Michelle Morais de Sa e Silva (The University of Oklahoma)

Michelle Morais de Sá e Silva, PhD, is the Wick Cary Associate Professor of International and Area Studies and Co-Director of the Center for Brazil Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She teaches courses on public policy, human rights, international development, and international cooperation at the David L. Boren College of International Studies. Dr. Morais is a key figure on several academic publications. She is the co-editor-in-chief of the International Review of Public Policy and associate editor of the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis. She recently served as Vice President of the International Public Policy Association (IPPA), where she still serves as a member of the association’s Executive Committee. Dr Morais is the author of Poverty Reduction, Education, and the Global Diffusion of Conditional Cash Transfers (Palgrave, 2017) and co-editor of the edited volumes Desmonte e Reconfiguração de Políticas Públicas (Ipea, 2023) and “Public Policy in Democratic Backsliding” (Palgrave, forthcoming).

Course: The Transnational Policy Process and Development Cooperation

As policies travel beyond national borders, the public policy literature has sought to better understand the processes, motivations, obstacles, agents, and arenas involved in policy transfer. In Global South countries, policy transfer has been often intertwined with projects of international development cooperation, be it at the bilateral, multilateral, or civil society levels. Dynamics of solidarity and conditionality arouse, promoting policy circulation in different ways. Resistance to the adoption of imposed models was often used as a strategy by social movements. Often policies are labeled as ‘best practices’ and globalized as if one size fits all. Drawing on different cases of policies circulating from/to the Global South and a new generation of policy transfer studies, this course will engage participants with the growing debates over policy dynamics that constitute the transnational policy process.