Moral politics and atypical change perspectives are important theoretical insights to understand cross- cultural variations in drug policy development. Yet, as it should have come across from the literature review (chapter 2), the cannabis debate is a two-level political arena. National and sub-national drug control cultures interact in different ways with global influences that have significantly affected the available pathways for cannabis policymaking.
On the one hand, international treaties have been used as a powerful tool for the expansion of cannabis prohibition and the War on Drugs framework from the countries of the north to those in the south. As noted by Jones and Newburn (2006), a generalised shift during the 1980s toward a more punitive culture of drug control has received widespread criminological attention in Latin America as elsewhere. Drug policy analysts have repeatedly pointed to the importation of ideas and legal frameworks from abroad, particularly from the United States, when explaining this general shift. Thus, for example, authors such as Jock Young (2003), Bewley-Taylor (2003), Youngers and Rosin (2004), O M and Durán-Martínez (2016), to mention a few, have consistently showed how North American political actors were key for the adoption of the war on drugs metaphor, and incarceration as the key weapon of this war, in a number of different countries.
On the other hand, increasing critiques of such treaties emerge at the same time as an array of divergent experiences of drugs regulation start to develop at the local level. Furthermore, one of the main alternatives to this punitive approach, harm reduction, is also a well-travelled concept. Since its development in Europe, Australia and North America two decades ago, harm reduction has been increasingly accepted by many governments and the international community as a policy proposal (Stimson, 2007).
Regarding cannabis policy more specifically, previous works have already identified a number of significant similarities and differences between recent regulation frameworks. In his research on the Uruguayan case, for example, von Hoffman states that although the existing literature conceptualized
U
M the changing
international context, epistemic communities, transnational activism and positive international response contributed to the success of cannabis policy reform H Y concrete mechanisms of policy transfer in this field remain relatively unexplored. Overall, as proposed by Nelken (2010) and Jones & Newburn (2006) in their works on international policy convergence and national punitiveness patterns, most of this literature is more concerned with who is in charge of policy transfer and where it may lead, while there is much less focus on discussing how it is even possible (Nelken, 2010; Jones & Newburn, 2006).
The analysis of policy transfer mechanisms regards the intentional actions of significant actors to process by which knowledge of policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in one political system (past or present) are used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in another political system (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000, p. 5). Here, the term is particularly important because the apparent similarity of policies adopted in different jurisdictions is not a sufficient guaranty of policy transfer, since it might have occurred simply by chance, as result of parallel endogenous policy developments or even as a tool for legitimizing decisions that political actors had already made. Thus, it is not always easy to empirically determinate
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Uruguayan cannabis reform and reforms occurred in other jurisdictions but also to detect the agents who have transferred this knowledge and made politicians aware of them, exploring the reasons why Uruguayan legislative actors utilized such knowledge (Jones & Newburn 2006).
Typically, research on policy transfer has primarily focused on the role of official actors and networks in this type of process. More recently, a growing body of work has been enhancing our understanding
of non-governmental actors and transnational activism as transference agents (Stone, 2000; Keck &
Sikkink, 1999). Since non-governmental actors cannot impose policies on a political system, their place in policy transfer dynamics is not self-evident, usually playing a role akin to that of policy entrepreneurs, encouraging policy lesson-drawing and advocacy efforts.
Further on, it is important to question by what means and why policy transfer is possible, exploring the existence of structural, contextual, institutional and cultural factors that may block or enable this kind of process (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Jones & Newburn, 2006; O'Malley, 1999). In this regard, Bennett (1991) outlines four possible types: emulation, harmonization, elite networking and policy communities, and penetration. Only the last one entails a non-cooperative mechanism of transference involving the imposition of a particular political pathway by some powerful agent. Thus, emulation implies the deliberate use of lessons of a program used in another society, whereas harmonization concerns the efforts of intergovernmental organizations to develop processes of international integration to synchronize common policies. Finally, elite networking refers to the coordination of governmental and non-governmental actors sharing information about a common problem and possible political solutions to it. Overall, the difference between these types is a matter of degree.
In the context of this research, policy transfer is discussed as both a causal contributor that might help to understand why cannabis regulation was possible in Uruguay. I will discuss the specific policy transfer mechanisms, blockers and facilitators that might have been underpinning the diffusion of cannabis innovations that the literature centred on policy design has empirically identified but fails to analyse.
Concluding remarks
Cannabis regulation is an atypical and surprising reform, in that it not only involves a questioning of policy tools but also interrogates deeply the moral foundations of policy making. Unlike most of the cannabis control models developed in the world, the Uruguayan new legal framework aims at facilitating the best public safety and health conditions possible for this market to develop, and not to just restraining it, as cannabis prohibition does.
Because of the high moral controversy surrounding this decision, this type of change is not expected to come as an endogenous policy learning process. Thus, the present thesis aims to contribute to the criminology field by discussing why and how a concrete behaviour ceased to be defined as a crime by law, exposing the interplay between morality and law-making.
Theoretically, it aims at a specific understanding of drug policymaking by engaging moral politics, atypical change and international policy transfer perspectives to explain Uruguayan cannabis
M tem framework was proposed,
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societies. An ethics of autonomy was related to progressive political stands on cannabis and other victimless crimes, generally emphasising elements of liberty and care in policy reforms. Conversely, an ethics of community was associated to conservative positions, endorsing prohibition as an
aditions.
Additionally, the role of religion and secularisation in victimless crimes political processes was
secular type, characterised by issue-specific coalitions where the composition of parties in government is not central to understanding cannabis reforms. In the religious type, different victimless crimes issues are likely to follow a similar policy process. In this case, varying degrees of secularization and the absence of a confessional party at the government are important factors to understand cross-national differences in political outputs. Hence, at the macro level, structural and contextual variables such as a secularisation processes affecting public opinion on cannabis, changes in the systemic governing coalition, the appearance of new political actors, and policy windows opened during the electoral competition creating chaotic moments of punctuation were all highlighted as relevant factors to explore in the Uruguayan case.
At the micro level, the constitution of advocacy coalitions around cannabis reform, as well as the presence of policy brokers and entrepreneurs mediating the conflict and re-framing the policy proposals to fit emerging circumstances were identified as important concepts to research. Lastly, the study of the political process itself necessitates exploration of the pertinent actors involved in the debate, and the mobilisation strategies used to change the power balances within the illegal drug policy subsystem. It involves the analysis of how the image of illegal cannabis was framed in Uruguay as a mixture of empirical information and emotive appeals, and how this shaped the policy design to resolve the problem.
Lastly, the role of international actors and experiences is under question, looking at how the international accumulation of knowledge about cannabis legal regulations might have been transferred to Uruguay, and what were the main blockers and facilitators for political actors to engage in this process.
Thus, having outlined the theoretical strategy to understand Uruguayan cannabis regulation, the following chapter delves into the corresponding methodological challenges attached to this case study.