Global Education Policy and International Development: An

Introductory Framework

Antoni Verger, Mario Novelli and Hulya Kosar Altinyelken

[Chapter 1 in: Verger, A., M. Novelli and H. K. Altinyelken (eds.). Global Education
Policy and International Development: New Agendas, Issues and Policies.
Continuum, London]

About this book

Today, as we speak, similar education reforms and a common set of
education policy jargon are being applied in many parts of the world, in
locations that are incredibly diverse both culturally and in terms of economic
development. Education policies and programmes such as child-centred
pedagogies, school-based management, teachers’ accountability, public-
private partnerships or conditional-cash transfer schemes are being discussed
and implemented everywhere, to the point that they have acquired the status
of ‘global education polices’ (GEP). More and more researchers, coming from
different disciplines and sub-disciplines such as comparative education,
political sociology, anthropology and political sciences, are paying attention to
the GEP phenomenon. Traditionally, scholars have used very diverse terms to
refer to this phenomenon, such as policy diffusion, policy borrowing, policy
transfer, policy travelling, isomorphism or convergence, among others.

However, paradoxically, existing research on GEP does not always

incorporate processes of globalisation into its analytical framework, at least in
a comprehensive way. Quite often, research on the topic does not provide an
account of how and why policies are globally constructed and settled in global
agendas. They are focused on the international dimension of the policy
process, i.e. they look at the transfer of policies ‘within countries and across
countries’ (Stone 2004, p. 545) or as a ‘boundary-crossing practice’ (Peck et
al. 2010, p. 169), but do not grasp the global dimension that education policy-
making is now acquiring. Another habitual problem in the policy transfer
literature is that it often implies a dichotomist split between the local and the
global ‘levels’ and represents them as separate layers of educational
governance (Mukhopadhyay et al. 2011). When doing so, research fails to
capture the complexity of global politics and the fact that different political
scales are mutually constituted (Robertson et al. 2002). Furthermore, much
research on GEP does not provide sufficiently rich empirical evidence on the
interplay between processes of globalisation and the re-contextualisation of
education policy in local places. Doing so is methodologically challenging, but
if we attempt to understand education policies globally, the study of the
complex relationships between global ideas, its dissemination and re-
contextualisation becomes a key task (Ball 1998).

This book contributes to addressing these and other challenges that

globalisation poses in education policy analysis. Its main objective is to
analyze the reasons, agents and factors behind the globalisation of
educational policy and, by doing so, reflect on the structures, processes and
events through which a global education policy landscape is being
constituted. Contributions to the book provide an in-depth theoretical and
empirical understanding of educational change and education reform in an
increasingly globalizing world. The authors are a mix of established and up
and coming, Southern and Northern, scholars with great expertise in the
analysis of specific global programmatic ideas. The book also draws on the
special contribution of Roger Dale and Gita Steiner-Khamsi. In their
concluding remarks, these two distinguished scholars look at the GEP
phenomenon and, in particular, to the cases collected in the book, with the
different theoretical lenses through which they look at the globalisation-
education relationship, and as a way to develop some crucial and original
insights.

The case studies collected in the volume reflect, on the one hand, on the
capacity of international organisations and other political actors to shape
education agendas and disseminate education polices globally. On the other,
they analyze the complex process of the re-contextualisation of global policies
at the country level, and their effects on educational governance. India, Brazil,
South Africa, Turkey, Kenya, Uganda and Central-America are some of the
locations in which the case studies have been developed. In the different
studies, authors look at the globalisation-education relationship from multiple
theoretical perspectives, including neo-institutionalism, constructivism,
international political economy and social movements theory, and by applying
different methodological approaches, mainly qualitative, such as comparative
analysis, the vertical case study or discourse analysis. Despite their diversity,
all chapters in this volume converge on the idea that processes of
globalisation have drastically altered the education policy landscape across
the world and, more particularly, in developing country contexts.

To a great extent, this book focuses on the developing world due to the
particular nature and intensity of global influences therein. Developing
countries, especially Less-Developed Countries, are often highly dependent
on foreign expertise, information and financing (Rose 2007). In fact, in low-
income contexts, there is a bigger presence of external actors including
international NGOs, donor agencies and international organisations (IOs) that
have a great capacity – both material and ideational - to set agendas and
country priorities. In this sense, these countries’ policy landscapes are much
more penetrated than countries in more industrialized societies (although the
current financial crisis and the way it is being managed in many European
countries is challenging this premise). Furthermore, from the point of view of
policy transfer, developing states are not only the object of a more intense
flow of external pressures, but also depend on hindered capacities to mediate
supranational policy pressures (Grek et al. 2009).

Taking globalisation ‘seriously’

While notoriously slippery and expansive (Rupert 2005), today, globalisation

is a very well established term in the social sciences. It can be broadly defined
as a constitutive process of increasing interdependence between people,
territories and organisations in the economic, political and cultural domains.
The dominant processes of globalisation can be characterized as hyper-
liberalism in the economic domain, governance without government in the
political domain, and commodification and consumerism in the cultural one
(Dale 2000). Globalisation is a very convenient concept for social scientists
due to its euphemistic character and due to all the meanings it subsumes
within it. Nevertheless, on occasions, referring to the supranational would be
more accurate than to the global since many of the trends we are witnessing
in education policy have a regional (and not necessarily global) scope.

Taking globalisation seriously implies capturing the multiple ways

globalisation affects education policy. In the following lines, we detail a
comprehensive, although not exhaustive, list of impact dimensions of
globalisation in education policy. Some of them will then be further developed
in this introductory chapter.

• Globalisation generates new inputs for education policy-making and

defines new problems that education policy needs to address (Ball 1998).
Among them, the transformation of the labour market and the re-organisation
of work worldwide standout. In a global economy, most countries aim at
raising their international competitiveness by offering knowledge-intense
products and services, and new manpower profiles. Accordingly, they expand
education and base its contents and processes on skills, competences and
the notion of flexibility (Carnoy 1999).

• Globalisation, or the ‘idea of globalisation’ (see Hay 2006), alters the

capacity of welfare states to address education and non-education problems
via education policy, as well as their capacity for providing and financing
education directly.
 • Globalisation revitalizes the role of international agencies in the making
of educational policy. Among them, international governmental organisations
(IOs) with an explicit or implicit education mandate, such as the World Bank,
the OECD or UNESCO, stand out. However, globalisation also brings new
international players into education policy-making, most of which are non-
governmental, including transnational corporations and foundations,
international consultants, transnational advocacy coalitions and epistemic
communities.

• The revitalized role of international players in educational politics

contributes to the deterritorialisation of the education policy process and to the
‘national’ territory losing its centrality in such processes (Robertson in this
volume). Deterritorialisation implies the redefinition of the scale, the space
and the dynamics through which education policy is being negotiated,
formulated and implemented. International players have an increasing
capacity to settle education agendas and define the priorities of countries
concerning education reform processes, but also to impose certain policies
via funding mechanisms and aid conditionality.

• Beyond the formulation and dissemination of policies, some IOs have

the capacity to transform the legal framework of member-countries and, by
doing so, alter the rules of the game through which policies are being
formulated. The most remarkable case here is that of the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) that, through the General Agreement on Trade in
Services (GATS), modifies a range of in-country ‘regulatory barriers’ to cross-
border trade in education including ownership, taxation, licensing or quality
assurance rules (Verger 2009).

• The advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT),

which are, at the same time, cause and consequence of globalisation, allow
the intensification of the international circulation of policy ideas (Peck et al.
2010). ICT are also transforming education practices and the patters of
education delivery by, for instance, reducing the costs of cross-border
distance learning.

• Globalisation also creates a transnational private market of education

provision that complements and/or competes against national education
providers. This emerging global market challenges some of the core functions
of conventional education systems such as ‘nation building’ (Robertson et al.
2002).

• Neoliberalism, as the currently dominant political-economic ideology

worldwide, frames many of the education policy ideas that circulate (Ball
2007). Proposals such as the introduction of market mechanisms and logics
(choice, competition, decentralisation), the liberalisation and privatisation of
the education sector, and the importation of management techniques coming
from the corporate sector resonate in the neoliberal ideational context.

• Globalisation fosters the organisation of transnational social justice

movements that struggle for the realisation of education as a global public
good and its endorsement as a human right. At the same time, these
movements contest the neoliberal global education agenda sketched above.
In the education for development field, the most remarkable organisation with
these objectives is the Global Campaign for Education (Mundy et al. 2001).
Importantly, it is not only civil society movements that are reacting to the
expansion of neoliberal policies. Like-minded coalitions of nation-states, such
as the ALBAi countries in Latin America, are pushing for a counter-hegemonic
regional education agenda that includes aspects such as increasing state
intervention in education or the so-called decolonisation of the curriculum
(Muhr 2012, forthcoming).

In conclusion, globalisation needs to be first and foremost understood as a

new terrain, the new ‘context of contexts’ (cf Peck et al. 2010), of education
policy. It defines the problems to be addressed and, at the same time, alters
the capacity of the states to respond to these problems by themselves; it
empowers international actors and makes the transnational organisation of
policy networks more pressing; and is a strategically selective and conflicting
terrain for educational policy making, which is more conducive to certain
education policy ideas and political actors than others.

Global Education Policy Studies: Methodological considerations

Globalisation has altered education policy, but also the way we think about
and study education policy. Global Education Policy is an emerging area of
research that examines the different ways in which globalisation processes,
agents and events contribute to educational policy change at a range of
scales, and with what consequences. GEP studies raise important theoretical
and methodological implications for education policy analysts. The shaping of
this new area does not simply mean introducing globalisation as a ‘topic’ onto
the educational research agenda, but rather revising certain theoretical
postulations, models of analysis and research methodologies (Green 2003).
Many of these implications have to be seen in relation to the changing
relationship between the state and education in a global setting.

The first and most obvious of these implications is that globalisation

challenges the basic unit of analysis, the nation-state, and, accordingly, the
methodological nationalism that predominates in educational research and in
comparative education in particular (Green 2003; Dale et al. 2007). Based on
a Westphalian understanding of political authority,ii education policies have
been traditionally developed within national settings. However, today, national
policies are the result of a ‘combination of political forces, social structures,
cultural traditions, and economic processes entangled in a matrix of
intersecting multi-level, multi-scalar (local, national, regional, and global) sites
and spaces’ (Yeates 2001, p. 637).

Directly related to the latter, a second challenge consists on overcoming the

global-local binary and the understanding of the relationship between the
national and the global as a zero-sum (Dale 2005). The concept of scale,
instead of that of level, is helpful for this purpose because it allows an
understanding of the production of space as a mutable product of social
relations and struggle in which the global and the local are mutually
embedded (Robertson in this volume). Transcending the global-local binary
means the problematisation of the state as a merely ‘national’ entity. Many
state components (ministries, departments) and bureaucrats operating within
the state are networked or, at the same time, part of IOs (usually identified as
the ‘global’ level). In fact, IOs are not something external to the state; in any
case, it would be more accurate to say that IOs are more external for some
states than for others or, in other words, that they are more owned by some
states than by others - see the unequal distribution of power and bargaining
capacity in Jawara and Kwa (2004) for the case of the WTO, or in Woods
(2000) for the World Bank.

Bourdieu’s concept of ‘field’ contributes to overcoming the local-global binary

in the analysis of GEP. Thus, rather than understanding policy borrowing or
transfer as the simple correspondence or influence between two institutions
(like IO-state), it is more accurate to consider that a global education field,
which interacts with the broader social context of international development, is
being constituted (Vavrus 2004). Fields need to be understood as conflicting
terrains in which different actors struggle for their transformation or
reproduction (Bourdieu 1999). The increasing political dimension acquired by
international standardized tests such as PISA and global targets such as the
EFA goals, and the corresponding international comparisons; the growing
cross-border flows in trade in education and scholars mobility; the generation
of funding mechanisms such as the Fast-Track Initiative (now called Global
Partnership for Education), etc, etc. have generated growing awareness
among policy-makers, scholars and practitioners of being part of a common
‘global education policy’ field. In this field, an official from an IO and a teacher
in a Peruvian rural school intersect in the production and reproduction of
policy texts and practices (Lingard et al. 2005). However, not all actors are
equally influential in the GEP field. Key international policy players and policy
entrepreneurs, with the capacity to transcend different scales at any moment,
have more chance of introducing their ideas, preferences and languages in
this field.

Thirdly, globalisation urges us to transcend educationism (Dale et al. 2007).

Thus, when analyzing new policy trends, policy changes and/or regulatory
transformations in the educational field we have to consider that these
elements may be shaped by extra-educational structures, events and
processes (such as the prevailing welfare regime, the levels of poverty and
social cohesion or the economic performance in a country). The comparative
education mainstream is still strongly marked by a disciplinary parochialism
that encourages researchers to base education policy studies on approaches
that exclusively come from within the field of education (Dale 2005). To
overcome this problem, educational changes should be better understood as
being as embedded within interdependent local, national and global political
economy complexes (Novelli et al. 2008).

A fourth challenge concerns methodological statism, i.e. assuming that the

state is a rationale and cohesive entity, and that it has the monopoly over
political action within the borders that delimit a territory. Overcoming statism
implies, first, that the state cannot be understood as a monolithic unit of
analysis, but as a range of diverse apparatuses that represent distinct
material condensations of social forces (Hartmann 2007). In fact, the different
(and differentiated) factions constituting the state usually push for diverging,
and sometimes even contradicting, interests and agendas (Cox 1995). For
instance, in education, it is quite common that, within the same country, the
Minister of Education and the Minister of Finance have very different
preferences about the amount of public resources needed in the education
system. In some countries, this has generated interesting alliances between
the EFA civil society movement and the Ministry of Education to pressure the
Ministry of Finance with the objective of obtaining more funding for public
education (Verger et al. 2012, forthcoming).

Overcoming statism implies, secondly, understanding that non-state actors

are relevant political agents in the governance of education (Dale et al.
2007). Recognizing the political relevance of non-state actors does not
necessarily mean assuming that the state is becoming less powerful. Rather,
it means accepting that the role and functions of the state have been altered
and redefined in the broad scenario of governance, that other players are
actively participating at the levels of education policies and politics, and that
the state is not as autonomous in relation to the definition of certain policy
issues as it was in other periods (Hay 2006).

The concept of ‘global governance’ aims at capturing this increasingly

complex policy landscape in which non-state actors, which operate at a range
of scales, gain political authority and presence in a range of policy fields,
including education. Global governance also refers to the intensification of the
interactions and the embeddedness between different scales in policy
processes. According to Dale (2005, p. 132) ‘what we are witnessing is a
developing functional, scalar and sectoral division of the labour of educational
governance’. Funding, provision and ownership of education are carried out
by a broad range of supra-national, national and sub-national agents,
including IOs, the state, the market, the community and/or the families. To a
great extent, the global governance of education means the redefinition of the
relationship between education and the state. In fact, today, the state is less
inclined towards the direct provision of education and more towards the
establishment of standards and evaluation mechanisms that determine
whether schools and universities are achieving standards effectively (Neave
1998).

Global governance refers to both ‘formal institutions and regimes empowered

to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements that people and
institutions either have agreed to or perceive to be in their interest’
(Commission on Global Governance 1995, p. 4). Indeed, currently, states’
action and, in particular, their social policies are framed and conditioned by a
dense web of international legal and political obligations (Yeates 2001). These
obligations include, in the case of education, legal binding agreements such
as the GATS agreement or UNESCO conventions, as well as non-binding
declarations such as the Education for All (EFA) action framework or the
Bologna Process, which have also triggered important educational
transformations both in the South and in the North. As Snyder (1999) states,
socio-cultural norms and soft-law are also powerful governance devices with
regulatory powers.

To sum up, to incorporate processes of globalisation in educational research,

the different methodological and epistemological challenges described above
need to be faced, and theoretical and conceptual frameworks coming from
sociology, political geography or political sciences considered. However,
taking globalisation seriously also means the revision of the core questions
that frame research agendas and projects. We identify four main sets of
interlinked research questions that can contribute to putting globalisation at
the center of education policy studies. These questions allow us to analyze
the whole global education policy process: from the structural selectivity of
certain policies to its actual implementation in particular contexts. Of course,
research can often only focus on one or two of these sets of questions, since
going through all of them would require a huge amount of data-collection.
They are:
 1- What is the nature of the relationship between globalisation and
processes of educational change? Why is ‘global education policy’
happening?

2- How are global education agendas and global policy solutions

formulated and constituted, and by whom? Why do certain policies become
selected and privileged in global agendas, instead of others?
3- To what extent are global education policies being disseminated
effectively? Why do local policy-makers and practitioners adopt them?

4- What are the mediating elements and institutions affecting the

translation and re-contextualisation of global policies to particular education
contexts? What are the specific difficulties associated with the
implementation of global education policies in local contexts?

In the following sections we explore how the GEP literature has dealt with
these questions and, in particular, the way the case studies included in this
book addresses them.

Globalisation’s effects on education

There are two main macro approaches that address the nature of the effects
of globalisation in education. We refer to, on the one hand, neo-institutionalist
approaches, represented by the ‘World Society’ theory, and, on the other,
international political economy approaches, represented by the ‘Globally
Structured Agenda for Education’.

World society theorists argue that a single global model of schooling has
spread around the world as part of the diffusion of a more general culturally-
embedded model of the modern nation-state (Anderson-Levitt 2003). The
need for nation-states to conform to an international ideal of the rationalized
bureaucratic state has led to a process of institutional isomorphism and
convergence (Drezner 2001). First and foremost, nation-states expand
schooling as part of a broader process of adherence to world models of the
organisation of sovereignty (the modern state) and the organisation of society
as composed of individuals (the modern nation) (Meyer et al. 1997). In this
process, education is a key area for governments to demonstrate to the
international community that they are building a modern state.

World-society scholars have validated empirically their thesis by showing, for

instance, that school expansion in African countries has not been so related to
their level of development (industrialisation, urbanisation, racial and religious
composition, etc.) and to the expected educational needs according to these
variables, but to how close countries were to Colonial powers and Western
influence (Meyer et al. 1992a).

Their research problematizes the presumption that education measures are

applicable globally, independently of the needs and capacities of the countries
adopting them. They observe that education policies (but also health, fiscal
policies, etc.) are being adopted in a quite routine way all around the planet
due to external and internal legitimation reasons. This is something especially
challenging for developing countries since they command less resources and
organisational capacity than rich countries, but feel similar pressures to
comply with educational reform imperatives (Meyer et al. 1997).

World Society proponents have conducted extensive research on curriculum

convergence (Meyer et al. 1992b) and, more recently, on institutional
isomorphism in higher education policy (Ramirez 2006). However, they are
not so focused on education policy change, or specific forms of education
reform since, to them, the main point is not whether state policy is
exogenously influenced, but the fact that the state itself is an exogenously
constructed entity. Nevertheless, some authors follow an analogous
institutionalist and culture-centred approach to analyze education reform. This
is the case of Schriewer et al. (2004) who argue that decisions on education
policy (and, more broadly speaking, the educational conceptions of decision-
makers) are affected by the dissemination of a world-level developmental
cultural account and education ideology. Based on Luhmann’s work, they
propose the concept of ‘externalisation’ to analyze the way policy-makers
argue for the necessity of education reform based on external models.
Externalisation can be subtle and does not refer to specific models, but to a
web of norms and beliefs that make national constituencies more receptive to
educational reform. Education reforms are thus today embedded in a
universalized web of ideas about development and social problems, ‘a web of
reciprocal references which takes a life of its own, moving, reinforcing and
dynamizing the worldwide universalisation of educational ideas, models,
standards, and options of reform’ (Schriewer 2000a, p. 334).

Carney (2009), for his part, elaborates the concept of ‘policyscape’ to provide
a similar argument. A policyscape is an ensemble of policy ideas and visions
(managerial practices, conceptions of the role of the state in education, the
functions of education, etc.) that are shared by a range of political actors
operating on multiple scales and affects the way these actors think and decide
about education policy. According to him, a transnational policyscape,
grounded on the principles of hyperliberalism, is contributing to ‘standardizing
the flow of educational ideas internationally and changing fundamentally what
education is and can be’ (p. 68). He shows very convincingly how this
policyscape has effectively contributed to shaping education reform in
countries as different as Denmark, Nepal and China.

For her part, Jakobi in this volume shows how different African countries are
implementing notions of lifelong learning by aligning themselves to the global
discourses disseminated by several IOs in the continent. As the World Society
theory would predict, these countries are engaging with the worldwide
discourse on lifelong learning even when it does not fit within their particular
needs and when they have only scarce resources for implementing it.

International Political Economy (IPE) theories, do not put so much emphasis

on cultural or ideational factors, but on economic ones as the main drivers of
educational change. According to the Globally Structured Agenda for
Education approach (GSAE) the world capitalist economy is the driving force
of globalisation and the first causal source of multiple transformations
manifested in different policy sectors, including education (Dale 2000).

The World Society model has an implicit theory of the state in which
legitimation, both internally and externally, is the main problem to be
addressed by the state. In contrast, for the GSAE, apart from providing the
basis of legitimation, the core problems of the state include supporting the
regime of accumulation and providing a context for its reproduction
(Robertson et al. 2002). These problems cannot all be solved together, and
solutions to them tend to be rather contradictory. These contradictions provide
the dynamic of educational systems and frame the state educational agenda.
Globalisation has significantly altered the nature of the core problems
confronting nation-states as well as the nature of their capacity to respond to
them (Dale 2000). As we develop below, economic globalisation needs to be
seen as a political force with great capacity to structure a global education
agenda.

IPE approaches focus on the indirect effects of globalisation in education, and

not exclusively on the direct influences between countries or between IOs and
countries. They suggest that the most important way globalisation is affecting
education policy is by altering the structural conditions in which education
reform happens, including the conditions in which reform is framed and
perceived by policy-makers as necessary. A good example of how
globalisation altered the structural conditions of educational governance can
be found in the World Bank/IMF sponsored Structural Adjustment
Programmes (SAPS) implemented in Latin American and African countries in
the 1980s and 1990s. The SAPS had serious repercussions in education by,
first, lowering the public budget necessary to fund educational expansion and,
second, raising the levels of poverty and, consequently, the opportunity costs
of schooling (Bonal 2002). The new social structure after the SAPs period
became highly conducive to the adoption and implementation of Conditional
Cash Transfer policies, which contribute, via economic incentives to the
families, to poor students being enrolled in schools (see Bonal et al. in this
volume).

For IPE scholars, economic globalisation, and the competitive pressures

associated with this phenomenon, are provoking educational changes all
around the planet. Globalisation is putting governments under financial
pressure to control inflation and the public deficit and, as a consequence, to
reduce public spending growth and find out alternative funding sources to
cover educational expansion. In fact, many governments believe that, in a
global economy, they have to reduce the rates of corporate taxation to avoid
capital moving away from their jurisdiction. In this intensely competitive
economic environment, finance-driven reforms such as privatisation and
decentralisation become highly attractive (Carnoy 1999).

Furthermore, most political and economic actors, including state actors (Cerny
1997), aim to raise their competitiveness and perceive education and
knowledge as key competitive assets for this purpose (Brown et al. 1996
Carnoy et al. 2002). This is also the case of individuals that increasingly
conceive education as a ‘positional good’ (Marginson 2004) in a highly
competitive and dualized labor market. These beliefs have spread to the point
that most countries and regions in the world aspire today to become
‘knowledge economies’. The knowledge economy idea works as a powerful
economic imaginary (Jessop et al. 2008), or a ‘political condensation’ (cf. Ball
1998), that frames the preferences of political actors and guides the way they
intervene in society. This imaginary puts education at the centre of the
economic strategies of governments due to its crucial contribution to the
formation of knowledge-intensive manpower, applied research and knowledge
transfer (Barrow et al. 2004). The knowledge economy ideal is often
associated with an educational reform jargon based on the principles of
quality, learning, accountability and standards (Carney 2009).

The emphasis given by IPE approaches to the ‘knowledge economy’ idea

shows that there is room for reconciliation between materialist and idealist
approaches when it comes to explaining educational change. Although, for
IPE scholars ideas are usually subordinated - an ‘entry point’ - to material
factors when it comes to understanding changes in the political economy of
education. Novelli and Lopes-Cardozo in this volume demonstrate the
complex interplay between discourse and material factors, when analyzing the
way Dutch aid to education in conflict affected low-income countries is
conditioned by the powerful influencing role of the World Bank and DFID,
despite its status as a wealthy Northern donor. This reflects a global hierarchy
within Northern donors as well as between them and their Southern partners.
IPE approaches problematize globalisation’s effects in education for two main
reasons. First, because they provoke neoliberal and efficiency-driven types of
reforms that, among other implications, put education equity in the
background (Carnoy 1999). Second, due to the weakening of sovereignty that
they imply. The main problem here is that globalisation favours important
education decisions being taken within transnational networks rather than by
institutions democratically elected (Moutsios 2010).

Poppema in this volume shows how School-Based Management initiatives in

Central America, spearheaded by the World Bank and USAID, were
powerfully promoted across the region. These policies were complicit in
weakening processes of participation, leading to the ‘depolitisation of socio-
economic relations’, and the promotion of de-facto privatisation of education.
In this case, ‘progressive’ discourses aimed at giving poor people more
‘voice’, appear as mechanisms merely to support the smoother functioning of
neoliberal reforms in education (see also Edwards and Klees in this volume).

Setting education policies in global agendas

The two approaches described above focus on the structural conditions that
favour the selection and retention of particular policies. However, GEP studies
are also attentive to the more micro-level types of analysis concerning how
policies are settled in global agendas and by whom. As we show in this
section, there is a range of research that looks at the structuring capacity of
particular actors and focuses on decision-making dynamics in multi-scalar
political systems.

The literature on global agenda setting usually refers to the key role of IOs.
According to the World Society approach, IOs contribute to policy
convergence in education by spreading the Western system of political
organisation and state authority around the world (Meyer et al. 1992a).
However, this approach seems to put all IOs, including international NGOs, in
the same package of Western modernizing agents. Certainly, IOs might
represent Western modernity broadly speaking, but when we look at them in
more detail we observe that they express divergent and even rivalling
education agendas. For instance, Robertson (2005) analyzes the different
meanings of the ‘Knowledge economy’ label that the OECD and the World
Bank are trying to fix, and shows how the latter favours the market and
individualism as the means for developing knowledge economies, while the
OECD favours a more institutionally embedded liberal approach to knowledge
production. Edwards and Klees, in this volume, reflect on the way political
actors, including IOs and international aid agencies, operating at a range of
scales compete to promote different meanings of participation policies in
education. They demonstrate the way participation in educational governance
is ‘predominantly neoliberal–instrumentalist in purpose, limited in nature, and
imbued with market ideology’. See also Mundy (1998, 1999), Chabbott
(2003), Jones (2006) or King (2007) on the competition between IOs such as
UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Bank to frame and dominate the education
for development field.

For IPE theories, IOs are conceptualized as key transmitters of particular

views of education and educational reform, basically instrumental and market-
oriented, to national contexts. Roger Dale (1999) systematizes a range of
policy mechanisms activated by IOs and other external actors that allows
them to frame and influence national and sub-national education policies (see
Box 1.1). In recent decades, these global mechanisms have acquired more
centrality than traditional mechanisms of bilateral influence such as `policy
borrowing’ and `policy learning’ (Dale 1999).

Box 1.1. Global mechanisms of influence

• Imposition: external actors compel some countries to take on particular
education policies (the classic example being the conditionality to credit
of the World Bank, the IMF and other aid agencies to borrower
countries).
• Harmonisation: a set of countries mutually agree on the implementation
of common policies in a certain policy area (e.g., the configuration of
the European Space for Higher Education);
• Dissemination: external agents use persuasion and its technical
knowledge to convince countries on the implementation of certain
policies (e.g., through annual reports, best practices data-bases and
technical assistance);
• Standardisation: the international community defines and promotes the
adhesion to a set of policy principles and standards that frame the
countries’ behavior (e.g., international performance tests, such as
PISA, contribute to the standardisation of curricular content at the
global level);
• Installing interdependence occurs when countries agree to achieve
common objectives to tackle problems that require international
cooperation (e.g., climate change, ‘education for all’).
Source: Adapted from Dale 1999

IOs are forums of cooperation and struggle between nations. However, they
are more than the aggregate of the interests of their member states. Even if
they are usually instrumentalized by the most powerful states, they are not
simply the extension of particular national interests (Dale 2005). A range of
scholars, often based on constructivist approaches, conceive IOs as relatively
autonomous sources of power. To them, IOs, and specifically, their
bureaucracies are not exclusively at the service of member-states. They count
on sufficient autonomy to interpret and redefine the broad political mandate of
the organisation, and to exercise power over members, even when they do
not have formal political power. The main sources of power of IOs
bureaucracies relies on, first, the legitimacy of the rational-legal authority that
they represent and, second, their control over information/data and technical
expertise (Finnemore 1996).

According to Barnett et al. (2004), IOs exercise power by organizing three

types of apparently apolitical and technical actions. They are, first, classifying
the world, for instance, by stratifying countries according to their level of
performance in international evaluations such as TIMMS or PISA and,
according to their results, putting governments under great pressure to
introduce education reforms. Secondly, fixing meanings in the social world by,
for instance, defining what educational development means. This is
something that IOs can do explicitly, but also indirectly in the form of
indicators and benchmarks. And, thirdly, articulating and disseminating new
norms, principles and beliefs by, for instance, spreading what they consider
‘good’ or ‘best’ practices’ in educational development.

Departing from the assumption of IOs as autonomous sources of power,

some researchers have analyzed the organisational culture and the internal
divergences within IOs to understand the particular education polices they
disseminate globally. Several of them focus on the role and strategies of IOs
officials when it comes to push for their preferences and approaches to
educational development. Thus, Heyneman (2003) provides us with a
complete story of how and why rates of return analysis has become the most
important analytical tool to guide World Bank education policy since the
eighties, and about the divisions this has generated between economists and
educationists within Bank staff. For their part, Mundy et al. (2011) have
reflected on the internal division among the officials of the World Bank Group
concerning the promotion of education privatisation in developing contexts.
They apply the ‘organized hypocrisy’ concept (i.e. the disjuncture between the
official discourse of IOs and their actual practices as a way to deal with
external pressures, demands and expectations) to understand, in part, the
reasons for this division.

Beyond IOs

International actors other than IOs, by using norms and ideas as tools of
power, play an important role in global education politics as well. Educational
scholars, among others, have focused on the role and impact of epistemic
communities (Chabbott 2003), transnational civil society networks (Mundy et
al. 2001), networks of international consultants and policy entrepreneurs (Ball
2007; Robertson et al. 2012, forthcoming) or international foundations
(Srivastrava et al. 2010). These pieces of work show that, under some
circumstances, different types of non-state actors can mould state
preferences over various policy options or help states to identify their
interests, above all in moments of uncertainty. At the same time, they also
show how these new actors are becoming an integral part of emerging forms
of global governance and count on an increasing capacity to provoke
processes of policy transfer and learning, or to introduce issues into global
policy agendas.

The power of non-state actors in international politics is not something new.

This type of actors has traditionally influenced international forums and
agreements through the state. However, more recently, we have witnessed
how multilateralism is moving away from an exclusively state based structure,
and how private actors play an increasingly relevant role in multilateral
structures. In this emerging ‘complex multilateralism’ (O’Brien et al. 2000),
non-state actors have more spaces and opportunities to influence IOs directly,
and without the necessary mediation of the state. Examples of ‘complex
multilateralism’ in the educational sector can be found in the membership of
the Global Campaign for Education and the World Economic Forum in the
board of the Global Partnership for Education, or on the role of transnational
corporations (TNCs) in educational assistance structures.

TNCs such as Microsoft are promoting educational programmes and

establishing bilateral relations with Southern countries, as traditional donor
countries would do (Bhanji 2008), or provide international organisations such
as UNESCO with funds (Bull et al. 2007). These emerging forms of private
authority in education are under suspicion due to the fact that private players
are usually policy advocates and service providers at the same time (Deacon
2007). For instance, Microsoft and other ICT companies are using corporate
social responsibility to open markets abroad (van Fleet 2012, forthcoming), or
big consultancy firms such as CfBT are advocating for PPPs using scientific
arguments, but at the same time benefiting from PPP contracts all around the
world (Robertson et al. 2012, forthcoming).

Social movements and advocacy coalitions are also adopting pluri-scalar

political strategies to achieve their objectives. When their access to the state
is blocked for whatever reason, it is quite common for them to try to influence
national policies by activating international agreements. This is a political
strategy that has been labelled as the ‘boomerang effect’ (Keck et al. 1998).
Soeterik and Santos in this volume demonstrate how the Brazilian Black
Movement successfully utilized a ‘politics of scale’ to strengthen their national
movement and made the Brazilian government comply with several policy
measures, particularly through their engagement with the World Conference
Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance
in Durban in 2001.

New actors have very different interests and reasons to become involved in
the global education field. However, they have in common that are
knowledge-intensive entities, and that their main power source relies on
knowledge and ideas (TNCs being an exception to this premise due to the
huge material power they also count on). Thus, most of them are gaining
authority in global governance structures because of the scientific knowledge
they posses, their track record for problem solving and, in the particular case
of civil society networks, their principled-oriented views to the problems they
deal with (Keck et al. 1998; Haas 2004).

However, being knowledge actors does not mean that international players
are continuously innovating and/or producing new policy alternatives. Most of
the time, policy entrepreneurs sitting in international foundations, think-tanks
or IOs act more as brokers and framers, than as pure theorizers. They usually
take already existing policy practices, re-label them and sell them around.
Many global education policies have started their journey in this way, being
first formulated and implemented in particular countries. School-Based
Management originated in the UK (Ball 2007), OBM in New Zealand (Spreen
2004), or charter schools in the US (Bulkley et al. 2003). Since most global
policy-entrepreneurs come from the Anglo-Saxon world, it does not come as a
surprise that their policy référentiels come from Anglo-Saxon countries. There
are some exceptions, however. For example, Conditional-Cash Transfers
schemes started being implemented in different localities of Brazil and Mexico
and, later on, they became adopted by the World Bank and other regional
development banks (see Bonal et al. in this volume).

Adoption: why do policy-makers buy GEP?

The adoption moment is the other side of the coin of the globalizing policy
phenomenon. For education policies to become effectively globalized, they
need to be adopted in particular contexts by policy-makers. In fact, once a
particular policy programme is being adopted in a critical number of locations,
we can start considering that some sort of policy convergence in education
would be happening. Often, countries adopt GEPs because they are
externally imposed via aid conditionality (see Box 1.1). However, from an
analytical point of view, it is also relevant to understand why it is that local
policy-makers voluntarily adopt GEPs.
A first type of answer to this question would say that local policy makers
implement global policies because these policies ‘work’. In this case, we
would be assuming that policy-makers are well-informed rational actors that
choose the best and internationally tested policy solutions to improve their
education systems. However, interestingly enough, it is not always clear
whether many GEPs work or not, or under what conditions they do so. For
instance, diverse policies such as quasi-markets or Child-Centred Pedagogies
have been extensively criticized for their uneven and even negative impacts,
and this has not prevented them from continuing to be disseminated around
the world (Luke 2003, Altinyelken in this volume).

A more nuanced answer to the GEP adoption question would say that policy-
makers adopt GEP because they perceive these policies work. In this case,
policy-makers would perceive GEP as appropriate policy solutions in their
countries for educational, but also political and economic reasons. The
literature is very rich on explanations and hypothesis related to this line of
argument. Different research places the emphasis on a wide range of
elements, from the persuasive capacity of global agents, to the capacity of
local actors to instrumentalise the global arena to advance pre-established
policy preferences. We explore the most relevant of them in this section.

Framing matters. IOs and, more broadly speaking, global policy entrepreneurs
are very active, and even compete among themselves, to make policy-makers
perceive that their policy ideas work and have an impact (Steiner-Khamsi
2004). In general terms, more than the internal consistency of policy ideas,
the way they are framed and presented affect policy-makers decisions on
whether to buy or not a certain policy (Verger 2011). IOs know this well and
put a lot of resources and effort in dissemination. Global policy ideas are
launched and spread through highly distributed policy briefs, papers and
reports, and in public or private events (seminars, workshops, report
launches, etc.) that are usually well attended by national political leaders and
policy-makers (Ball et al. 2010). Despite IOs use of an apparently neutral and
technical discourse, at the same time, they strongly advocate their proposals
often with great enthusiasm. To frame GEP ideas in an appealing way, IOs
need to present them in a clear and concise manner. Moreover, new policy
ideas are most likely to be taken up if they are perceived as technically
workable, and fit within budgetary and administrative constraints (Kingdon
2002). Not surprisingly, most education policy entrepreneurs highlight the
cost-effectiveness and efficiency gains of the policies they are promoting.

However, framing strategies are often in dispute with scientific rigor. In order
to sell their ideas and frame them in a more convincing way, policy
entrepreneurs might on occasion need to, more or less explicitly, simplify
reality (Ball 1998) and resort to different types of logical fallacy and
argumentative shortcuts (Verger 2011). In fact, beyond their argumentation
strengths and consistency, GEPs often maintain their credibility through
repetition (Ball 2007; Fairclough 2000). Indeed, the international travelling of
education policies has been strengthened by the consolidation of the
evidence-based policy idea (i.e. basing policy decisions on research that
shows what kind of policies ‘work’). In fact, evidence-based policy has been
welcomed by many policy-makers and donors as a superior way of taking
decisions, even when it is well-known that evidence can be easily
instrumentalized to support the adoption of certain policies instead of others
(see how this bias affects the international debate on quasi-markets in
education in Luke 2003 or Verger 2011).iii

Global status and deterritorialisation. As pointed out earlier, all policies have
an origin, which is usually Western and, more precisely, Anglo-Saxon.
Because of this reason, it is useful to think about GEPs as globalised
localisms (cf. Santos 2005). Likewise, once a critical number of countries
borrow a policy, it seems like its particular origins vanish; it becomes global
and is traded as a global model (Steiner-Khamsi 2010). The acquisition of
‘global status’ raises the attractiveness of policies and predisposes policy-
makers to discuss educational reforms guided by them.

Apart from the global status of policy ideas, the global prestige of the actors
backing them is similarly important. Usually, the most successful policy
entrepreneurs are based in IOs that are located at the interstices of a range of
influential social and policy networks (Campbell 2004). Indeed, in many
countries, the opinion of a World Bank expert will be more considered than
that of a scholar from a local university, even if they have a similar high-quality
training and propose the same successful or failed policy ideas. The definitive
move for a policy to become globally traded comes when a global institution
that counts on high levels of exposure and good networks adopts it. On
occasions, social networks are key to understanding this type of movement.
For instance, Outcomes-Based Education became a global policy in part
because one of the promoters in New Zealand, Maris O’Rourke became
tenured at the World Bank (Steiner-Khamsi 2004).

GEP selectivity. Some scholars consider that policy-makers perceive

importing new policies from elsewhere as necessary when the situation of
their education systems is critical. Phillips et al. (2003) use the concept of
'impulses' to refer to the preconditions for borrowing. Impulses include an
eclectic set of elements such as internal dissatisfaction with the education
system on the part of families, teachers, etc.; the collapse or inadequacy of
educational provision; negative external evaluation; political change and the
changing demands for education; and so on.
IOs play a key role in some of these aspects, especially when it comes to
making countries aware of the necessity to implement reforms, and becoming
more receptive towards their policy recommendations. International
standardized tests such as PISA have generated a feeling of reform urgency
even in powerful countries such as Germany and Switzerland (Bieber 2010).
In developing countries, the EFA Actions Framework and, in particular, the
fact that many countries are still far from reaching the EFA goals is working as
a great political opportunity for many IOs and policy entrepreneurs trying to
sell their policy prescriptions.

In general, those policies that resonate best within the prevailing form of the
capitalist system and the prevailing development policy paradigm will have
more chances of being retained in global agendas and selected in particular
countries (Dale 2000). From a semiotic perspective, neoliberalism and related
policy discourses have become hegemonic, and a sort of common sense.
Ideas such as performance-based incentives, competitive funding, education
as a competitiveness device, etc. have been interiorized by many decision-
makers and practitioners (Carney 2009). As a consequence, this type of
market-oriented principles is shaping the parameters of policy-making in many
countries (Taylor et al. 2000). However, at the same time, governmental
decision-makers often reject hard-privatisation policies. That is why, to make
them more normatively acceptable, most IOs promoting quasi-markets in
education avoid using the ‘privatisation’ concept and use instead more friendly
concepts such as PPPs (Robertson et al. 2012, forthcoming).

Instrumentalizing GEP. Steiner-Khamsi (2004, 2010), on the basis of intensive

fieldwork in several Asian countries, concludes that local policy-makers have
a double register in their education policy discourse; they speak differently to
local constituents than to international donors. Policy-makers adopt the
international language of reform as a way of securing international funds but,
once they get them, they implement the type of reforms they consider more
relevant and go ahead with business as usual. Thus, according to this
scholar, more than global policies, what is being actually disseminated is a
global policy speak. This is indeed a sceptical approach to globalisation’s
effects in policy change that breaks with the usual approach that perceives
developing countries as victims of IOs and passive-recipients of global ideas.
In this volume, Verger and Van der Kaaij show that, in India, the global PPP
idea, beyond an external imposition, works as a floating signifier for local
actors to settle national and sub-national education agendas, and advance
their pre-established preferences in the educational field.

Although following a different reasoning, Martens et al. (2009) also consider

that countries instrumentalise the global arena to advance certain policy
reforms. They consider that countries approach global institutions to reduce
transaction costs for problem solving and policy formulation purposes, but
also to gain leverage at the domestic level when it comes to advancing policy
changes. From this point of view, global policy recommendations would be
instrumentally invoked by policy-makers for legitimatory reasons and as a way
of softening internal resistance. The Bologna process has been, to some
extent, manipulated in this way by a range of European countries to advance
pre-established governmental policy preferences (Huisman et al. 2004). In her
analysis of the political dimension of PISA, Grek (2007, p. 35) makes a similar
point when she states that ‘reference to “world situations” enables policy-
makers to make the case for education reforms at home that would otherwise
be contested’.

Re-contextualisation and implementation

Methodologically speaking, research on the recontextualisation of GEP traces

the translations of policy programmes, and tries to find out about the multiple
relationships that reconstitute such programmes in multiple scales
(Mukhopadhyay et al. 2011). Experiences from the field tell us that we should
question those hyperbolic arguments about globalisation as a driver of
absolute world convergence of policy and practice in education. Most scholars
agree on the fact that globalisation is not an absolute project with identical
effects in all places (Appadurai 1996; Robertson et al. 2006). Although
globalisation presents common features around the world, the effects of
globalisation in education policy are mediated by domestic history and politics,
and by the complex interplay of global and local forces, among other
contingencies.

Research stresses that borrowed policy ideas are modified, indigenised or

resisted as they are implemented in the recipient countries (Schriewer 2000b;
Philips et al. 2003; Steiner-Khamsi 2004; Steiner-Khamsi et al. 2006).
According to Peck et al. (2010, p. 170) global policies mutate during their
journeys, they ‘rarely travel as complete packages, they move in bits and
pieces - as selective discourses, inchoate ideas, and synthesized models -
and they therefore “arrive” not as replicas but as policies already-in-
transformation’. Ball (1998), who focuses on the globalisation of education
policies that emanate from what he calls the ‘new orthodoxy’, considers that
policies are rarely translated into policy practices in pristine form. One of the
main reasons for this to happen is that policies, beyond a ‘text’ that is easily
transferable across scales, are also part of an often-disputed technical and
political debate that is highly contingent and situated.

Altinyelken in this volume looks at how Child-Centred Pedagogy (CCP) was

re-contextualised in Uganda and Turkey. Her study points to convergence at a
superficial level and around new rituals that have emerged as a result of the
dissemination of CCP. However, her findings indicate more strongly the
persistence of divergences across countries as CCP was interpreted
differently, the reform practices were embraced unevenly, and adaptations to
classroom realities and student background have resulted in very distinct
practices. Stenvoll-Wells and Sayed, also in this volume, demonstrate that in
several locations of South Africa and Zimbabwe, despite policy rhetoric
around decentralisation and school management reform as delivering more
power to local actors, there appears little on the ground transformations. In
fact, their analysis indicates that a few groups dominated decision-making
within the school governing bodies and blocked the participation of many
other local agents.

Overall, since imported education policies are locally mediated and re-
contextualised through multiple processes, the consequences of transfer
remains unpredictable (Beech 2006). By ignoring differences in contextual
capacity and culture at the national, regional, and local levels, globalisation
has resulted in unintended and unexpected consequences for educational
practice such as the deterioration of education quality (Carnoy et al. 2002).
The development of global education programmes is often questioned for not
taking into account the social context and needs sufficiently (Crossley et al.
2003). In the literature, we find four main arguments that reflect on why the
GEP re-contextualisation can be so problematic, especially in developing
countries. According to their different emphases, we call these explanations
material, political, cultural and scalar.

Material. As Lewin (2007) notes, it is not appropriate to import models that

might have worked in consolidated, well-funded, highly professionalized and
well-regulated educational systems to places whose educational conditions
are far from reaching these standards. Many developing countries often do
not have the appropriate material and human resources to implement very
costly and technically demanding global education programmes such as
quasi-markets in education or accountability policies. The World Bank faces
this issue with the projects it finances. In fact, the 2011 report of the World
Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group finds quite ‘uneven results’ in the
Bank’s portfolio of education projects, precisely, due to ‘design and
implementation weaknesses’ including ‘overly complex designs relative to
local capacities’ (IEG 2011, p. 13).

However, local policy-makers are often aware of the resources available and
the material needs in their countries when engaging with GEP and,
accordingly, adapt global discourses to them. This is for instance the case of
many African countries when embracing worldwide principles on life-long
learning. Under the life-long learning discourse, African policy-makers
basically emphasize adult literacy and basic education, instead of higher
education or alternative qualification frameworks as more industrialized
countries do (see Jakobi in this volume).

Bonal, Tarabini and Rambla in this volume show very convincingly how
technical capacities and, specifically, the final design of global policies are key
mediating factors to understand the outcomes of global policies in the terrain.
They do so by comparing the effects of Conditional Cash Transfers in different
Brazilian locations on the basis of the intensity of the economic transfer, the
targeting criteria and the coverage of the beneficiaries, among other aspects
of the policy design.

Political. Political mediations and institutions also shape the adaptation of

global policies. A range of case studies emphasizes the mediating role of
political factors in the re-contextualisation of diverse policies such as
‘education assessment’ (Benveniste 2002), ‘decentralisation’ (Rhoten 2000),
or the ‘Bologna process’ (Heinze et al. 2008).

According to Taylor et al. (2000), political ideology is one of the main reasons
why nations do not deliver equally in the GEP field. Specifically, they show
that government ideologies (market-liberal, liberal-democratic, and social-
democratic) represent a key filter when it comes to adopting the OECD
recommendations in educational policy. Martens et al. (2010), for their part,
focus on the potential role of national veto players in the implementation and
modification of global policies. By veto players they mean political actors who
have the power to block or hinder legislative initiatives, such as the senate or
the national ministry of education. Although, based on the cases of Bologna
and PISA in several countries, they show that when there is a strong political
consensus and leadership to advance a certain reform, veto players and veto
points can be easily by-passed.

In the political approach, we also identify political economy accounts of

education reform that show how, beyond veto players, key professional
groups and constituencies are key when it comes to advancing or resisting
educational change. Key actors here are teachers unions for primary and
secondary education, and university associations in the case of higher
education. Altinyelken’s work in this volume also reflects on how teachers
and other local actors ‘sometimes resist and always transform’ the official
models they are handed (Anderson-Levitt 2003, p.4).

Cultural. Another group of scholars highlights how a range of ideas including

policy principles, public sentiments or policy paradigms can mediate
effectively GEP implementation. For instance, in many Latin American
countries there are strong public sentiments (cf. Campbell 2004) around the
idea of education as a public good. Consequently, in this region it is more
difficult to advance privatisation policies than in countries such as India where
these sentiments do not prevail and, moreover, there is a historically rooted
elitism in society that makes it socially acceptable to not provide the same
quality education for all (Verger and Van der Kaaij in this volume). For their
part, Santos and Soeterik in this volume show how the strong social belief of
Brazil being a ‘racial democracy’ makes the implementation of racial
affirmative policies in the country more challenging.

Scalar. The professionals that ultimately have to make new policies work
(teachers, principals, local government officials, etc.) often perceive education
reform as something imposed from above. This problem is more striking in the
case of global education policies that have been designed and negotiated at
supranational scales. Incrementalist approaches tell us that policy changes, to
work out smoothly, need to be grounded on previous practices and advance
progressively. As bigger is the gap between the new policy and the previous
system, implementation processes become more problematic (Rizvi et al.
2009). This ‘gap’ is usually accentuated in relation to policies imported from
elsewhere and initially designed by officials that are unconnected to local
realities.

Following this type of reasoning, Steiner-Khamsi (2010, p. 331) argues that,

very often, reform failures are not due to technicalities, limited funding, or
similar implementation problems. Rather, such failures reflect ‘the
fundamental contradictions that arise when (policy) solutions are borrowed
from educational systems where the problems are entirely different’. Thus, the
main implementation problem can be found in the decoupling between the
global policy, whose programme ontology has a universalistic pretension, and
the local reality, with the particular configuration of problems that predominate
therein.

Unterhalter in this volume observes how global targets, inevitably,

oversimplify reality, as well as the complexity of the problems that policies are
intended to address. The main issue here is thinking that by achieving a
specific target, the problem that the target relates to has been solved as well.
She shows how this ‘political relaxation’ effect happens in the case of the EFA
gender parity target; once countries have achieved this target, decision-
makers consider that they have solved the problem of gender equity, which is
much more complex and difficult to measure.

Concluding remarks

Having laid out schematically the landscape of the different methodological

and theoretical approaches on globalisation, education policy and
international development it is perhaps fitting now to conclude that there
remains a great deal of work to be done. Many of the debates outlined above,
beyond their analytical dimension, have hugely important implications for
social justice and the right to education around the world. Globalisation, far
from producing a flat-world, has increased inequalities both within and
between countries, and has altered the cartography of contemporary social
relations and education politics. Power, and its unequal distribution, are
reflected throughout these pages, and challenge us to think beyond the
current mainstream in the education/globalisation relationship and to develop
more inclusive, participatory and egalitarian educational policy processes.
Hopefully this book can contribute to highlighting the fault lines upon which
these principles can emerge.

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i
ALBA stands for Alternativa Bolivariana de las Américas.
ii
The basic rules of the Westphalian State are: 1. Authority can only be
exercised by a state over a defined geographical territory; 2. Each state is
autonomous to develop its own policies; 3. No external actor can direct the
state’s priorities (Yeates 2001).
iii
Accordingly to Pawson (2011), this way of using science and evidence to
legitimate predefined policy preferences, instead of evidence-based policy,
should be called ‘policy-based evidence’.