ИСТИНА

As post Soviet countries lack any experience in functioning of market economy the importance of knowledge transfer in the course of transition from developed capitalist countries has increased. However two major questions remain open, namely, what particular knowledge was transferred and why in some cases knowledge transfer was successful while in others it failed. It definitely depends on both international strengths/influence of ideas/knowledge in question and their acceptance by domestic social policy actors. To answer these questions the explanatory potential of causal mechanisms proves to be important in social research. In this paper they are understood as purposive actions of agents acting within certain societal constraints that provide links between idea and outcome, policy innovation and institutional change in a specific context. The paper consists of two parts. The first one discusses methodological issues pertaining to analysis of knowledge transfer in post Soviet countries, first of all existence of groups / individuals promoting an idea; social and economic conditions; attitude of political leaders and general public, development of relevant supporting institutions. The standard scheme would be – identifying the origins and hypothetical relevance of a knowledge, the reaction of local social policy actors that may lead or not to its acceptance, and implementation/adaptation to local conditions or rejection. It also nesesary to work out criteria to evaluate if knowledge transfer should be considered as sucessful, either at theoretical or practical level. The second part deals in detail with concrete mechanisms used in international knowledge transfer in Russian social policy applying the proposed methodological approach to trace causal mechanisms at each stage of knowledge transfer. We selected the three situations that differ by both strength of initial knowledge input and outcomes - promoting gender approach, developing social work as a profession and introducing family practice. It is argued in the paper that the major problem in international knowledge transfer in Russian social policy is sustainability that highly dependы on system of values and knowledge legacy, financial mechanisms as well as stage of transformation when such a transfer started.