Knowledge sources in crafting school reform policy: The case of Norway

• In Event: Policy knowledge networks and lesson drawing in an era of international comparison

Proposal

Due to the fact that globalization and network governance intensify linkages between policy actors and their knowledge, there is a growing body of academic literature that recognizes the importance of policy knowledge in decision-making processes (Menashy & Verger, 2018). This paper looks into the global-local nexus, arguing that national policy contexts determine the receptiveness to international knowledge and thereby plays a crucial role in the different stages of the policy cycle. It examines how the preparation of a national school reform in Norway draws on knowledge sources in white and green papers which are shaping policy discourses.

By applying bibliographic network analysis, the paper aims at unravel the composition of knowledge sources and their rationales within a national reform context. Research questions are:
• Which sources of knowledge are used in the stage of the policy-formulation process of the reform, and which counts as evidence for policy planning?
• How are clusters of references bridging central knowledge networks in the Norwegian school reform, and why have some key-texts become more central than others?

Drawing on research on policy borrowing and lending (see, for instance, Steiner-Khamsi & Waldow, 2011), the paper addresses the role of policy reception in crafting reform policy. The main proposals of the reform and underlying knowledge were set out in altogether 12 white and green papers prepared by the government to inform political debates and decisions within the parliament.

Methodologically, a sample of source documents relevant to the Reform of 2020, comprising the Curriculum Renewal and Improvement Reform were selected. This paper looks deeper into nine of the twelve documents as they concentrated solely on school reform changes. First, references listed in the source documents were entered into a database (first-degree documents). Second, based on the conceptual framework by Holst and Christensen (2017) the research team categorized references in terms of knowledge types such as policy documents, policy research and academic research, besides papers published by interest groups, think tanks and consultancy firms. Third, to examine the relationships between the documents in the dataset, we used the network analysis tool UCINET 6.289 (Borgatti, Everett, & Freeman, 2002). It helped to unpack the role of different types and clusters of knowledge that divided but also tied together national and international discourses in the reform-making process.

Our previous study examining the role of evidence-use in the same reform (see Beak et.al 2018) concluded that publications that are cited are highly specialized and issue centered with little overlap and rather few connections. This article extends the analysis by scaling up the analytical unit into types and clusters of knowledge to search for reference patterns that explain why some references are more influential than others. On this background, we draw conclusions on the ways in which different types of international, regional and local knowledge inform reform-making processes and shape school governance discourses, which is a relevant topic for researchers, policy makers and experts.

Authors

• Kirsten Sivesind, University of Oslo

• Berit Karseth, University of Oslo