Introduction

This edited volume contributes to the literature on global education policy by bringing together, extending and problematizing different theoretical and methodological approaches to policy movement. A variety of concepts – including policy transfer, borrowing, lending, travelling, diffusion, dissemination and mobility – have been deployed to study how and why policy moves across territories, jurisdictions, scales and organizations. A central premise of this volume is that these various concepts align with different theoretical traditions, which can have conflicting epistemological and ontological orientations that are important to examine and understand. We employ the term “policy movement” as an umbrella term that encompasses this range of concepts and associated research approaches.

The literature on policy movement has increased exponentially and has evolved in recent decades in parallel to the global intensification of education policy circulation (Dale and Robertson, 2012). Historically, the policy transfer and diffusion literatures focused on policy moves between governments (for example, from government A to government B) and, later, between international organizations (IOs) and governments (for example, from IO1 to governments A, C and F). However, with digitalization processes and the expansion and multiplication of policy networks, policy relationships have become increasingly reticular and multidirectional, and constantly feed new policy cycles. The growing role of nonstate actors in education governance has accelerated this interactivity, with academic institutions, philanthropic foundations, civil society and corporations influencing policy formation and its movement. As a result, understandings of the classical mechanisms of policy transfer (for example, emulation, competition, learning and coercion) have evolved to account for other modes of global policy making and pathways of influence (Blatter et al, 2022). As one example, policy transfer scholarship has begun to focus in a more nuanced way on the role of IOs, finding that they are more than triggers of classical transfer mechanisms. Their role in global governance is increasingly subtle, materializing in less frequently examined activities such as framing the terms of policy debates; the provision of technical assistance; the facilitation of study tours to learn about policies; and the construction, theorization and development of policy models, not to mention their transposition across different sectors (for example, health and education) (Zapp, 2021; McKenzie and Stahelin, 2022; Edwards et al, 2023; Fontdevila and Verger, 2024 forthcoming).