The spaces in between: Mobile policy and the topographies and topologies of the technocracy

Abstract

This paper considers how the technocracy contributes to the mobilisation of policy, and in doing so suggests that this allows for a systematic explanation for policy mobility that is based on a particular form of expert practice rather than ideologies such as neoliberalism. It argues that the technocracy has topographies through which different places are materially connected and through which policy knowledge flows in various forms. But it also has topologies that emerge from the practice of measurement through which often distant places can be made to loom much larger, or nearby places fade into insignificance. Together they help to materialise the spaces ‘in between’ policy-making sites through which policy is often transferred. Considering the technocracy in this way demonstrates how apparently autonomous political–economic contexts shape patterns of policy mobility and state change.