REFRAMING SOCIAL POLICY: ever, in the words of a respondent –‘ let’s work with what we have now’, as it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness. Previous explanations within Global Social Policy debates have tended to view major donor organisations as monolithic entities, with geographical policy transfer seen as linear, entailing the imposition and appropriation of a homogenised set of methodologies and policy conceptions 88 . In this light, Albanian social poli­cies can be seen as expressing the need to satisfy conditional credit aid and the various demands of donors. 89 Similarly, convergence, driven by globalisation, the idea has prevailed that, under similar conditions, in the same environment and with the need to remain competitive and efficient, institutions and policy regimes will need to evolve similar or the same structures. Some justification for this could be derived from the idea of institutional isomorphism(Di Maggio and Powell, 1983). Whereas that theory was proposed to explain institutional change, it could instead be seen here as being used as a rationale for it, and behind much of the work on developing their capacities. In the light of the ideas of multi-level governance, we might expect to find complex, reciprocal and multi-layered policy transfer mechanisms between donor organisations and host countries. Instead, this research has indicated that in Albania the flow has been largely linear and unidirectional. One would expect this reliance or dependency on external intervention for sure during the heat of transition, but the situation seems to have altered little even into the current development and im­plementation of the NSSED. The benefits of technical aid seem to have become something of a straightjacket to local understanding and abilities. 90 The findings of this research lead one to think that institutions in both government and civil society appear functionally mired in meeting the multiple demands of a variety of donor organisations – demands that doesn’t look like reducing anytime soon as the coun­try aspires to synchronous orbit of the EU 91 . The real truth of the situation in Albania is somewhere between the two posi­tions just related. Far from the theoretically attractive convergence or isomorphy in institutions that would be expected from convergence and technical aid, I want to propose that we observe an institutional‘pseudomorphosis’. 92 In this conception, structurally impaired organisations attempt to emulate the functions of donor agen­cies, while incorporating atrophied versions of the civic or democratic values that form the basis of the pluralism of multi-level governance. 88 Whether neo-liberal, or newly, with a green tinge. 89 Such as, to maintain small government(IMF, 2006) or the demands of MDG and SAp. 90 The reliance on donors is immediately apparent in asking where anti-poverty efforts would have been without their technical aid. 91 Like the moon, presenting only one face to the earth at a time. 92 Author’s coinage, borrowed from‘cultural pseudomorphosis’(Spengler, 1991), whereby a local culture is thwarted in its natural development by an overpowering foreign civilisation. The origin of Spengler’s analogy is in mineralogy, where it is the deformation into a false form of a material as a result of the cumulative pressure other geological structures . 216