Norms do not simply diffuse all-over, and institutions cannot simply be transplanted everywhere. Western agents who promote their institutions, practices, or ideas vis-à-vis non-western ‘others’ should abandon blueprint approaches but rather study local fit. In this context, recent research on external governance in the non-western world suggests that the (collective) agency of transfer recipients is a key determinant in the adaptation process. Even though conceptual innovation and clarity in this field are scarce, recent studies experiment with concepts like localization, translation, and appropriation. The proposed contribution figures out the strengths of each of these concepts and distinguishes a cultural, and a power dimension of the recipients’ agency. This distinction leads to a new conceptual framework of the recipients’ adaptation performance which identifies four ideal types of the recipients’ agency in processes of policy transfer: localization (creative reception), imitation (passive reception), resistance (creative refusal), and indifference (passive refusal).
