Learning from Foreign Policy Models in Latin American Policy Reform

Weyland, Kurt (ed). Learning from Foreign Policy Models in Latin American Policy Reform. Washington: Wilson Centre Press, 2004. 283 pp.

This book's title seems rather inappropriate, as the bulk of the work is geared around social service reform efforts in Latin America, rather than learning per se. Weyland is a well-known analyst of Latin American politics due to his work on populist leadership. He provides an adequate, if not thorough, literature review of models of learning in international relations, psychology, and, to a lesser extent, of economic policies in the region, along with a series of suggestions to open the volume. However, the introduction, while admirably ambitious, is not drawn tightly together around a clear theme, analytical framework, or set of issues to frame the book and prepare the reader for a linked set of essays. In essence, the essays that follow are really about social service reform in Latin America, mostly pension reform, and so an opportunity to provide an overview of the question of learning, for which there is no systematic content, is missed.

Taken from this angle, there is some important material here on what seems to be the true subject of the volume. Joan Nelson's strong first chapter actually serves as a decent introduction to some of the themes occurring throughout the chapters. She points out that there is no simple external (international) to internal (domestic) transmission mechanism for the diffusion of policy models, repeating Weyland by highlighting, among other things, the importance of variety of stakeholders on the domestic level, including labor unions and government ministries as well as international public and private financial institutions. Nelson also exposes the myriad of internal contradictions and competing models of reform within the large external agencies, such as the World and Inter-American Development Banks, and has a few interesting suggestions, such as the possibility that the multilaterals often go through policy "fads." Again, like Weyland, she notes that too much has been made of a simple Chilean model spreading through Latin America. Sarah Brooks contributes a similar overview approach to pension reform, focusing on the role of the World Bank, and again reinforcing the importance of the interplay between external and internal factors. Nelson and Brooks' suggestions could have been honed down to a few streamlined hypotheses for systematic testing, but unfortunately, as is often the case with edited volumes based on conferences, the rest of the articles do not follow any clearly agreed-upon framework.

The chapters that follow are interesting and substantive accounts of case studies, whose importance is heightened by the fact that the authors themselves have experienced the impacts in their home countries. Undoubtedly, the reform of social services is one of the most pressing issues in Latin America in terms of the need for fiscal reform and increasing the spread and equity of social services amidst crushing external debt. Two chapters on social security reform in Argentina and Brazil are followed by two on unemployment insurance in Brazil and Chile and two on healthcare reform in Colombia and Mexico. Each chapter contains valuable and at times counterintuitive information on the role of domestic factors in shaping externally-pushed ideas of social service reforms. The reader can not help but notice a certain degree of arbitrariness inherent in the results of reform outcomes based on often contradictory political forces and political compromise. For example, the wide variety and dynamic development of models of social service in the North means there is no clear model for late developers of social service reforms in the South. As Uribe's chapter on healthcare reform in Colombia shows, welfare systems in the South are often mixes of different models from the North, adapted for local realities. While these chapters provide interesting descriptive stories of reform efforts in particular sectors in particular Latin American countries, they are not well integrated.

To be fair, in writing my own book on how neoliberal ideas spread throughout Latin America, I found similar obstacles to writing about policy innovation, learning and diffusion. The key problem with such pretensions is that, among other factors, and as Weyland points out in his interesting conclusion, people are often not sure themselves of the sources of their policy ideas. Our international relations models of learning, such as the work of Jervis on perception and Janis on group-think on the one hand, and the psychology of learning literature on the other, all rely principally on studies of individuals. We simply do not have any good analytical models of how learning on a group, national, or international level occur. While I suggested one framework in my own work, that is, a fit between the ideas and interests of leading experts in a developing country, and on the other side, the economic and political opportunity structure on both the domestic and international levels, my goal was simply to show the importance of the ideas-interest nexus in practice. Demonstrating how the learning of ideas takes place remains as ambiguous as how ideas arise in the first place. There simply are no easy empirical referents for tracking ideas, which is why political economists in general seem to have acquired a bias towards simplistic economic analyses that lend themselves to easy testing. It will take the development of a clearer set of propositions about learning, and a method of testing these out, to really move forward on the proposition suggested by the title of this worthwhile volume on social service reform in Latin America.