Kristian Olesen

Policy mobility literature invites us to consider the power-laden processes of how urban policies are exported, mimicked, and transformed in different urban contexts. However, recent critique has highlighted the need for a fuller understanding of urban policy context to understand where and when policies come to be implemented in new settings and how they are transformed. The purpose of this study is to explore understandings of urban policy context in a comparative study of policy mobility, and specifically relations between internationally packaged concepts, local pilot projects and national level actors. We develop a framework for understanding these relations in policy mobility based on case studies of BID policy development in Sweden and Denmark drawing on both Policy Mobility literature and a Multiple Streams Approach. The main finding is that local pilots play a key role in translating packaged policy concepts but also serve as ‘proof of concept’ for further institutionalization. The way these pilots are discursively situated in relation to ‘problems’ is therefore of central importance for further implementation. Furthermore, the study highlights the role of policy entrepreneurs that connect local pilots (and discursive problems) with national level actors, and political opportunities.

The Finger Plan has guided the spatial development of the Greater Copenhagen Area for more than 70 years, constituting a planning doctrine in Danish spatial planning. However, recently the Finger Plan has come under attack from the liberal Danish Government (2015–2019), who implemented a number of initiatives to deregulate spatial planning in Denmark, most significantly through a ‘modernised’ Planning Act. As part of this process, the Finger Plan was revised twice in 2017 and 2019. The latest version of the Finger plan was prepared as part of a larger policy package aiming at promoting growth in the Greater Copenhagen Region towards 2030. This paper argues that the recent revisions of the Finger Plan must be understood as part of the ongoing neoliberalization of spatial planning in Denmark, but that the Finger Plan, at the same time, has remained ‘immune’ to a more widespread neoliberalization in this process.