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Håkan Johansson.

Håkan Johansson

Professor

Håkan Johansson.

From a liberal to a Social Democratic welfare state: the policy transfer of the UK Compact?

Author

  • Håkan Johansson
  • Mairon Johansson

Summary, in English

England was one of the first countries to install a Compact to regulate the relationship between state and civil society and since then several other countries have followed and initiated national Agreements, Charters or Concordats. Despite a growing academic interest into such national Compact models we have insufficient knowledge of how such ideas ‘from abroad’ are adapted and molded to fit with ‘domestic’ legacies, institutions and power disparities. The purpose of this article is to analyse the translation of the English Compact into a Swedish context and above all how domestic Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) acted to adjust such an international model to a national context. The article draws upon studies of written documents and interviews with key actors (politicians and CSO representatives) and two main conclusions are being presented. First, the article demonstrates that CSOs played an important role as translation agents as they identified the Compact idea long before key decision makers did, yet that the complete translation of the Compact model into a Swedish context was dependent upon the political will and ownership of central decision-makers. Second, the article demonstrates that the translation process was not as ordered as sometimes depicted within the translation literature and instead chains of translation processes was detected. These findings address a need to open up the translation perspective for the analysis of multiple types of translation agents and to understand translation as a nested process, in which one translation process might very well be interrelated with other parallel translation processes.

Department/s

  • School of Social Work

Publishing year

2012

Language

English

Publication/Series

Nonprofit Policy Forum

Volume

3

Issue

2

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

De Gruyter

Topic

  • Social Work

Keywords

  • Civil Society Organisations
  • Translation
  • NGOs
  • Compac models
  • Social democratic welfare state

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 2194-6035