Exploring ‘international-subnational’ crime and justice policy transfer: the case of MOPAC’s Alcohol Abstinence Monitoring Requirement Pilot

Take even a cursory glance at literature dedicated to discussing crime and justice policy and you are likely to stumble upon claims that policy innovations have travelled overseas and disembarked in the United Kingdom (UK). The significant problem with the majority of such claims, however, is that they are rarely substantiated by systematically conducted research. Instead, they are commonly based on hunches and assumptions that seemingly derive from an understanding that policy responses in the UK and elsewhere look rather similar. Moreover, the small number of empirical studies that have been published in this sphere primarily fix their gaze at the national level, thus neglecting to examine if, why, when, and how subnational agents seek to import crime control initiatives from subnational jurisdictions in a different country. Positioned firmly at the nexus between social policy, political science, and criminology, this thesis seeks to respond to this lacuna by examining the occurrence and realities of the phenomenon of ‘international-subnational’ crime and justice policy transfer with respect to the UK. Adopting a qualitative case study design that is exploratory in nature, it meticulously reconstructs the (in)formal events that led to the development and implementation of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime’s (MOPAC) Alcohol Abstinence Monitoring Requirement (AAMR) Pilot by triangulating evidence obtained from three sources: elite interviews, documentary materials, and unstructured naturalistic observation. In addition to making a series of empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions to existing academic knowledge, this thesis also bridges the gap between social scientific enquiry and public policy-making by identifying empirically grounded ‘lessons’ for policy practitioners and by forwarding a number of policy recommendations.