Policy makers sometimes act as innovators, coming up with brand new ideas to solve thorny policy problems, but frequently they act as borrowers, recycling ideas from other sectors and countries. The Conservatives’ Citizen's Charter programme of the 1990s was exported around the world, as policy makers latched on to the charter concept (Butler, 1994). New Labour imported its welfare to work policies from Clinton's New Democrats when it came into power in 1997 (Dolowitz, 1998; Dolowitz et al, 1999; King and Wickham-Jones, 1999). Organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Bank are widely seen as exporters, picking up Anglo-Saxon new public management approaches and adapting them for a wide range of country contexts (Dolowitz, 2000; McCourt, 2001; Christensen and Loegreid, 2007; Kiely, 2007).

This chapter examines how policies transfer from one government department or state to another, exploring how far such moves are evidence-driven and what the mechanisms and channels of transfer are likely to be. Within health and social care, there are a number of initiatives that have been lent or borrowed – some internationally, some between departments. These include policies such as the Patient's Charter, expert patient programmes and individual budgets. An extensive literature has grown up around the concept of policy transfer (or ‘lesson drawing’) to explain how transfers such as these occur, offering possible explanations about the how, why and when of transfer. However, this approach relies on a systematic account of the transfer process that has come under increasing attack. As a result, the concept of translation has developed as an alternative approach to explain why and how policies migrate from one setting to another (see below for further discussion).

The chapter considers these two approaches in some depth, and then applies their insights to a case study of personal budgets in social care. It examines how the concept of individually based budgets is spreading from social care into the NHS, and gaining attention in relation to education, employment services and offender management. Drawing on interviews and document analysis conducted by the author, the chapter highlights the ways in which ideas and policy mechanisms spread through powerful stories of change rather than being ‘evidencebased’ in a traditional way (see also Chapters Four and Five in this book on the role of rhetoric and on sense making).