Historically, there is nothing new about the movement of policy ideas and ideologies across national borders and systems of education. Indeed, the basic architecture of colonialism was only sustainable through the movement of policy ideas and ideologies, with directives coming from the metropole on how systems of education should be developed and managed to cultivate compliant colonial subjects. At the same time, some ideas and innovations of policy and practice in the colonies made their way back to the metropole, though they became authoritative only with the metropole’s imprimatur. Similarly, the Catholic Church has long acted as a supranational organization, seeking to implement its policies and practices through its systems of Catholic schools and universities around the world.

During most of the 20th century, educational policies continued to move from the West to the Rest, shaping the policy priorities of educational systems everywhere, based on the assumptions of the inherent superiority of the Anglo-American norms. These assumptions were legitimized through the invocation of such ideologies as modernization, industrialization and, more recently, globalization. As new nations came into existence, they continued to subscribe to these ideologies. Their reliance on overseas aid, technical expertise and other resources they needed to forge their own systems of educational governance invariably meant adopting ideas that were developed elsewhere. Moreover, the idea of “educational development” in the image of the West played a key role in constituting and defining “new” nations and their perspectives on education.

However, as reliant as the newly independent nations were on policies designed elsewhere, there were always “slippages” in the implementation processes, between the grand designs and the practices on the ground. A great deal of literature has pointed to the unintended consequences of policies unsuited to local conditions, disconnected from local traditions and often oblivious or insensitive to local resistance. Implementation processes have clearly been shown to be a great deal more complex than expected, demonstrating the limits of technicism and instrumental rationality in a field of practice as contingent and complicated as education. Policies, it is now widely recognized, cannot be implemented by edict and instructions alone.

In recent decades, this realization has challenged the traditional accounts of policy movement, organized around such concepts as policy transfer, policy borrowing and policy adoption. It is now abundantly clear that these concepts are often grounded in positivist and rationalist epistemologies, and, in many ways, draw on “neoclassical economics and orthodox communication theories” (Peck, 2011: 275). Policies, it is clear, seldom move across nation states and educational systems in ways that the technocratic processes of decision making and transfer suggest. Rather, the movement of policies is mediated by both local actors and actors beyond the nation state. In the context of growing levels of global interconnectivity, the notion that nation states and educational systems can be assumed to be spatially self-contained and bounded has been shown to be a fiction. As Diane Stone (2008) has noted, such assumptions of methodological nationalism can no longer be taken for granted to understand the logics of policy mobility.

Recent scholarship on policy mobility has shown how the traditional approaches to its understanding underestimate the role played by the globally mobile agents who facilitate policy movement and learning, be they consultants, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, philanthropic bodies or multinational corporations interested in steering education in directions they prefer, invariably aligned to the dictates of global capitalism. Furthermore, it is increasingly recognized that the global space within which policies move is not one-dimensional and linear, since the globalized world is not “flat,” as Tom Friedman (2007) assumes, but profoundly “lumpy,” characterized by asymmetries of power, uneven distribution of resources and complex political and policy networks, both within nation states and transnationally – giving rise to varied, dynamic and complex modalities of policy movement.

This important book offers a most helpful survey of these modalities through a range of thoughtful and astute essays, grounded in rich empirical data which are critically analyzed through the use of recent developments in social and political theory. Most usefully, these essays are presented around four “related-though-distinct” approaches to understanding policy mobility in education. These approaches focus on the cross-scalar, discursive, topological and decolonial aspects of policy movement. While these approaches are embedded within different disciplinary orientations and incorporate different theoretical and methodological features, the editors of this book rightly claim that they are situated within the wider phenomenon of globalization, and the debates that surround its impact and outcomes – both positive and negative. Situating their analysis in these debates, the authors of the chapters included in this book point to the ways in which policy mobility is both facilitated and impeded by global processes as it intersects with local traditions, priorities and politics.

The cross-scalar approaches to policy mobility – discussed in Part I of this volume – show how policy ideas and ideologies circulate across national and cultural borders through a diversity of mechanisms, shaping the flows of people, capital and the media in ways that are uneven and “disjunctural” (Appadurai, 1995). These flows are facilitated by numerous forces and agencies. For example, in education, international organizations have become increasingly influential in promoting ideas of reform through the processes of consensus building and conventions such as the Human Rights Conventions, the Bologna Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals, and in developing policy instruments through which agreed goals are harmonized, monitored and even audited, as is encapsulated in the idea of “governing at a distance” (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010: 118).

In recent decades, new modes of educational governance have also involved assessment schemes, such as the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA), through which systems of education compete with each other against an agreed set of criteria. Increasingly, the definition and measurement of educational performance and merit are based on these criteria. This has led to globally convergent perceptions of policies that are believed to be smart, evidence-based, efficient and effective, as the discourse approaches to policy movement discussed in Part II of this volume show. Along with competition, cooperation is also encouraged by international aid agencies, such as the World Bank, as is evident with the concepts of “development assistance and partnership” (see Olivie and Perez, 2019) through which attempts are made to mask impressions of coercion, replacing them with the ideas of cooperation needed to create a globally harmonious world.

Moreover, it should be noted that these developments are taking place at a time when the advances in technologies are rapid and relentless. Mobile and convergent technologies have extended the possibilities of communication across borders, creating robust transnational communities, as topological approaches to policy mobility have shown (see Part III of this volume). In many ways, datafication and artificial intelligence have also transformed the nature and scope of policy mobility, giving rise to both new opportunities and major risks, which include the possibilities of surveillance. Furthermore, the rise of authoritarian populism, along with the growing levels of distrust in institutions, has diminished the authority of nation states over policy-making processes. The early optimism associated with globalization has been replaced by doubt and cynicism, especially as the role of global capitalism in extending global inequalities, undermining local cultural traditions, and rendering the world environmentally unsafe and insecure has become evident. The editors’ introductory chapter usefully underscores and extends our understanding of the contemporary tensions around globalization.

However, their analysis also suggests that there is no turning back from the contemporary conditions of global interconnectivity and returning to some romantic nation-centric past. The movement of policy ideas across national and cultural borders has become a permanent feature of the global condition. Yet the nature and impact of this condition are not self-evident, but are highly contested. It is against the backdrop of this contestation that policies in education travel across borders in a whole range of contingent, uneven and complex ways. This observation highlights the fact that issues surrounding global policy mobility are simultaneously discursive and topographical, demanding closer attention to the particularities of the manner in which policies move in ways that are contextually and historically specific.

This emphasis on temporality has led postcolonial and decolonial authors –such as those in Part IV of this volume – to highlight the continuities and discontinuities across time and space, along with the dynamics of power relations in the movement of policy ideas and ideologies. Emerging from recent theories of decolonization (for example, Mignolo and Walsh, 2018) is the imperative concerning the need to understand the undercurrents of policy mobility within their long historical trajectories. Central to decolonial approaches to policy mobility is thus the contention that its contemporary forms are not disconnected from the colonial legacies of subordination, exploitation, domination and violence.

While the four approaches to the study of policy mobility in education examined in this book – namely the cross-scalar, discursive, topological and decolonial – differ markedly with respect to the theoretical assumptions they embody, they are not unrelated. They focus on different aspects of the same empirical phenomenon, embedded within the shifting and unsettled conditions of globalization. To appreciate the relationship across these four aspects of policy mobility, this book points to the particular significance of the concepts of translation and assemblage, interpreted both as metaphors and conceptual lenses. These concepts are helpful in examining the movement of policy across cross-scalar trajectories – that is, they are useful in researching how the processes of adaptation, convergence and disembodying of policies across sites are characterized by radically different linguistic, cultural and political traditions. If translation is always a selective and active process in which meanings are interpreted and reinterpreted to make them fit their new context, then the idea of translation demonstrates the fluid and dynamic nature of the social world, created through displacement, dislocation and negotiation, and always associated with uncertainty and contingency.

An understanding of the ways in which the same policy text can have different meaning implies the importance of the role that discourses play in the diffusion of norms across borders, through the work of transnational policy communities and networks. This diffusion involves translation, relocating and assembling policy in the wider fields of relationship in which power is now organized and enacted. To an extent, policy becomes delinked from strictly national processes of policy making, as transnational networks become relevant to, and embedded within, the national systems. While this does not suggest that the nation states lose their significance, new questions emerge about their policy-making capacity in a complex world in terms of the broader concerns of legitimacy and authority. The ideas of national borders and sovereignty also acquire new meaning and therefore need to be reconsidered and reimagined, as the flows of information and opportunities of policy comparison and learning disrupt and expand existing networks and relationalities of power.

In the study of policy mobility, this emphasis on temporality – and on its onto-epistemic basis more generally – opens up the possibility of challenging the hierarchical structures that continue to shape most institutional practices in education and society around the world in ways that often distort and deny the knowledges, subjectivities and perspectives of marginalized populations. In highlighting issues of power in the processes of translation and assemblage, this book thus reaffirms the notion that the explorations of policy mobility have the potential to help us better understand the worlds of both the colonized and the colonizer, injecting a new sense of possibilities. This implies that research into policy mobility should not only be viewed through its analytical lenses, but fundamentally also as an ethical and political project.