Why borders matter

A recurrent theme in this volume is that the world in which public policy actors seek to move towards their preferred futures is an increasingly complex one. One dimension of this increasing complexity in policymaking is in the relationship between the territorial scale of existing political and administrative jurisdictions, such as nation states on a map, and the scale of major policy problems. From clean rivers, to population health, to migration, to crime, to macroeconomic management, to climate change, there are a series of contemporary policy challenges, which are so large in scale that they cross national borders. The problem of borders in public policy is easily stated in the abstract: these are an increasing number of important policy challenges that cannot be solved by the policy actions of states within their own borders. However, the consequences for complex problem-solving are less straightforward to identify. Hence the reconsideration of borders in this chapter and investigation of policy capacity for collective action across borders, at the international and national levels, and involving governments, private interests as well as civil society.

From the perspective of policy practice, borders may be open or closed to varying degrees to encourage or prevent flows of goods, services, capital and people. They can be reshaped as increasingly hard or soft to pursue policy objectives and goals in terms of economic growth, social development outcomes and security. From the analytic perspective, the challenge of framing transnational policymaking in those policy sectors where actors and ideas operate across, and beyond borders, to shape agendas, policy content and modes of governing, is an active and burgeoning seam of public policy scholarship (Skogstad, 2011).

Wimmer and Schiller (2002) present a wide-ranging critique of methodological nationalism in the social sciences, teasing out the effects on scholarship of the assumption that a system of nation states is the natural order of the world. As with any methodology, assumptions are required about the nature of the world being studied, or in other terms, an ontology needs to be adopted about borders. The criticism that methodological nationalism acts as a brake on policy scholarship inevitably involves some claim about the changing nature of borders in the study of public policy (Stone, 2008; Callaghan, 2010).