The movement of policy is a core feature of contemporary education reform. Many different concepts, including policy transfer, borrowing and lending, travelling, diffusion and mobility, have been deployed to study how and why policy moves across jurisdictions, scales of governance, policy sectors or organisations. However, the underlying theoretical perspectives and the foundational assumptions of different approaches to policy movement remain insufficiently discussed.
To address this gap, this book places front and center questions of theory, ontology, epistemology and method related to policy movement. It explores a wide diversity of approaches to help understand the policy movement phenomena, providing a useful guide on global studies in education, as well as insights into the future of this dynamic area of work.
297 14 Global education policy Susan Robertson and Roger Dale Overview This chapter examines the expansion of global education policy-making over the past three decades, broadly driven and given shape by the globalising of neoliberalism, on the one hand, and greater engagement with the idea of education as a human right, on the other. Our argument is elaborated through the analysis of four education policy issue areas. The first focuses on the first attempt to globalise education policy via the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The second
Introduction This chapter makes an intervention in the literature on knowledge mobilization and global education policy by presenting a novel approach to studying policy movement. The central purpose of this approach – labeled bibliographic ethnography – is to highlight the work that bibliographic references do in the context of academic and organizational texts, while also keeping one eye on the larger implications of the productive nature of such citations beyond the limits of the text itself. The approach brings an ethnographic sensitivity to the
209 nine global education policies Roger Dale and Susan Robertson overview This chapter points out that existing ‘conceptual grammars’ of education, based on the primacy and centrality of national education systems, are inadequate in an era of globalisation. Globalisation has changed the structures, processes, scales and actors involved in education policy. These arguments are developed through the analysis of four educational trajectories: the first focuses on the fate of the first attempt to ‘globalise’ education policy, the United Nations (UN) Declaration
Introduction This edited volume contributes to the literature on global education policy by bringing together, extending and problematizing different theoretical and methodological approaches to policy movement. A variety of concepts – including policy transfer, borrowing, lending, travelling, diffusion, dissemination and mobility – have been deployed to study how and why policy moves across territories, jurisdictions, scales and organizations. A central premise of this volume is that these various concepts align with different theoretical traditions, which
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chapter is that it presents an approach to investigating how actors and mechanisms associated with structural forces on different levels (that is, international and local) interact in the trajectory of a certain global education policy. Inclusive education policy making in the Malaysian context IE policy making in Malaysia is essentially a centrally directed exercise that remains internally determined by the federal government ( Arifin and Othman, 2018 ). While the formulation process is to some extent open to public opinion and interest groups’ influence (for
Over the past decade, dual training (DT) has consolidated its status as a travelling policy idea. Born in German-speaking countries, DT combines school-based education with highly regulated work-based training and generates interest among a growing number of countries. The challenges encountered by policy transfer dynamics behind the spread of DT have sparked considerable debate, but much less has been said on the origins of DT as a portable, export-ready policy. Likewise, while there is growing understanding on why recipient countries might be interested in DT, there is less clarity on how this policy idea acquired global currency. In light of this, this chapter examines the articulation of the German model of DT as a mobile policy idea. Building on documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews, and informed by von Gliszczynski and Leisering’s work on the articulation of global social policy, the chapter identifies a number of enabling and limiting factors that explain the (relative) spread of the DT policy idea. Particular attention is paid to the discursive and institutional efforts made by the German polity to promote DT. In so doing, the chapter contributes to shedding light on the role of bilateral cooperation in the production of global policies.
This chapter analyses the impact of the global diffusion of equal pay laws (EPLs) on the relative enrolment rates of women in secondary education. First, we aim to explain the policy movement of EPLs and then the impact this movement had on countries’ female students. We contemplate international organizations as decisive actors since they set global normative standards regarding EPLs. They foster the idea of gender equality with an individualistic perspective on skill formation and human rights. We theorize this neoliberal discourse to influence the uptake and, crucially, the impact of EPLs across countries with widely differing economic, historical and cultural traits. We show in our mixed-methods study that: (1) equal pay of men and women is an important issue for the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in the context of education policy; (2) the worldwide diffusion of EPLs indicates an isomorphic trend, which is mediated by “cultural spheres”; and (3) that EPLs can provide incentives for girls to participate in secondary education, but the effect of EPLs on participation rates is also mediated by different “cultural spheres.” We thus consider policy movement as a phenomenon itself and simultaneously analyze the de facto outcomes of this specific policy movement.
This chapter is an attempt to trace the legacy of colonial time in the secular historiography of the madrasa and the modern higher education institutions in Turkey. The guiding questions of inquiry are: (1) how have secular historians narrated attempts at policy and institutional borrowing of scientific ideas and higher education institutions in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire?; and (2) what are the conditions that make it possible for secular historians to be able to conceptually juxtapose two institutions that have historically belonged to two different discursive systems, temporal regimes and institutional traditions? Adopting a philosophical and historical interpretive framework, the chapter puts forward the argument that the system of reasoning of secular historiography relies heavily on a secular conceptualization of time inherited from the Western social theory of “modernization” and “modernity,” wherein there is a particular temporal order and organization of the historical experience. To problematize this ordering of historical experience, this chapter engages with recent revisionist historiography and argues that Ottoman reformers were operating in multiple temporalities in the 19th century when transferring and translating scientific concepts and institutions of Western origin. Operating in multiple temporalities has to be seen as an ontologically necessary condition for the reformers, which was already a common practice in both Islamic jurisprudence and theology. Overall, this chapter problematizes the uncritical adoption of Western, secular time as a condition of possibility and a background grid of intelligibility for global policy movement, which otherwise incessantly reproduces the conditions and aspirations of Western modernity, occluding other onto-epistemologies.
