fast Policy examines the global spread of the CCT concept.

Using a similar structure to that employed to examine Opportunities NYC the text focuses on the roles played by: international institutions (e.g. World Bank, UNDP and the IDB); international policy entrepreneurs (e.g. Santiago Levy); the importance of the promotion of given models (e.g. Brazil's Bosla Família); the importance of socio-political settings (particularly as CCT moved from Latin America to North America and Europe), and ideological predispositions (individual versus structural causes of poverty).

Fast Policy takes these insights forward though a second study focused on the development and spread of Porto Alegre's Orçamento Participativo program. For Fast Policy much of Porto Alegre's importance is found not as a model but though its symbolic importance to those interested in PB. Additionally, it is argued that much of Porto Alegre's success was due to the driving force and beliefs of the Brazilian workers party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT). As evidence Fast Policy illustrates how Orçamento Participativo became a ‘defanged’ program once the PT lost control of the local political process and a more right wing administration took office.

A theme running throughout Fast Policy, the importance of the international and ideological dominance of neo-liberalism, takes center stage in the analysis at this point. To do this Fast Policy argues that it was international and neo-liberal paradigms that altered and ‘defanged/effectively reversed’ the concept of participant budgeting (even in Brazil), where PB was rebranded as ‘local solidarity governance’ (LSG) by the Fogaça administration. This process of alteration and defanging continued as international actors and organizations promoted the Porto Alegre model (discussed as phase two of the PB process) across the globe. Specifically Fast Policy argues that in ‘in practice, the participatory process would become dominated by governmental and NGOized interests: local business demonstrated little motivation to participate, while popular participation declined . . . as [PB was] folded into an evolving elite consensus around “good governance”’ (161-4).

Overall Fast Policy offers an excellent text on the policy transfer processes associated with the movement of the concepts and ideas associated with CCT and PB. It focuses on the role of core policy entrepreneurs, the multiple and often changing roles of international organizations, the evolving nature of the networks associated with each of these policies. In addition, the discussion of Opportunities NYC and Orçamento Participativo illustrated the importance of understanding the local context and surrounding social-political-economic environment when studying the policy transfer process. While Fast Policy is an excellent text on how policy transfer should be studied, it is not a text that offers an entirely new approach to the study of policy movement. Outside a few paragraphs in each of the case study chapters, social constructivist analysis clearly takes a back seat to a standard ‘who, what, when, where and why’ text. This stated, anyone interested in an excellent policy transfer case study text, which discusses some of the more innovative approaches to the study of transfer, should read this text.