What Is Actually Being Evaluated When Crime Prevention Travels?

International crime-prevention models rarely arrive in a receiving setting as unchanged programmes. Institutional carriers, local components, implementation arrangements and evaluable outcomes may all change. This article compares four Swedish translation pathways: Kurve kriegen to Rätt Kurva, US focused deterrence/GVI to Swedish GVI/Sluta skjut, Scotland´s GIRFEC lineage to Backa barnet, and Communities That Care in Malmö. Using a fixed source-to-receiving record, the study distinguishes what travelled, what changed and what must be re-established locally. Programme lineage did not uniquely identify the receiving evaluand. The cases instead generated different prevention and evaluation burdens: carrier/form translation, renewed causal attribution, service-architecture implementation, and partial system installation followed by organisational reconfiguration. These findings do not propose a new adaptation framework. They show how prevention practice can preserve source evidence without treating implementation success, programme lineage or local outcome movement as equivalent to a locally identified causal effect. Publication status: Version 1.0 Zenodo preprint; not peer reviewed. The Zenodo record also contains structured source/comparison matrices supporting the analysis.