10 - “Global” as co-construction: a sociomaterial analysis of policy movement

Summary

Introduction

Policy movement is a multidimensional concept which covers various study areas in comparative and international education such as global education policy (see Edwards, 2021) and policy transfer (see Beech, 2006; Perry and Tor, 2008). Scholars studying global education policies often focus on the role and labor of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) – such as the Organisation of Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) – to explain the manifold interplay between global educational discourse and national policy making (for example, Kallo and Rinne, 2006; Beech, 2009; Grek, 2009; Lingard and Sellar, 2014). Research on the reception side of global education policies sheds light on the divergence of local responses, drawing on the body of literature on policy transfer (for example, Steiner- Khamsi and Waldow, 2012). Approaches that acknowledge divergence in the nature of policy transfer explore how external policy ideas and models are recaptioned, resisted, recontextualized and internalized by local power politics or culture (Anderson- Levitt, 2003; Phillips and Ochs, 2004; Steiner- Khamsi and Waldow, 2012). While global education policies are extensively studied in the field, the abstract notion of the “global” is often used without a critical discussion on what the “global” actually is and how it is made. These are the issues that this chapter primarily aims to address by making a contribution to policy movement research.

Besides the notion of the “global,” this chapter challenges the hierarchal, static and binary conception of global/ local. Studies are often built on the tenet that IGOs play the key role in identifying, developing and disseminating certain education policies to the “local” level, which is customarily interpreted as a country or a subnational unit (see for example, Kallo and Rinne, 2006; Beech, 2009). The divergence approach does not perceive local recipients as passive emulators, but nevertheless retains and reproduces binaries such as convergent/ divergent, global/ local and real/ imagined (Silova et al, 2020). Such dichotomies may narrow down or already prescribe our understanding of policy movement, perceiving, for instance, the global as an entity of “the abstract, the ubiquitous, something out there, out of control and inevitable” (Beech and Artopoulos, 2021, p 435; see also Larsen and Beech, 2014).