Global education policy: key concepts and theoretical frameworks

This paper reflects on the main conceptual and theoretical components of global education policy as an emerging field of studies. Global education policy research looks at how global education agendas are being constituted, and by whom, and what are the implications of global dynamics of a different nature in the promotion of education policy change. Globalization produces multiple effects, both direct and indirect, on education policy systems. Globalization has generated new social and educational problems that education policy is expected to address; it has intensified the international flow and exchange of policy ideas on educational reform; it has facilitated the constitution of influential transnational networks of experts and, overall, has contributed to rescale policy-making processes in an unprecedented way. Nonetheless, the influence of these and other global developments in national education systems is not always easy to observe, distinguish or track empirically. Overall, the global education policy field resembles more a messy market of policy ideas that, albeit its hierarchical nature, is not structured according to very well defined centers of diffusion and receptive peripheries, but through more complex multi-scalar dynamics. As a way to address these challenges, the paper also reviews the most prominent theoretical, epistemological and methodological perspectives that scholars are using to study the relationship between globalization and educational change, including world culture theory, international political economy perspectives, policy borrowing and lending, or the policy mobilities approach