This book presents a long overdue encounter between policy studies and critical work on questions of scale (from geographers, anthropologists, political sociologists and others). Scale, as Natalie Papanastasiou argues compellingly, is central to the political and intellectual landscape of policy studies. It is present everywhere and almost always taken for granted as the terrain on which policy takes place – whether that be the role of global organisations (such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund) in shaping policy or the local as the site of policy implementation (where the ‘front line worker’ meets the ‘service user’). Between these two levels is the apparently fixed point of the nation – the place where policy and politics meet, in the offices, corridors, debating chambers and legal drafting departments of the nation-state.

Both space and scale matter for policy and policy studies. It has taken a long time to loosen the grip of methodological nationalism on policy studies which has conventionally treated policies as exclusively national phenomena, attached to a particular place and polity, and being devised, directed and enacted by a nation-state. Such a view enabled a comparative studies approach centred on looking for the similarities and differences between national systems (and attending to their evolution through time). However, this conception of the national space of policy has been increasingly challenged and there has been a growing attention to new domains and dynamics of policy, in particular, those associated with perceived processes of globalisation, regionalisation and Europeanisation. These processes are understood to have unsettled the assumed unities of place, people and policy associated with methodological nationalism. At times, there has been a risk of substituting a methodological globalism in its place, projecting a flat world of policy travel and transfer. What is more important, however, is that much of this emerging scholarship has been framed by a taken for granted conception of the scales or levels at which policy comes into being – the local, national, European, global and so on.

This book takes on this scalar framing directly and aims to enhance and deepen the work of critical and interpretive policy studies, not least by inciting a conversation with critical geographers and others. Critical geographers have done those of us working in policy studies a great favour by undoing such ways of thinking about space and scale – both conceptually and politically.