The Diffusion of Best Practices in the Public Sector

Abstract

Policy innovations in the public sector are very common. It is rather usual to hear about the adoption of what are considered by international organizations as “best practices” without necessarily carrying out an accurate analysis. But how can one learn? This chapter will briefly outline the literature on policy diffusion and learning, the Evidence Based Policy and the extrapolation approach to feed the findings of the work and to widen the horizon of recent literature.