The role of international transfer of tools for cannabis regulation in Uruguay ; El rol de la transferencia internacional de herramientas para la regulación del cannabis en Uruguay

In December 2013 Uruguay surprised the world by becoming the first nation to extensively regulate cannabis. Behind the approval of this law, an odd and conflictive combination of national civil society representatives, legislative and executive power, entrepreneurs and transnational networks, came together to make cannabis regulation happen. In this paper, I delve particularly into the role of international policy transference processes in two areas of the political process: policy design and political campaigning. As path dependency theorists point out, once in place, institutions tend to persist. One political choice closes off alternative options, and leads to the establishment of institutions that generate self- reinforcing path dependent processes. In other words, regulating cannabis is as atypical as prohibiting it once legal. Therefore, knowing and understanding the point of origin of this controversial drug policy reform is crucial to understanding the dependent path. Within an international context increasingly sceptical about the cannabis prohibition orthodoxy, insights gained from this atypical change are quite relevant for policy-making, since the Uruguayan example might prove to be useful for policy learning across the globe. The analysis of policy transfer mechanisms includes the intentional actions of significant actors who engage in a 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 y Marsh, 2000, p. 5). 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 ...