Moving ideas: An agenda for expanding the political scope of the policy mobilities approach

Abstract

This paper addresses the policy mobilities approach’s relative inattention to counter-hegemonic activism and contentious politics. It outlines one way to expand the literature’s engagement with the political. By introducing the notion of “moving ideas”—ideas that circulate among places and also move people to political action—it outlines five avenues for policy mobilities scholars to advance the approach: situated knowledge on-the-move; persuasive storytelling; encounters in physical “truth-spots”; the temporalities of activism; and the role of “futuring” in policy change. It ends with notes on the framework’s possible applicability to numerous social movements and its challenges and limitations.

Keywords

policy mobilities social movements moving ideas political activism harm reduction

Introduction

Since the mid-2000s, the policy mobilities approach has informed critical research into the spatialities and politics of policy-making. The approach focuses on the travels of policy ideas, knowledge, models, and “best practices” among localities and how policy models “on-the-move” shape and interact with politics and governance “on-the-ground.” Rather than conceiving of policy models as emanating and diffusing from single origins to be adopted in numerous others, the approach conceptualizes how policy is made through interconnections among networked actors. Thus, the literature emphasizes how and with what effects local policy is also extra-local and often global in its production (see the following agendas and reviews: McCann, 2011a; McCann and Ward, 2012, 2013; Peck, 2011; Prince, 2020, 2025; Temenos and McCann, 2013; Temenos and Ward, 2018; Ward, 2018). Yet, while the literature is fundamentally political through its analysis of the power relations that shape and are shaped by policy-making, it has largely conceptualized policy mobilization through studies of the politics of hegemonic neoliberal policy-making. These mobile policy models include Business Improvement Districts (Ward, 2007), Tax Increment Financing (Baker et al., 2016; Ward, 2018), Bus Rapid Transit (Wood, 2022), market-oriented sustainable planning strategies (McCann, 2011a, 2013; Montero, 2017; Montero and Baiocchi, 2022), creative city policies (Prince, 2012, 2014), Participatory Budgeting strategies (Peck and Theodore, 2015), and public space planning techniques (Lees and Warwick, 2022; McCann and Mahieus, 2021).¹ These hegemonic policy models tend to fly far and fast on the strong winds of global institutional orthodoxies, shaping contemporary life as they go (Peck and Theodore, 2015).

My purpose is to outline an agenda for expanding and deepening the policy mobilities approach, conceptually and empirically, by building on its insights while signposting an opportunity for further research that has been only partially addressed in the literature’s first two decades. Specifically, I argue that the political scope of policy mobilities scholarship can be enlarged to include not only the politics of hegemonic policy-making but also the counter-hegemonic activism, ideation, and contentious politics through which political activists seek to change hegemonic policies. There is no necessary reason why the policy mobilities approach cannot inform and benefit from analyses of counter-hegemonic politics, after all.² Indeed, as Plehwe (2023: 642) argues, the policy mobilities literature is marked by a problematic inattention to “oppositional ‘strategy mobility.’” It is important to expand and deepen the political scope of policy mobilities analyses because, first, this will allow the approach to further fulfill its analytical potential, largely on its own terms. Second, such an expansion will also provide opportunities for the approach to develop further, conceptually, through engagement with cognate and intersecting literatures. A third benefit of a more sustained and systematic approach to counter-hegemonic activism is that it allows the literature to more fully meet the contemporary political moment, in which policies intended to govern a particularly precarious and uncertain future are made, enacted, challenged, and reformulated through contentious politics.

The policy mobilities approach has the capacity to address how counter-hegemonic social movements produce and circulate knowledge and ideas as they engage in contentious politics. Ample evidence indicates that political ideas, knowledge, agendas, practices, and solidarities in social movements are built through similar “informational infrastructures” (Cook and Ward, 2012; McCann, 2008, 2011a; Ward, 2024) as those upon which the policy mobilities literature has primarily focussed (e.g., Bosco, 2001, 2006). These ideas may not always become formalized as policy models, although some are. Massey (2011), developing the notion of “a counter-hegemonic relationality of place,” makes this point in the opening essay of the early policy mobilities edited collection, Mobile Urbanism (McCann and Ward, 2011). Correspondingly, Harris and Moore (2013: 1505) build on Purcell’s (2008: 153) phrase “fast resistance transfer” to argue that “subaltern or oppositional groups replicate the global scans and exchanges of more formal policy-makers, often by inhabiting similar channels and technologies … [as exemplified by] the rapid, global spread of urban Occupation movements during 2011, and their ‘fast’ transfer, facilitated by transnational media networks.” The potential for an expanded politicization of the policy mobilities approach is similarly evident in Bunnell’s (2015: 1996) argument that there remain “important possibilities for … [bringing] activists … into critical policy analyses.” Nonetheless, the opportunities suggested by these and other statements have been rarely pursued either within the literature or through engagements with other bodies of work, such as the social movement studies literature.

I introduce the term “moving ideas” as a frame to help pursue these opportunities. It has two connotations. First, the political efficacy of ideas is related to their spatialities, that is how and with what effects they move from place to place and are embedded in places. Second, political ideas of all kinds move people to critique dominant ideologies and to engage in political activism that challenges, rethinks, and reworks political orthodoxies. Engaging the question of how exactly moving ideas are implicated in contentious politics and movement activism, in reference to but also beyond formal policy-making, is more than a chance to find further examples that largely demonstrate the efficacy of existing policy mobilities concepts, however. Focusing only on these sorts of “corroborative case studies” is an empiricist trap that the contemporary policy mobilities literature would do well to avoid. Focusing on ideas also avoids being hamstrung by the term “policy,” which tends to intuitively connote governmental plans, strategies, and rulings that are formally written, adopted, and enacted. Rather, researching moving ideas, especially as they operate in the activism of counter-hegemonic social movements, will help the policy mobilities literature to develop conceptually through engaging with a wider range of political ideation and practice.

The next section outlines how policy mobilities scholars have conceptualized the global-relational production of policy and how the literature might advance conceptualization in the future. It also introduces drug harm reduction as a social movement that will be the illustrative example through the rest of the discussion. The subsequent section outlines a five-part framework for conceptualizing moving ideas in reference to concepts largely drawn from policy mobilities and social movement scholarship. The paper’s final section discusses the framework’s potential applicability to a range of social movements and its possible challenges or limitations.

Conceptualizing counter-hegemonic ideas in-the-making and on-the-move

The policy mobilities literature employs a largely social constructivist approach that pays attention to actors and institutions working from sub-national to global scales and to the activities of a wide range of “transfer agents” (Stone, 2004) who advocate, produce, and circulate policy models. It addresses how policy knowledge and policy models are created and circulated across scales through the following broad questions, which I have summarized from various reviews of the literature (e.g., Prince, 2025; Temenos et al., 2019; Ward, 2018): Who mobilizes and who is mobilized in policy-making processes? How are policies rendered mobile? What infrastructures enable and channel policy mobilities? What sites and spaces shape and are shaped by mobilization? What are the politics of this global-relational policy/knowledge-making? What are the conditions, consequences, and politics of failure in policy mobilization, when policies do not become mobile models or when attempts to introduce models in new locations are unsuccessful?

By addressing these questions, the literature has traced a political geography of knowledge-practice that adopts or develops a number of useful concepts, including the defining productive and propulsive tension between mobility/fixity by which circulation occurs (McCann and Ward, 2010), informational infrastructures, through which policy models flow (Temenos and McCann, 2013; Ward, 2024), policy tourism, via actors learning models-in-action and in-place (Baker and McGuirk, 2019; González, 2011; Ward, 2011; Wood, 2014), and assemblage, translation, and mutation, by which models are localized (McCann and Ward, 2012, 2013; Peck, 2011; Prince, 2014). These concepts have shed light on how powerful institutions, with the assistance of international organizations, professional consultants, academic experts, business organizations, and community advocates, mold “best practices” into formal written policies that are emulated, adjusted, and enacted across multiple jurisdictions.

The policy mobilities literature has always paid attention to ideas, as have related literatures (e.g., Peck 2012; Stone, 1989). Temenos et al. (2019: 105) define policies as “constellation[s] of ideas, people, resources, techniques, and technologies” and I would add materials, expertise, knowledge, interests, and power. Therefore, concepts and insights from the literature can be brought to bear on and be informed by the study of social movement activists’ ideas, actions, strategies, and spatialities. As Kelley (2002: 9) argues, “[s]ocial movements generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions. The most radical ideas often grow out of a concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression.” This perspective on knowledge and grounded practice—on broad ideational resonance and local specificity—is echoed by Temenos’s (2017: 585) discussion of the “properly political work that makes up policy mobility,” involving “countermobilities … resistances, disruptions and alternative pathways used in activism for policy reform by people in disparate locations.”

Yet, few studies of counter-hegemonic politics, knowledge production, and policy-making have appeared in the literature. This scarcity is evident both in Theodore’s (2019) policy mobilities bibliography and Prince’s (2025) book-length introduction to the approach. Neither feature more than a few mentions of social movement activism, which speaks to the literature, not to any oversight on the part of these two authors. Both see the potential of studying resistance and counter-hegemonic and contentious politics through the policy mobilities approach. Theodore, for example, has made a longstanding contribution to the study of social movement activism and contentious politics, largely regarding migrant and labor movements. Some of this work (e.g., Theodore and Martin, 2007) does not use the language of policy mobilities per se, but its themes, including how new forms of political action are brought into cities by international migrants, are pertinent. On the other hand, Theodore (2015) explicitly draws on the policy mobilities approach to analyze how migrant day labors organize in US cities by using Latin American popular education traditions to combat exploitation by employers. Notable in this context is his attention to the community organizing strategies of non-state actors, rather than to “forms of statecraft per se” (Theodore 2015: 2037). “Like mobile policies,” Theodore continues,

community-organising philosophies and practices can exhibit a transnational reach, linking distant sites through circulatory systems of knowledge production. Furthermore, like mobile policies, community-organising practices do not travel intact as immutable objects; rather, their relevance depends on the ways in which they are adapted and moulded to suit local conditions (Ibid.).

He details how a nationally organized network of day laborers circulates the common identity of a “day laborer,” around which a political coalitions and principles and methodologies for organizing were built, thus producing “a relational geography of social movement activism” (Ibid.: 2049).

Peck and Theodore’s book, Fast Policy (2015), is concerned with the production and proliferation of policy models, “traveling across … neoliberalized terrains” (Ibid.: 237) but not necessarily conforming with the tenets of hegemonic neoliberalism. Two points are worth making. First, their study of the Conditional Cash Transfer and Participatory Budgeting models shows that policy models are complex and contradictory. Therefore, inklings of counter-hegemony are evident, even in models that are distilled and circulated by hegemonic institutions. Second, as the authors recount in a review forum on the book, their research was originally motivated by the question of how “‘progressive’ or left-of-center policies [propagated] across borders” (Peck and Theodore, 2016: 96). These examples show that counter-hegemony has always been a latent theme of the policy mobilities approach. Examples of heterogeneity, complexity, contradiction, and resistance (Lauermann and Vogelpohl, 2017; Stein et al., 2017) can be found, but these have not been drawn out systematically in the literature across multiple case studies. This is the opportunity I am signaling and contributing to in this paper. Only the case of harm reduction drug policy and, specifically, the case of Supervised drug Consumption Sites (SCSs), has been developed as a sustained case of counter-hegemonic policy/idea mobilization in the literature (Baker et al., 2020; Baker and McCann 2020; Longhurst and McCann 2016; McCann 2008, 2011b; McCann and Temenos 2015; Temenos 2016, 2017, 2024). I use it as the illustrative example in the sections below, not to suggest that it should be the sole focus of research into moving ideas, but to use it as a model which, like all models, offers lessons that might inform other studies and can be translated for and molded to other contexts.

Harm reduction as a case of counter-hegemonic ideas in-the-making and on-the-move

Harm reduction is “a principle, concept, ideology, policy, strategy, set of interventions, target and movement” (Ball, 2007: 684–685) and a “way of knowing” (Klein, 2020). In its most generic connotation, it is a public health approach intended to allow, rather than prohibit, activities that are productive, fulfilling, or enjoyable, while also being risky. In this regard, birth control, seat belts, bike helmets, and sunscreen are all examples of harm reduction. In the context of drug use and particularly the use of illegal drugs, harm reduction is both a public health movement that alleviates the effects of consuming unpredictable, unregulated drugs produced and sold by criminal organizations and it is also a social movement that advocates for changes to harmful policies, such as those associated with the so-called war on drugs (Bluthenthal, 1998; Braine, 2020; Friedman et al., 2001, 2007; Kerr et al., 2006; McKeganey, 2011; Wieloch, 2002). Examples of drug harm reduction include needle and syringe distribution; Opiate Agonist Treatment, using methadone or buprenorphine; naloxone provision to reverse overdoses; the decriminalization or legalization of certain substances like cannabis, or defined quantities of certain drugs; and the establishment of Supervised drug Consumption Sites (SCSs) (Harm Reduction International, 2024).

Harm reductionists research, champion, and implement “policies, programmes, and practices that aim to minimize the negative health, social, and legal impacts associated with drug use, drug policies, and drug laws” without mandating abstinence or supporting criminalization (Harm Reduction International, 2023: 11; Harm Reduction International, 2024). Harm reductionists include people who use drugs and their families as well as public health and social service professionals, politicians and policy-makers, health researchers, and other allies. Since the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, they have created a globally interconnected movement of organizations, journals, conferences, research centers, and funders. The movement’s counter-hegemonic political character is evident in advocates’ efforts to change policies at scales from the local to global (Bewley-Taylor, 2012), in ongoing debates within the movement around its priorities and strategies (Fraser et al., 2018; Standring, 2017; Tammi, 2004), and in calls for a widening of the disciplinary knowledge contributing to harm reduction scholarship, which have focussed on critical theory (Watson et al., 2020), philosophy, and political theory (Dea and Weinstock, 2020). I would also advocate for a geographical perspective defined by an interweaving of empirical detail and conceptualization in ways that Dea (2020) herself argues is worthwhile.

People who use SCSs are generally low-income, unhoused or tenuously housed, marginalized, stigmatized, and grappling with concurrent health conditions, from physical pain to emotional trauma. They bring their previously obtained illegal drugs to SCSs, consume them with sterile equipment, like needles and syringes or pipes, under the supervision of trained staff who can assist if they succumb to overdose or other unexpected harms, and can help them connect with other social services, as available and desired (EMCDDA, 2018). The SCS model is a set of ideas, practices, equipment, and architectural elements that are circulated, assembled, and operationalized in various locations in opposition to orthodox, criminalization, and abstinence-focussed policy models. Moreover, SCSs are political spaces—one form of informational infrastructure—constituted by and constitutive of the model’s global circulation (McCann and Temenos, 2015). Thus, they are instances of fixed/moving ideas.

The SCS model has circulated since the first SCS was established in Switzerland in the 1980s (Haemmig, 1992). Now, at least 139 of them operate legally in twenty countries³. Over two hundred peer-reviewed research studies of SCSs have been published since the 1990s (Belackova et al., 2019; Belackova and Salmon, 2017; EMCDDA, 2018; MSIC Evaluation Committee, 2003; Potier et al., 2014; Urban Health Research Initiative, 2009). They largely report evidence of the sites’ effectiveness. Research indicates that SCSs: reduce overdose deaths; may improve hygienic drug use (thus reducing the spread of blood-borne infections, like HIV and Hepatitis C) without increasing frequency of use; may improve access to health and social services, including detox and recovery; reduce the prevalence of street-based drug use and its associated litter; and reduce health care expenses. Evidence does not suggest that SCS availability produces higher rates of drug-related crime. Nonetheless, harm reduction remains politically controversial because it does not center prohibition, criminalization, or abstinence in the way that the hegemonic international drug control regime does (Bewley-Taylor, 2012). Many of its interventions, including SCSs, are prohibited or severely constrained in many jurisdictions (Harm Reduction International, 2024), leaving harm reductionists to advocate for their ideas through counter-hegemonic politics, in which the drug control hegemony is not simply resisted but through which activists engage in a multifaceted project of counter-hegemonic knowledge-practice to transform established attitudes and practices and to construct new ideas and, in some cases, formal policies for addressing drug-related harm (Carroll, 2006, 2010; Im, 1991; Kipfer, 2002).⁴

Five themes for a research agenda on moving ideas

If the policy mobilities approach can be usefully expanded and deepened with reference to the political, how can it learn from literatures on counter-hegemonic social movements in the process? I will detail five themes that might shape an agenda: the co-constitutive relationship between knowledge situated in specific socio-spatial contexts and its mobilization; the role of persuasive storytelling in constituting local and global “policy (counter-)publics” and generating political support for social change; how encounters in specific places and narratives from and about those places shape political action; how apparent failure can generate alternative policy visions, strategies, regimes, and temporalities; and the role futuring plays in defining and driving moving ideas.

Movement, knowledge: Situated knowledge on-the-move

“There is a need, to coin a paradoxical term, to embed mobility,” argues Peck (2011: 22, his emphasis) when discussing policy circulation. The need to embed, or situate, the circulation of policy ideas, knowledge, and models in relational contexts, is also pertinent to studying political ideas more generally, even counter-hegemonic ones. Their circulation is a form of situated knowledge on-the-move. In this framing, situatedness is both spatial and social (Barnes, 2009; Haraway, 1991; Kobayashi, 2020; McFarlane, 2011; Proudfoot, 2019) but, as the sociological mobilities literature (Adey et al., 2014) indicates and the policy mobilities approach emphasizes, people and knowledge are situated in specific locations and also situated in their movement among locations. Barnes (2009: 684; see also McFarlane, 2011) emphasizes this point by arguing that situated knowledge is “constantly in motion, tugged and pulled among the various nodes of its constitutive field,” while Kobayashi (2020: 216) contends that,

[p]eople are positioned within a discursive field … that influences what they say and do, the power that they wield, with whom they speak, the extent of their inclusion or marginality. It matters, moreover, “where” (and when) they are positioned, in buildings, or cities, in what part of the world, and with whom they share proximity, either through direct bodily contact or through the myriad ways in which knowledge is transmitted spatially, shared partially, and embodied meaningfully [see Haraway, 1991 on situatedness, embodiment, and knowledge].

Situatedness and relationality are not spatial, in a narrow sense, but socio-spatial and policy mobilities concepts, including informational infrastructures (through which ideas flow), policy tourism (via which advocates, skeptics, policy-makers, and others develop knowledge about the operation of policy models elsewhere), and assemblage, translation, and mutation (by which models are localized) provide a framework for understanding situated-mobile knowledge.

Numerous scholars who grapple with the spatialities of social movements address their spatiality (Blank, 2016; Bosco, 2001, 2006; Chatterton and Pickerill, 2010; Davies and Featherstone, 2016; Featherstone, 2008; Halvorsen, 2017; Herrera, 2022; Leitner et al., 2008; Magdahl, 2022; Martin and Miller, 2003; Miller, 2000, 2013; Routledge, 2003, 2009; Routledge et al., 2013). From this perspective, situated knowledge on-the-move is embodied in spatially extensive collectives (Barnes, 2009), a point emphasized by Featherstone (2008: 158): “place-based political movements … are always already constituted through various interrelations” or organizing practices that include the circulation of ideas. The policy mobilities literature has consistently foregrounded the circulation of knowledge through epistemic communities or communities of practice (e.g., Algoed and Torrales, 2024; Bok and Coe, 2017; Peck and Theodore, 2010) and has grappled with how to conceptualize and research knowledge that seeps through from elsewhere—breaching the bounds of established political and policy regimes—via ephemeral influences, inspirations, impressions, comparisons, encounters, rumors, and memories (Cochrane and Ward, 2012; Robinson, 2015).

The production of “movement knowledge” (Cox and Flesher Fominaya, 2009) is a prominent theme in social movement scholarship and holds a valuable resonance with policy mobilities discussions. “[A]lternative knowledge projects” are essential to social movements (Carroll, 2016) and, more specifically, the relational situatedness of what Casas-Cortés et al. (2008) call “knowledge-practices” are crucial to social movements’ effectiveness. Knowledge-practice emphasizes that knowledge is “concrete, embodied, lived, and situated,” the material product of political work (Ibid.: 20), a point that echoes Carroll’s (2006: 25) argument that “counter-hegemonic globalization … often means pressing in local contexts for changes whose site-specific benefits open opportunities for activists elsewhere to make similar claims.” The “political effects” of movements, “include not only immediate strategic objectives for social or political change,” however, but also

the generation of expertise and new paradigms of being, as well as different modes of analyses of relevant political and social conjunctures. … [Movements are] knowledge-producers in their own right … lively actors producing their own explanations and knowledges … [in] the form of stories, ideas, narratives, and ideologies, but also theories, expertise, as well as political analyses and critical understandings of particular contexts (Casas-Cortés et al., 2008: 20–21; and see Brissette and King, 2023).

Thus, the notion of situated knowledge on-the-move provides a language for conceptualizing activist spatialities in ways that resonate strongly with the policy mobilities approach’s focus on policy spatialities.

The development and circulation of harm reduction ideas have always involved situated/mobile knowledge-practices, for example. During the 1980s AIDS crisis, Dutch, English, German, Swiss and US harm reductionists connected via media reports, phone and email, at conferences, and through site visits to create innovative responses, especially for people injecting drugs and engaged in sex work (Ashton and Seymour, 1988; O’Hare, 2007). The first legally sanctioned SCS open in Bern in 1986 (Haemmig, 1992). By the late 1990s, service providers and activists in Vancouver recall desperately hanging on to stories of harm reduction from Europe as they fought against criminalization and high rates of disease and overdose death. They and their Australian counterparts learned from German & Swiss cities and, in 2001, the Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Center opened, followed by the Insite SCS in Vancouver in 2003—the first two SCSs in English-speaking countries (McCann, 2008; McCann and Temenos, 2015). In the years since, others have learned from established sites, including SCSs advocates in Dublin, one of whom worked in the MSIC to gain practical knowledge of its operation and another subsequently visited Vancouver to understand Insite and its context (McCann and Duffin, 2023). These connections and travels have been essential to those educating about, debating, translating, and molding the model to their local political and policy-making contexts.

Persuasive storytelling and coalition-building

If the notion of “moving ideas” implies that knowledge-practices are circulatory, it also emphasizes that ideas move opinion, spurring people to create coalitions and act politically in support of them. The policy mobilities literature shows that if a policy model is to become a global exemplar, it must develop stories that create a supportive audience whose members act as mobilizers, proselytizers, adaptors, and implementors. Indeed, Throgmorton (2003: 126) argues that policy-making is “persuasive and constitutive storytelling about the future” (see also Mahieus and McCann, 2023; Sandercock, 2003; Söderström et al., 2014; Stone, 1989) and that the social process of storytelling, more than singular stories, shapes policy (Throgmorton, 2007). To be persuasive, policy advocates need to get their story straight, so to speak. Consultants, politicians, and bureaucrats must gather supportive audiences around their carefully constructed narratives. As Montero (2018: 758) suggests in his discussion of the travel of Bogotá’s car-free Ciclovía program to San Francisco, in part carried by stories told in documentary films, “the charismatic and persuasive capacities of storytellers are essential.” Part of their storytelling about policy must also involve careful, strategic translation—an always interested (i.e., never neutral) process of framing, inscribing, and silencing elements of a story for an intended audience (Clarke et al., 2015).

For Vasudevan et al. (2023: 1728), storytelling is the iterative and transformative process of “interpreting reality through observation and the exchange of ideas.” It involves “dismantle[ing] the dominant story and proliferat[ing] stories that tell otherwise” (Ibid.: 1738). Similarly, counter-hegemonic, or “dangerous ideas,” as Nicholls and Uitermark (2018: 259) call them, are intended to move society toward a better future. To do so, they need a story to be told with and about them, a case to be made for them, and an active audience, counter-public, or political coalition built around them (Felski, 1989; Fraser, 1990; Mansbridge, 1996; Warner, 2002). “Collective action frames” have been a prominent concern of the social movement literature since the 1990s (Benford and Snow, 2000). Taking “meaning work—the struggle over the production of mobilizing and countermobilizing ideas” seriously (Ibid.: 613), this literature emphasizes activists’ efforts to create interpretative frames that challenge hegemonic interpretations of reality and possibility while drawing their audience into their cause. Similarly, Evans (2008: 295) argues, a key task of counter-hegemonic activism, “is to propose a vision of the future that connects to peoples’ own definition of the lives they want to live”—a Gramscian “war of position” involving “alternative knowledge projects” (see also Carroll, 2016; Evans, 2012; Smith et al., 2018). As the policy mobilities literature has shown, policy-making is a storytelling endeavor: a problem must be defined, appeals to evidence must be made, ideally bolstered by proponents’ direct experience of the policy being enacted elsewhere, all supported by globally extensive communities of like-minded activists, researchers, and allies.

In their discussion of policy translation, Clarke et al. (2015: 47) define it as “a process of potential struggle” and social movement scholarship adds detail to this argument. Polletta and Redman (2020: 2) argue that stories arrange actions in a sequential plot that resonates with and moves or “transports” an audience into engagement with the logic and intent of the storyteller’s normative message (see also Green and Appel, 2024). Correspondingly, for Kelley (2002: 9), “[p]rogressive social movements do not simply produce statistics and narratives of oppression; rather, the best ones do what great poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors, and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society.” Studies of social movements’ persuasive storytelling must attend to their socio-spatial character, however. If storytelling “transports” audiences, in the context of circulating ideas, this word is more than poetic license. Stories transcend space, as well as time, bringing audiences to places elsewhere and bringing models from elsewhere to new settings. Storytelling is crucial to topological knowledge-making. Yet, only focusing on persuasion and connection through verbal and textual storytelling would miss what Davies and Featherstone (2016) refer to as performance. Stories are also told through physical actions, like occupying public spaces (Butler, 2015; Mitchell, 1995) and using visual means, from PowerPoints, graphs, images in policy documents, to t-shirts, posters, banners, and murals to convey messages (Doerr et al., 2014). Storytelling in all its forms, in policy-making and contentious politics, combines emplotment with emplacement.

In the case of SCSs, throughout the long history of advocacy for the Insite SCS in Vancouver, the simple, iconic slogan, “Insite Saves Lives,” sometimes accompanied by “Trust the Evidence” (Pivot Legal Society, 2015) has been worn on t-shirts and emblazoned on posters, placards, and banners during protests advocating for the opening and ongoing operation of the SCS. In Vancouver and elsewhere, various stories and storytelling practices have made the argument for SCSs, including scientific evidence framed in the peculiar style of academic journals, personal testimonies voiced in policy hearings and media accounts, and slogans on banners at protests—public oral and visual storytelling events where people express empathy, grief, anger, and hope. Advocates in Dublin, for their part, spent most of the 2010s crafting a narrative and a coalition, not simply by pointing to peer-reviewed evidence of the benefits of SCSs, but also by articulating a persuasive communications strategy, involving consultations with communications and marketing professionals, to encourage empathy among the general public and politicians for people who use drugs and their families (McCann and Duffin, 2023). These cases and others can best be studied as examples of policy mobility if they are understood in terms of the full range of moving ideas that motivated and maintained long-term political action until policies were implemented.

Activism and truth-spots

Persuasive storytelling and the circulation of ideas involve references to and practical engagement with specific places. Without this material groundedness, discussions of ideas can fall into the trap of idealism (see Peck et al., 2025 on the embeddedness of ideas). To become mobile models, the policy mobilities literature suggests that policy interventions generally need to have been operationalized in places that can be studied, referred to, and visited by policy tourists (Baker and McGuirk, 2019; González, 2011; Ward, 2011; Wood, 2014). These spaces are what Larner and Le Heron (2002: 765) call “globalizing ‘microspaces,’” where expertise, lessons, and trust are deployed and produced and where local situations are connected to global circulations (see Peck et al., 2023; Temenos 2017). Regarding social movements, Miller and Nicholls (2013: 465) argue that “[t]he processes that produce [political] mobilization, and the strategies of movements, are inherently constituted in multiple and ever-changing spatialities.” If the policy mobilities literature is to focus more fully on the spatialities of counter-hegemonic ideas, it can build on resonances with the social movement literature.

Yet, another concept is worthy of consideration: truth-spots. For Gieryn (2018), “truth-spots” are “places that help people believe.” They are sites of practical and intellectual encounter that generate credibility for claims that are made from and about them (Bunnell et al., 2022; Gieryn, 2018; McCann, 2023). “To locate an account [or story],” Gieryn (2018: 3) argues,

is to return it to a place where it was discovered or manufactured, where it is displayed or celebrated, where it gets enacted and reproduced, where it is contested or obscured. Such places may become truth-spots—and the place itself is not merely an incidental setting where some idea or assertion just happens to gain credibility, but a vital cause of that enhanced believability.

Gieryn develops his argument through analyses of a range of places from where ideas emanate, including the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Greece, and an ultra-clean lab at Indiana University. In the context of policy-making, conference rooms (Cook and Ward, 2012), “living labs” (Evans and Karvonen, 2010), or model green housing developments (McCann, 2013), are truth-spots, “where an account and a potential believer intersect” (Gieryn, 2018: 3). Cities and regions, more generally, can also be truth-spots and nodes within wider networks of policy circulation. Peck has pointed this out, both in the case of Amsterdam (Peck, 2012) and, with colleagues, in reference to Hong Kong (Peck et al., 2023), noting that these places often transcend the realm of truth to become “faith spots” in service of particular interests (Ibid.: 100). In a similar vein, Lendvai (2015) emphasizes the relationships between space, policy circulation, and storytelling by discussing “translation zones” in which policy is formulated and operationalized.

Social movements are similarly grounded in truth-spots, including Greenwich Village, New York’s Stonewall Inn, a pivotal site in the LGBTQ rights movement, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., site of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech during the US civil rights struggle, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy before Parliament House, Canberra (Iveson, 2017), which asserts First Nations’ land rights, and the Riksgatan pedestrian passage between two parliament buildings in Stockholm, site of Greta Thunberg’s early Fridays for the Future climate protests (McCann, 2023). These iconic public spaces are always in conversation with other, less visible and more mundane “protected enclaves,” as Mansbridge (1996: 57) calls spaces like feminist bookstores (Fraser, 1990), or the upstairs rooms of bars (Warner, 2002), kitchen tables (Staeheli, 1996), or bus seats (Sziarto and Leitner, 2010) where counter-publics gain strength through supportive engagement as they develop their ideas. All these are sites of truth, faith, translation, convergence, and mobilization. Moving ideas are situated and encountered ideas, then. They are simultaneously moored and mobile, introspective and extrospective. For policy mobilities scholars, these points resonate with Wright and Shore’s (2011: 1–2) argument that policies are “embedded within … particular social and cultural worlds or ‘domains of meaning’ [that they] create as well as reflect.” Teaching, persuasion, and trust-building happen face-to-face and in-place.

Truth-spots, encounters, and unequal access to them are longstanding themes in the global campaign for SCSs. Conferences and workshops, at local, national, and international scales are one setting in which ideas and knowledge have long been circulated in the harm reduction movement (O’Hare, 2007). At least three other sites of situated narration are salient for the movement. First, there are what might be called “spaces of problematization,” in reference to which policy problems are identified (Bacchi, 2009). Urban public spaces, strewn with discarded syringes, feces, and dirty puddles, are contrasted by SCS advocates with images of the clean, orderly spaces of existing SCSs. “Where would you rather your loved one used drugs?” they ask (McCann and Duffin, 2023). Second, SCSs are frequently visited sites of policy tourism. They act as physical models—places where interested visitors can take photos or videos of the consumption booths, medical supplies, etc. and can learn from participants and staff. Opening up SCSs for this sort of visceral experience is a key aspect of activism, since it affords visitors greater credibility when they report back to their localities (McCann and Temenos, 2015). Third, activists use public spaces as sites of protest, memorial, knowledge exchange, and political public formation which, through media attention, spread their vision for a more humane drug policy (Boyd et al., 2009). If the policy mobilities literature is to engage more fully with the political, an attention to how social movements use truth-spots to develop and circulate ideas can enhance its existing focus on policy tourism and informational infrastructures.

Generative failure and the temporalities of moving ideas

What does it mean, however, when ideas seem not to gain traction or appear to fail in their circulation, leaving a proposed future, faith, or truth unrealized? How do we account for policy immobilities, or ideas that do not move? More usefully, how can we conceptualize the temporalities of moving ideas in the politics of policy-making? Failure and success are relationally interconnected, according to the policy mobilities literature. They are not self-evident or distinct from each other. They are social productions, situated, and suffused with power (Baker and McCann, 2020; Bok, 2020; Chang, 2017; Longhurst and McCann, 2016; Moore-Cherry and Bonnin, 2020; Nciri and Levenda, 2020; Temenos, 2024; Temenos and Lauermann, 2020). This focus entails a “critical attention to the politics of failure” and

works to re-center power within analyses of urban policy, laying bare … multiple and ongoing failures in ways that can help us to imagine alternative policy interventions and, more radically, alternate forms of governance (Temenos and Lauermann, 2020: 1114, my emphasis; see Wells 2014).

No policy model lasts forever and an apparent policy failure is not an ending, per se. From this perspective, failure and success should neither be dichotomized nor reified. Rather, it is crucial to address the politics, spatialities, and temporalities of moving ideas, in their full range manifestations and impacts (Abram, 2014; Anderson, 2010; Bunnell et al., 2018; Harms, 2013; Morais, 2024; Wood, 2022).

Yet, despite these insights from policy mobilities scholars, the literature can learn more from social movement scholars. Since movements generally face challenges, their outcomes are both overdetermined and indeterminate. As Featherstone (2008) argues, social movement “alliances and solidarities can have multiple … open-ended effects” (Ibid 160), while, writing specifically about counter-hegemony, Kipfer (2002: 127) suggests that it is “a non-teleological practice with multiple time/space horizons.” Social movements may not immediately achieve their stated goals in a specific context, but their work establishes their ideas in the public sphere by making alternative possibilities visible to a more general public, by creating new political subjectivities and alliances in relation to those ideas, and by maintaining the motivation of activists who have already been committed to the cause (Temenos, 2017). “Failure” can be generative of new advances through the knowledge, narratives, connections, capacities, and coalitions that are built in campaigns.

Scholars who study social movements’ responses to losses would agree. Beckwith (2015), for example, contends that movement actors construct “narratives of defeat” in response to failures, indeed if they do not, their movement is less likely to survive. These narratives ascribe meaning to a failure, including defining it as a form of learning, as a sign of “defiant survival,” and as part of a noble good fight (Beckwith, 2015: 11; see also Gulliver et al., 2023). These authors argue that such strategies allow movements to maintain belief and, I would add, to sustain and reconstitute capacities, alliances, and solidarities across distances and over time.

These themes are central to an account of the campaign for an SCS in Melbourne, Australia, for example (Baker and McCann, 2020). It was scheduled to open in 2001, concurrent with Sydney’s. An organization was granted permission to open it and had equipped a building with the necessary fixtures. Yet, close to the planned opening, a change of State government in Victoria led to a reversal. Crucially, however, the city’s harm reductionists, looking back over the intervening years, do not necessarily define see it as a defeat. Rather, they point to evidence of how the conversation over opening an SCS, to the extent of one being physically if not operationally “modelled” in the city center, led to a broadening of what sorts of other harm reduction services were acceptable and, crucially, fundable in the city. First, almost immediately after the decision not to open the SCS, five primary healthcare centers for people who use drugs were established. These are operated on harm reduction principles and, unlike the SCS if it had opened, they are staffed by peer workers—people who use or have used drugs—who can make different connections with program participants than the centers’ clinical workers. Second, the SCS campaign galvanized community-based harm reduction advocacy groups, who remained active in advocating for other harm reduction initiatives, including heroin prescription and expanded needle and syringe exchange and more drug treatment. Given this example, the failure/success framing is analytically unhelpful and politically disempowering. Instead, it is better to interrogate the political temporalities, as well as spatialities, of counter-hegemonic moving ideas.

Imagining and modeling transformed futures

If, as I suggested above, the policy mobilities literature benefits from a nuanced approach to temporality, this must include not only historical analyses but also an engagement with the future and with acts of “futuring.” Policy researchers, Oomen et al. (2022: 253–254), conceive of futuring as “the identification, creation and dissemination of images of the future shaping the possibility space for action, thus enacting relationships between past, present and future.” The notion of futuring centers a view of the future as the product of “imaginative work and practices” (Ibid.) of knowledge and meaning production and claims to legitimacy that produce publics around them. Ideally at least, it is intended to shape a better future for all. Nevertheless, Wang’s (2023: 1420) point that the “policy mobilities [approach] … would be enriched by attending to … how futures become justifications for a specific form of political action in the here and now” is well-taken. Policy-making is prospective or future-oriented, extrospective or elsewhere-oriented, situated, and contentious (McCann, 2013, 2017).

Bunnell et al.’s (2018) engagement with futuring is a valuable connector between the policy literature and the politics of futuring in social movement activism. They use the notion of the prospect—both a noun suggesting a vision of the future and a verb indicating seeking or searching (prospecting for) a future—to argue that people’s conceptualizations of “elsewhens,” including futures, are connected to elsewheres, since the imagination of the future is situated in specific places. In policy mobilities terms, a local aspiration for a greener development future, for example, is often framed and facilitated by the ability to reference a model that has been operating for a while in another place, as part of a dynamic spatiotemporal “referencescape”(McCann, 2017). Knowledge-practices involved in prospecting for the future are generative, therefore: they “continually give rise to new imaginings and necessitate revised calculations in a recursive spatiotemporal process that is human life itself” (Bunnell et al., 2018: 40).

The longstanding attention to movement goals in the social movement literature speaks to this point. Reflecting on the poetic knowledge and radical imagination of social movements that Kelley (2002) invokes, Benjamin (2024) argues that collective “[r]adical imagination … isn’t counter to doing the work of changing our material conditions and improving our quality of life. Rather, radical imagination can inspire us to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is politically possible.” Casas-Cortés et al. (2008: 28), for their part, argue for understanding movements as knowledge producers that develop

analyses, concepts, theories, imaginaries—including the very categories of collective identification and political analysis according to which they act—and … methodological devices and research tools. In addition, they also entail practices less obviously associated with knowledge, including the generation of subjectivities/identities, discourses, common-sense, and projects of autonomy and livelihood.

Imagining, making, and mobilizing ideas are a practice of political futuring.

An intensely moving idea expressed by harm reductionists is that, by stopping people dying, they offer them a future and, specifically, one in which they may develop a more stable relationship to the psychoactive substances they use. With reduced harm, people may be able to secure housing, when needed, and to achieve other goals (i.e., enact their futures). On the other hand, “dead people don’t recover,” as the harm reduction slogan goes. The current overdose crisis, in which formerly common drugs have been replaced by fentanyl and a chaotic, ever-changing mix of other substances, has emphasized the need for SCSs. This has led more activists, including people who use drugs themselves, to create new mutual aid spaces—often called Overdose Prevention Sites (OPSs)—sometimes defying slow-moving legal and policy regimes to rapidly respond to the increased dangers of unregulated supply (Wallace et al., 2019).

More radically still, the crisis has encouraged conversations and experiments in drug laws reform to allow decriminalization, regulated markets, and “safe supply” of drugs to people who currently obtain them from unregulated markets. In those cases, SCS would be less necessary, since activists argue that the content and strength of drugs would be regulated, as alcohol currently is in most of the world, with legally enforced monitoring of production and retailing, and clear and accurate labeling of strength, thus reducing the likelihood of overdose. For example, in 2022–2023, Vancouver’s Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) bought drugs including heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine online, tested them, packaged them with clear content labeling, and distributed them to their members. As such, they took most of the risk from unregulated drugs out of the equation and, as DULF argued, protected their members from the harms of contemporary hegemonic drug policy (Kalicum et al., 2024). After being allowed to operate in contravention, but in full view, of current laws, DULF’s office was raided and its founders arrested in October 2023. Protests in support of the organization have subsequently been held in Vancouver, in which the slogan “DULF Saves Lives” echoes the “Insite Saves Lives” refrain. Furthermore, DULF’s founders are challenging their arrest in court by arguing that any benefits of closing their operation is disproportionate to the harms inflicted on its members who are once again exposed to the unpredictable drug supply of the unregulated market controlled by organized crime (Godfrey, 2024). This case suggests that social movements are continually engaged in practically and imaginatively prospecting for alternative futures, including ones that counter-hegemonic policy regimes and develop alternative policy models in and across localities.

Discussion

As the policy mobilities approach matures, it is high time the literature deepened its engagement with the political. While there is no doubt that the approach is politically attuned—it focusses on questions of policy-making, governance, and the uneven consequences of decision-making on social life and built environments—it is also true that the political extends further than the scope of most policy mobilities research, which tends to focus on the production, circulation, and effects of policies that align with political orthodoxies. The understandable and important focus on hegemonic policies should be joined more forcefully by an attention to contentious and counter-hegemonic politics in which ideas of various types and degrees of formality are articulated by those positioned, or who position themselves, outside of the state and capital or find themselves infrequently, uncomfortably, or thinly included in policy-making. These “moving ideas”—ones that are influential in and through their circulation and that move people to political action—motivate struggles in various locations and connect them to wider political geographies of knowledge-practice.

Using the drug harm reduction movement as a illustrative example, I argue that a valuable way to think more about counter-hegemonic ideas from the perspective of policy mobilities—and to think about policy mobilities through counter-hegemonic ideas—is to draw upon and elabourate on certain themes within social movement scholarship, broadly defined. I have suggested how consideration of the tensions and connections between situatedness and mobility, persuasive storytelling’s role in movement-building, truth, faith, and translation spots as spaces for encountering and moving ideas, activist temporalities, and the politics of futuring provides policy mobilities scholars with resources to engage in discussions with other literatures that are also interested in the spatialities of political change. Moreover, since both policy mobilities and social movement scholars are interested in the state, primarily in its role as a seed bed, testing ground, mobilizer, and legitimator for certain “best practices” in the former case and as an arena of conflict that can only be understood in relation to social movements in the latter (Johnston, 2011), there is substantial common ground for ongoing development of analyses of moving counter-hegemonic ideas.

Yet, it would be wrong to say that policy mobilities scholars should take one of those “turns,” of which geography as a discipline is quite fond. Critical policy scholars need not rebrand themselves as social movement scholars. Instead, I am arguing for addition, expansion, and ongoing (self-)critique, rather than the abandonment of the “old” in order to veer off in frenzied pursuit of the new. The substantial amount of conceptual, empirical, and methodological work already done in the policy mobilities literature is valuable, after all. Rather, I suggest that the spatial and political connotations of moving ideas resonate with the study of a wide range of counter-hegemonic social movements, including those addressing climate justice, Indigenous land rights, tenants’ rights, racial justice, abolition, and others.⁵ Their specific knowledge-practices no doubt entail varied combinations of the strategies described above, but most of those strategies are likely to be evident in some combination in the knowledge-practices of most social movements.

The environmental movement, with its longstanding impulse to think and act across scales, from the local to the global, is a case in point. The recent iteration of the movement has, for example, combined an iconic origin site, or truth-spot—the site of Greta Thunberg’s weekly protests in Stockholm—with various other individual actions in meaningful places, such as art museums, with disruptive actions and mass protests that have taken over public spaces to problematize hegemonic energy policies and to articulate alternative visions of climate justice (McCann 2023). These protests are storytelling events, highly mediatized to represent their arguments widely and thus help build publics around them. Furthermore, the movement’s ideas and policy proposals, articulated through strategies and programs like the “Green New Deal” in the United States, gather accounts of the worst effects of the growing crisis in particularly vulnerable places and point to concrete examples of how energy can be produced, or the effects of climate change mitigated, in socially just ways (Aronoff et al., 2019). Of course, this counter-hegemonic movement, like all others, suffers its share of setbacks and apparent failures, from the gradual fall-off and burn-out that comes with sustained action by under-resourced and overstretched activists, to electoral reversals, to the arrest and harsh sentencing of protestors.

This is not to suggest that the framework discussed above is unproblematic or universal. One concern with its potential applicability across a range of contexts is whether a conceptualization largely developed in reference to hegemonic process and ideas—traveling neoliberal policy models—can be used to study counter-hegemonic ideas. I have suggested that many, if not all, of the broad strategies used by purveyors of neoliberal orthodoxies, from appeals to truth, to strategic storytelling about problems, solutions, and even the reasons for failure, as well as many of the informational infrastructures used to circulate the ideas, are generally similar to those used by admittedly less well-resourced and less institutionally backed counter-hegemonic activists. Yet, the limits and lacunae of this conceptualization, as well as its promises, will need to be unpacked through detailed empirical research. The applicability of this approach might also be questioned regarding its resonance with movements, including Indigenous and intersectional ones and ones grounded in the Global South, that have not been studied by policy mobilities scholars to any great extent. Are the knowledge-practices of some of these movements incompatible with a framework built on the insights of the policy mobilities literature? Is their knowledge-practice localized enough, perhaps in the case of movements that draw sustenance and strategy from land-based knowledge, to be incompatible with a framework that conceptualizes policy-making and politics as relationally produced through extra-local networking?

These questions present opportunities for the policy mobilities literature to continue challenging its conceptual and empirical limits. It can only continue to maintain the vibrance it has displayed in the last two decades if scholars take up new challenges and continue to think critically about the politics of policy-making and the political geographies of knowledge production.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Tom Baker, Cristina Temenos, and Kevin Ward for ongoing conversations about policy mobilities, to Allan Cochrane for comments on an earlier draft, and to Colin Lorne and Baharak Yousefi for valuable discussions about activism and counter-hegemony. I also thank Noel Castree and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions. A version of the paper was presented as the 9th Annual Harrison and Eva Lewis Bailey Distinguished Alumni Lecture at the University of Kentucky’s Department of Geography. It has benefited from comments and questions at the event. The research upon which this paper is based is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

ORCID iD

Eugene McCann

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (31-R640114) for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Eugene McCann is a Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University. He researches policy mobilities, social movement activism, urban politics, and harm reduction.

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