Policy laundering

Policy laundering is the disguising of the origins of political decisions, laws, or international treaties. The term is based on the similar money laundering.

One common method for policy laundering is the use of international treaties which are formulated in secrecy. Afterwards it is not possible to find out who opted for which part of the treaty. Each person can claim that it was not them who demanded a certain paragraph but that they had to agree to the overall "compromise".

Examples that could be considered as "policy laundering" are WIPO or the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

Harmonization is the process through which a common set of policies are established across jurisdictions to remove irregularities. Regulations can change in any direction, however: regulations may be pushed to the lowest common denominator; but may equally benefit from the 'California effect', where one regulator pushes for the highest standards, setting models for others to follow. Harmonization requires further interrogation, however. In their review of global business regulation, Braithwaite and Drahos find that some countries (notably the U.S. and the UK) push for certain regulatory standards in international bodies and then bring those regulations home under the requirement of harmonization and the guise of multilateralism; this is what we refer to as policy laundering.

One manifestation of policy laundering is claiming a different underlying objective for a policy than is actually the case. The usual reason for politicians following this approach is that the real objective is unpopular with the public. The usual process is to conflate the issue being addressed with an unrelated matter of great public concern. The intervention pursued is presented as addressing an issue of great public concern rather than the underlying objective.

Yet another manifestation of policy laundering is to implement legal policy which a subset of legislators desire but would normally not be able to obtain approval through regular means.

ACTA is legislation laundering on an international level of what would be very difficult to get through most Parliaments.

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