The paper investigates the European Union (EU)–Brazil and EU–China regional policy dialogues, viewed as vectors of cross-national policy transfer. Regional policy is considered as having limited transfer potential due to its inward orientation, context specificity and complexity. Yet, knowledge exchange and voluntary policy transfer have taken place between the EU and Brazil and between the EU and China since the mid-2000s. The study investigates and compares actors, motivations, mechanisms of transfer, conditioning factors and types of outcomes, shedding a light on the under-researched phenomenon of international policy transfer in regional policy.