Why do Policy-makers Adopt Global Education Policies? Toward a Research Framework on the Varying Role of Ideas in Education Reform

Abstract

Globalization is profoundly altering the education policy landscape. It introduces new problems in education agendas, compresses time and space in policy processes, and revitalizes the role of a range of supra-national players in educational reform. This deterritorialization of the education policy process has important theoretical and epistemological implications. Among others, it is forcing comparative education scholars to pay more attention to the politics and dynamics involved in the "policy adoption" stage. Policy adoption is a moment that has acquired a great deal of strategic significance in current education reforms. Looking at the adoption stage has the potential to introduce new perspectives in the study of global education policy (GEP), as well as to disentangle several aspects of the global policy debate that, in comparative education, have been often captured by the convergence-divergence dilemma. In the first section of this article, author Antoni Verger reviews the different traditions in education and globalization studies, and justifies the necessity of looking more explicitly and systematically at the policy adoption stage. In the second section, he reviews how different theoretical approaches in social sciences can contribute to analyze the role of ideas in GEP change, and in policy adoption in particular. In the third section, he systematizes a range of contextual dimensions that are more decisive in processes of education policy adoption.