Big policies/small world: An introduction to international perspectives in education policy

Abstract

Introduction One of the tensions which runs through all varieties of policy analysis is that between the need to attend to the local particularities of policy making and policy enactment and the need to be aware of general patterns and apparent commonalities or convergence across localities (see Whitty and Edwards (1998) for further discussion). That tension is central to this paper and this special issue. In this paper my primary emphasis is upon the general and common elements in contemporary, international education policy but I will also address the processes of translation and recontextualisation involved in the realisation or enactment of policy in specific national and local settings. However, one immediate limitation upon the generality of my discussion is its focus upon Western and Northern developed economies, although a great deal of what I have to say has considerable relevance to countriessuch as Colombia, Chile, Portugal, Japan and some of the ex-Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. The paper has three main sections. The first sketches in a set of generic ‘problems’ which constitute the contemporary social, political and economic conditions for education and social policy making. The second discusses the idea of ideological and ‘magical’ solutions to these problems and the dissemination of these solutions. The third and last returns to the issue of recontextualisation.