In recent years, a set of new post-empiricist advances to public policy, drawing on discursive analyses and participatory, deliberative practices, have come to challenge the leading technocratic, empiricist models in policy analyses. According to Pessali, the transplantation of public policies is an influential instrument in the hands of economic development – important as it may be, transplantation may not be inevitably successful, therefore not always looked for. There are good economic reasons to consider the practice of grafting in public policy transplants, i.e., consideration for the specific cities of existing local institutions and how they may interact with a set of predominant policy requirements and guidelines. By taking into account Pessali's alternative method that institutionalizes some sort of cooperation between policy makers and stakeholders, in contrast with some other common variants of the policy transplantation method, we discuss an architecture for public policy inputs in a country context, which may help to avoid some of the underlying risks of standard transplantation architectures. The article concludes that the “transplantation metaphor” can be a powerful tool in organizing our thoughts and framing our decisions, which can lead to better use of it for the purposes of public policy design in societies only in cases of political stability.