Policy Proliferation

The basic assumption is that policy entrepreneurship is the result of some combination of ability and need. This is because for a solution to be created, first there must be a problem of sufficient magnitude to justify the cost and secondly, the costs must be able to be covered. The intuitive result is that cities, with their large amounts of problems and resources, are able to have people whose jobs revolve about the creation of new problem solving policies. These policies are then picked up by the suburbs which rather than creating entirely new policies which would be costly both in the creation and in potential litigation, instead opt to minimal modify the city’s policy to match their context/issue. This continues until a policy has been proliferated with some boarder challenges between cities or where the problem/context is so different, the adopted policy could be challenged in court or be similarly costly. This would suggest that the primary way problems are solved are by taking urbanized areas’ solutions and generalizing them; however, how does policy entrepreneurship and proliferation work in unique areas where no urbanized area would have need of a solution to that particular problem. This raises a major question: Does it make sense for these policies to proliferate or are the contexts too different that even for municipalities with similar issues, legal systems, cultural expectations, etc… would make adoption so expensive that bespoke policy solutions make sense. This question itself has three questions which much be addressed: How do municipalities conduct case selection/how aware are they of other similar cases; how do these smaller municipalities in extreme contexts conduct their cost benefit analysis; and how do they adopt such a solution/how much is the policy modified: In the urban policy proliferation case, each iteration is small but from the edge case to the urban core, the policies may be nearly unrecognizable do to the aggregated differences in context and issue but when the issues are nearly identical but contexts are extremely different.