Ideas, transfer, and diffusion in health care policy

Various studies rooted in global social policy, international relations, comparative policy, global public policy, and critical policy studies have examined policy learning processes that combine domestic and transnational political dynamics in complex ways. In this paper, we connect the scholarship on the impact of domestic ideas with the literature on transnational processes in health care. The result is a critical review of the key concepts and claims associated with the study of ideas as it relates to both domestic and transnational processes. We explore the role of transnational ideas and the actors carrying them in health care reform by reviewing three main literatures, which are respectively centred on policy diffusion, policy transfer, and critical analysis of the role of ideas in health care. Our review demonstrates that the interactions among the different literatures are very limited, many analyses pay more attention to agenda setting and policy adoption stages of the policy cycle, and study of ideas and their movement remain siloed. Especially the global COVID-19 pandemic experience, which demolished prior expectations of success and failure, provides new opportunities to challenge power asymmetries in the production of knowledge and identify multidirectional movement of ideas across boundaries and borders.