Importing development policies from the North to the Global South——where institutional distance is significant—is a prevalent practice to tackle grand challenges. Often this transplantation championed by state governments leads to policy failure and exacerbates the sustainability problems the policies are trying to solve. In this paper, we shift our attention to a critical case where a development policy copied from the Global North to address a grand challenge in the Global South has not failed despite its institutional misfit but instead has been sustained by a group of foreign and local actors generating ‘small wins’. Drawing from the empirical case of the development policy establishing a Mexican dual vocational education training (VET) programme inspired on the German system, we theorize this phenomenon as a case of ‘high-distance translation’. Using rich longitudinal data, we develop a process model that explains how actors in the Global South materially and discursively correct an ill-fitting policy to avoid its failure, thereby building capacity to tackle the grand challenge at hand.
