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Global education policy: networks and flows

Article  in  Critical Studies in Education · October 2011

DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2011.604079

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Global education policy: networks and

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Sonia Exley, Annette Braun & Stephen Ball

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 Critical Studies in Education
Vol. 52, No. 3, October 2011, 213–218

GUEST EDITORIAL
Global education policy: networks and flows

Literature on the globalisation of education policy has been prolific in recent years.
Discussion, both in academic and policy circles, about the spread and ‘borrowing’ of ideas
and policies between countries has been extensive, though it has tended to be preoccu-
pied with Anglo Saxon contexts and exchanges between countries such as England, the
USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In this special issue we consider the spread of
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a possible ‘global education policy’ beyond these countries, looking – somewhat eclecti-
cally – at the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America. Apart from its geo-political
biases and limitations, this literature has so far often focused on and critiqued the con-
tent of neo-liberal policies and discourses in circulation – notions such as ‘effectiveness’,
‘standards’, ‘new public management’, ‘school improvement’, ‘choice’ and ‘privatisation’.
However, there are additional interesting questions to be asked about the mechanisms by
which policies travel. Going beyond a focus purely on policy content, for this special
issue we have invited ‘policy sociology’ contributions which examine how policy becomes
globalised: grounded accounts and analyses of the existence of policy networks, both
cross-national and those that span across the boundaries of the state, private and volun-
tary sectors; as well as tracing and mapping the flows of ideas from dominant ‘exporting’
countries to those ‘importing’ education policy. We have asked authors to explore ques-
tions about how ‘global education policy’ has been ‘received’ within individual countries;
how far has it been embraced, imposed, reproduced, mediated or interrupted by national
contexts, political and cultural histories, local education belief systems and by local pol-
icy networks/communities? Are there countries, parts of countries or policy areas within
countries that remain untouched by or resistant to the ‘global’ discourses of education? If
there are, can we say that policy is (yet) truly globalised?
Within these broad questions, we were interested in and wanted to read about what
forms cross-national policy networks take within authors’ countries of expertise. Who are
the critical policy actors and what new policy communities, connections and relationships
are being established? Do these relate to or circumvent traditional policy communities
within individual countries, and if so, how? Having written about policy networks in a UK
context (see Ball, 2008; Ball & Exley, 2010), we asked contributors to consider the exis-
tence of global ‘heterarchies’ within policy making – complex networks of transnational
relationships blurring the lines between state and non-state actors. Such heterarchical actors
may include particular individuals as well as institutions and businesses. By paying atten-
tion to these agents of neo-liberalism it becomes possible to think about how power and
‘expertise’ flow between nations and how policy entrepreneurs, NGOs, think tanks and
commercial providers of education ‘do’ globalisation. To explore these issues, we have
assembled a set of five empirical articles, each addressing relevant questions in relation to
a particular country context, plus two book reviews of relevance to the theme and concerns
of the issue.

ISSN 1750-8487 print/ISSN 1750-8495 online

© 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2011.604079
http://www.tandfonline.com
 214 Editorial

In this editorial, we attempt to give a flavour of some of the common themes emerg-
ing from the articles. All authors have responded to our call for papers by emphasising
the diverse and complex relationships between globalisation and neo-liberalism in educa-
tion. In a context of increasingly integrated global capitalism, it is impossible to consider
globalisation without also engaging with neo-liberal theories and concepts that provide a
discursive grounding to the politics and economics of globalism – making it natural and
necessary. The papers in this special issue deal with the relationship between globalisation
and neo-liberalism on two levels:

• first, with respect to the content and detailed nature of popularised policy packages
which ‘travel’, i.e., those facilitating a reduced role for the state in policy control and
delivery alongside autonomy, participation and ‘empowerment’ for smaller, weaker
or more local actors (schools, communities, parents). We might think of this as a
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spread of neo-liberal ideas,

• second, with respect to capitalist relations and how these impact on the mechanisms
and technologies via which policies transfer and the various routes, conduits and
relationships within which discourses are spread in a global knowledge economy.
We might alternatively think of this as a neo-liberal spread of ideas.

In terms of the first – specific policy packages that travel – in her study exploring man-
agerial discourse structuration prior to the creation of the Dovrat Report in Israel in 2004,
Julia Resnik has discussed the development of ‘parent choice’, ‘decentralisation’, ‘school
autonomy’ and ‘school-based management’ as key ‘social objects’ within education pol-
icy. Creation of these distinctly neo-liberal objects in education was heavily influenced by
Israeli academics who had strong network connections to other academics in English and
US universities. As a result, school autonomy developments in Israel led to the 1980s cre-
ation of ‘special schools’ with striking resemblance to magnet schools in the USA. Another
strong identifying feature of neo-liberal elements within policy packages that travel – pop-
ular with bilateral and transnational donors and with international NGOs – is a push for
their being delivered ‘via’ civil society agents. In Marie Lall’s article on the promotion of
child-centred teaching approaches in Myanmar, she traces an extensive network of teacher
educators within the country, financed by international donors, which provides training
drawing on Western-originated child-centred teaching methods to mainly monastic schools
in remote areas of the country. Her fieldwork and research highlight the fluid links between
various providers – not-for-profit as well as for-profit – and the opportunities for busi-
ness and employment for individuals and organisations created by these travelling policy
packages.
In terms of policy transfer and the cross-national spread and exchange of ideas, authors
identify and trace exchanges between dominant and less powerful countries, governments
and transnational players such as the United Nations, World Bank, IMF and OECD in a
global knowledge economy. These exchanges are rich with not just present, but also histor-
ical meanings, and questions about the relationship between neo-liberalism, globalisation
and neo-colonialism come to the fore. In her Tanzanian study of state-NGO relations in the
governance of education, Kristin Phillips discusses the way in which Structural Adjustment
and powerful international donor agencies have challenged state running of education in
Tanzania. A decentralised neo-liberal heterarchy has grown within a perceived orthodoxy
whereby community or civil society participation is ‘good’ and synonymous with democ-
racy and the state is ‘bad’ – corrupt, unaccountable and failing in its efforts to provide
 Critical Studies in Education 215

Education for All. While such critiques may hold some weight, the discourses they artic-
ulate are neo-colonial as much they are neo-liberal. The Tanzanian state finds it difficult
to resist the ideas and policies of international donor organisations because it is financially
dependent on these organisations. National NGOs struggle to act independently because
they are often at even greater risk than government of becoming co-opted into neo-liberal
agendas given their reliance on international funding and the role funders believe they
should play in the governance of education. Where colonial powers in the 1960s and 1970s
favoured nation-building and national unity in Africa in order to curb local tribalism, the
neo-colonial agenda exercises a preference for grassroots activism over the national state
and Phillips describes this as a 180-degree turn. Her charting of the fraught relationship
and publicly fought crisis between the prominent Tanzanian education NGO Hakielimu and
the Tanzanian government, amidst a polarised population and a confused and mute inter-
national development community, serves as a fascinating illustration of fresh faultlines
opening up in the new heterarchical system.
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On Myanmar, as indicated above, Marie Lall has spoken about the way in which inter-
national NGOs and donor organisations have pushed the spread of a Western idea – Child
Centred Approaches (CCA) to learning – viewed as being more progressive pedagogically
than traditional Burmese rote learning. Here UNICEF emerges as a major international pol-
icy player, sponsoring and moving policy from the global North to the global South, along
with the UK Department for International Development and the Japanese International
Cooperation Agency. Networks ‘outside the state’ have been established across Mynamar,
where gaps in educational provision mean teachers in monastic schools teach vast numbers
of children but typically receive no local state teacher training. Western, commercially-
developed ‘packages’ of CCA training are the only training on offer for these teachers –
part of a tied aid package ‘offered’ by international donors and set within the agendas of
international NGOs. These practices are passed down and sold in a cascading model of
knowledge exchange comprising local NGOs, private businesses and local teacher train-
ers. Considering policy in a more economically developed context, as indicated above,
Julia Resnik talks about the importance of Israeli-US-English networks of policy makers
and ‘knowledge producers’ – particularly featuring academics in university public policy
and economics departments – in promoting managerial discourse within Israeli educa-
tion. Resnik also points to a growing role for ‘philanthropic entrepreneurs’ within policy
networks, who are made influential because of the resources they contribute and deemed
authoritative on educational issues because of the ‘managerial practical knowledge’ they
bring from other settings.
More broadly, what Foucault has termed ‘governmentality’, global surveillance and the
disciplinary technologies of the market push countries of all sorts towards neo-liberal pol-
icy ‘solutions’ in response to perceived national ‘crises’ produced by OECD performance
indicators on education such as PISA and TIMMS. In Israel Julia Resnik has described
the discursive construction of a pressing ‘interstate education gap’ social problem by key
policy actors, based on PISA and TIMMS data, which lent legitimacy and urgency to sub-
sequent managerial reform and led to the adoption of rational market models for education
which were deemed valid because of claims that they ‘work’ in other places. However, as
Resnik – drawing on Gita Steiner-Khamsi – points out, neo-institutional theories of ratio-
nal global progress towards homogenous models for policy ‘success’ are themselves part
of dominant discourse, legitimising market solutions to social problems.
In his article about the impact of globalised education policy on the Singaporean edu-
cation system, Aaron Koh makes a similar point to Julia Resnik’s. Aaron Koh highlights
global disciplinary surveillance felt by the People’s Action Party in Singapore, fuelled by
 216 Editorial

international performance indicators on education and contributing to a national narrative

of anxiety about possible economic collapse (and the drop in living standards this would
produce within a ‘culture of excess’), ‘crisis’ and ‘survival’. However, at the same time,
Koh argues that presentations of rational ‘convergence’ on policy in response to common
global problems in education must not be accepted at face value. Instead they must be
analysed critically within national, political contexts. Drawing on Saskia Sassen, Aaron
Koh describes globalised education policy as being an unhelpful ‘master category’. While
global pressures and neo-liberal policy forces clearly influence heavily the way policy hap-
pens across the world, they cannot be considered to be the whole story. ‘Assemblages’ exist
at levels below the global, incorporating situated politics, ethics and local policy making
cultures. Drawing on Bourdieu, Rizvi and Lingard (2010) have characterised the global
policy field as a site of struggle, and looking closely at individual countries outside the
‘bright light’ (Sassen, 2009) of a global education policy discourse, we see complicated
stories in the undershadows – stories of local interpretation, enactment, recontextualisa-
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tion and resistance to global policy solutions. According to Aaron Koh, the Singaporean
response to global challenges in education is different to that which we would see else-
where because it is the product of a centralised state ‘with totalitarian ambitions’ and a
policy making culture that is heavily top-down. Koh describes the Singaporean context
as being a ‘state ordered assemblage’: national policy solutions focus on ‘preparing’ the
country for globalisation with highly prescriptive experimentation and a very strong tying
together of economic and educational goals. There is a policy focus on reskilling, national
unity and national identity in a context where the citizens fear both ‘brain drain’ and an
influx of ‘foreign talents’, which will take jobs away from Singapore-born people. There is
little talk of opening up Singapore to greater global competition and to neoliberal market
forces in education and Koh concludes that this shows a highly pragmatic and technocratic
reading of global policy, used to support and legitimise the centralised state regime.
Tales of resistance to or significant mediation of global neo-liberal policy discourses
in education exist elsewhere, and one prominent example is the case of Argentina, as out-
lined by Jason Beech and Ignacio Barrenechea. According to the authors, after heavy IMF
and World Bank intervention following the crisis in the Argentine economy in 1989, the
country during the 1990s paid loud lip service to neo-liberal reforms, but – at least in edu-
cation – did not enact them comprehensively in terms of practical reforms. While there
has been some transfer of power from the central state to the provincial level, decentrali-
sation stopped there, and bureaucratic structures at the level of the provinces are arguably
not noticeably different to or more ‘dynamic’ than administrative processes at the national
level. Prominent features of neo-liberal education systems – such as profit making in state
education, performance related pay for teachers, high stakes publishing of exam results
or school autonomy, vouchers and choice – are not part of the present Argentine sys-
tem, despite 20 years of supposed ‘opening’ up of its economic and policy infrastructure.
This non-conformity leads Jason Beech and Ignacio Barrenechea to call Argentina the
‘black swan’ of pro-market educational governance and they comment that these days,
the Kirchner administration is actively speaking out against global, neo-liberal agendas.
However, in their paper they question how much longer Argentina will be able to sus-
tain this course and they would welcome a reduction in some of the country’s current
bureaucratic and inflexible state structures.
The policy enactment pictures emerging from these five articles are necessarily het-
erogeneous, given the very different countries and contexts to which they refer, yet there
are some notable common threads and in this editorial we have attempted to draw together
some of these. In terms of our proposed distinction between the spread of neo-liberal ideas
 Critical Studies in Education 217

(policy packages and concepts) and a neo-liberal spread of ideas (the networks and flows
by which these ideas travel), authors provide rich accounts and analyses of policy networks
and their various international and national players across state, non-profit and private
sectors. By considering a range of education policy initiatives and their country-specific
articulation, the rhetorical ubiquity of some policy ideas is striking, but this does not mean
that they are necessarily being actively and generally pursued across education systems.
Some countries evidently have greater capacity for resisting or perhaps significantly recon-
textualising and inflecting global neo-liberal policy ‘solutions’ than others. Dependence on
aid and international donors unsurprisingly compromises countries’ ability to protect their
national sovereignty on education policy, but even so ‘external’ messages and influences
are themselves at times incoherent and conflicting and informed by changing educational
fads and fashions. Some countries appear to be able to ignore a neo-liberal diktat of their
education policy (Argentina) and for others, these ‘global’ ideas get re-contextualised and
transformed to support their national priorities (Singapore) – in effect a harnessing of neo-
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liberalism for protectionism. Taken together these papers offer a grounded and nuanced
account of how global policy ideas flow and change and how neo-liberalism gets done
and does not get done – at least not in any simple and straightforward sense. They also
give some specificity to the sites in which neo-liberal policy ideas are ‘given’, sold and
contested and to the agents involved in their advocacy, imposition and refusal.

Sonia Exley, Annette Braun and Stephen Ball

Notes on contributors
Sonia Exley is a Lecturer in Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political
Science. Prior to this she was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of
Education, University of London. Her research focuses primarily on education policy, the
politics of policy making and the politics of school choice. She has published in a range of
journals, including Oxford Review of Education, Journal of Education Policy and Policy &
Politics.

Annette Braun is a Research Officer at the Centre for Critical Education Policy Studies,
Institute of Education, University of London. She is working broadly within the fields of
sociology of education and education policy and her particular research interests are in
gender and social class, transitions from education to work and professional identities.
She has articles published in a number of journals including Journal of Education Policy,
British Journal of Sociology of Education, Critical Social Policy and Sociological Review.

Stephen Ball is Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education at the Institute of

Education, University of London and managing editor of the Journal of Education Policy.
His research is focused on issues of social class and education policy analysis. Recent
publications include: The education debate: Policy and politics in the twenty-first cen-
tury (2008, Bristol: Policy Press) and Education plc: Private sector participation in public
sector education (2007, London: Routledge).

References
Ball, S.J. (2008). New philanthropy, new networks and new governance in education. Political
Studies, 56(4), 747–765.
 218 Editorial

Ball, S.J., & Exley, S. (2010). Making policy with ‘good ideas’: Policy networks and the ‘intellectu-
als’ of New Labour. Journal of Education Policy, 25(2), 152–169.
Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalising education policy. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Sassen, S. (2009). Digging in the shadows. In J. Kenway & J. Fahey (Eds.), Globalizing the research
imagination (pp. 115–133). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
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