Comparing against a global script: Considerations of method and theory

• In Event: Data for accountability in education: Global trends in school reform

Proposal

The paper explores the intersection between the macroscopic, global trend analysis (Authors/Presenter) and the mesoscopic, institutional analyses of reform trajectories (Authors/Presenter), and compares the varied responses against the global script. This bifocal perspective enables us to bring to light on one hand the trajectories of the global script itself—how it changed as it moved from one country to the next—and on the other, the reasons for why policymakers adopted the script and how they translated it to fit their local policy agendas. Attention to the global level, enables us, for example, to detect two reform periods within the neoliberal reform wave. The first period (1980s until mid-1990s) was triggered by the New Public Management reform and implied a wave of deregulation, privatization, and decentralization of state institutions. Towards the end stage of the reform (end 1990s until 2007), the state was brought back but in a fundamentally different role than before the onset of neoliberalism. The new role of the state was to establish standards, monitor performance on these standards, and reward those publicly funded institutions that achieve the standards. In contrast, attention to the country level helps us complicate the narrative of traveling reforms. While global actors such as the OECD and the World drove and funded the reform globally, there were specific local reasons why policymakers bought into the reform. Drawing on policy transfer research, the author presents a few useful key concepts (diffusion, externalization, reception, translation) that help understand why and how reforms travel. The question of what exactly travels is relevant for comparisons against a global script. The paper therefore differentiates between what the reform entailed in terms of its policy goal, bundle of policies, and policy instruments. Finally, it makes the case for differentiating the spatial dimension (place versus space) and the temporal dimension (time, timing, tempo, sequence, lifespan) of policy when policy adoption is compared across varied contexts.

Author

• Gita Steiner-Khamsi, Columbia University Teachers College & NORRAG