Policy transfer among planners in transit-oriented development

What is it about?

This article describes and assesses the process of transferring policy ideas on transit-oriented development (TOD) to Dutch land-use and transportation planners. The Netherlands illustrates a planning context typical of countries where the concept of (TOD) has been transferred, but perhaps in an incomplete form; considerable barriers remain in implementing TOD beyond disconnected projects. The policy ideas were 16 critical success factors in TOD obtained through a meta-analysis of international case studies developed in the first phase of this study (Thomas and Bertolini, 2014). Through two exercises, local planners learned about the processes and types of policy transfer, identified the strengths and weaknesses in TOD implementation in their regions and discussed ways in which to strengthen weaknesses. Pre- and post-workshop surveys of the participants indicate that the workshops were an effective way to transfer policy ideas and lessons from international cases to the local planning context and ‘recontextualise’ them to their own region.

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Why is it important?

There are few articles on policy transfer processes in planning, but we use ideas from other geographic, political, and cultural contexts in our daily practice.