Unpacking policy knowledge utilization beyond borders

• In Event: Informing and shaping policy reform

Proposal

Globalization has resulted in increased international mobility of people and ideas—thus, knowledge is not restricted to national territories anymore, but rather it travels around the world and impacts various public sectors. The education sector is no exception, as national education policies are now influenced by bodies of knowledge produced not only domestically but also internationally.

International knowledge often facilitates the process of benchmarking, standardization, and comparison, and consequently influences policy development and implementation in each country (Ball, 2012; Ozga, 2009). In particular, previous literature has noted the crucial role of international organizations in today’s global education governance in generating, managing, and disseminating knowledge across countries. For example, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which is administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), has been studied as evidence for policy change or support for existing policy direction in numerous national contexts. National policy actors may utilize international knowledge to scandalize or glorify ongoing reforms, legitimize policy ideas and proposals, advance policy actors’ own agendas, or form political alliances (Gorur, 2015; Grek, 2009; Steiner-Khamsi, 2004). Furthermore, references to international knowledge can mediate conflicts between opposed advocacy groups by offering an external source of knowledge, which is considered to be neutral and not propagated by either coalition (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004).

Building on previous literature, this study investigates how and why policy actors utilize international knowledge in education policymaking by examining references in policy documents prepared for education reform as well as interviews with policy experts. Analysis of policy document references allows this study to focus on a more intentional and selective use of knowledge. The practice of referencing in a policy document is inherently different from the practice in other forms of deliveries, such as public speech or newspaper articles, because it is part of the official, institutionalized policy process. In addition, this study pays attention to context-specific circumstances by comparing knowledge utilization for most recent school reforms in three countries with distinctive policymaking settings: the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in the United States, the 2015 Curriculum Reform in South Korea (hereafter Korea), and the Renewal and Improvement Reform in Norway. This study is part of a larger research project on knowledge utilization in education policymaking that examined expertise-seeking arrangements, policy experts, knowledge producers, and reference utilization patterns. The three countries included in the project each represent a broad category of political systems (e.g., Kuhnle et al., 2003; Rust & Blakemore, 1990; Schmitter & Lehmbruch, 1979): the United States as pluralist, Korea as state corporatist, and Norway as societal corporatist.

In this study, I used bibliometric network-cued interviews as a method for examining utilization of international knowledge in the policy process. This method combines the essential elements of in-depth interviews with bibliometric network analysis. I analyzed (1) the bibliometric network database of 896 references in 115 US congressional hearings, 640 references in Korean expert reports, and 2,337 references in Norwegian Green Papers; and (2) interview sessions with 45 informants in the three countries. In addition to the descriptive statistics on references, network measures such as degree centrality and co-citations were calculated to interpret the power of actors, organizations, and references. Furthermore, a supplementary qualitative content analysis was performed to understand how particular knowledge was utilized in specific contexts.

After completing the bibliometric network analysis, I used the findings as the cue for my interviews with policy experts in each country to explore how they made sense of their policy knowledge utilization within and across education systems. I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 18 informants in the United States, 15 informants in Korea, and 12 informants in Norway. Interview participants were recruited from the list of experts who participated in the congressional hearings and expert commissions analyzed in this study.

The results showed (1) OECD’s strong presence as a knowledge producer across all three countries and (2) different utilization patterns across policy contexts. The analysis of the knowledge publishers in each country showed a network structure where government agencies, domestic think tanks, and government-funded research organizations have highest centralities, confirming how knowledge production and utilization is shaped by different local contexts in policymaking. Despite the dominance of domestic knowledge producers, OECD, as an international organization, not only appeared but also ranked as one of the top 10 publishers with the highest centrality in the publisher networks for all three countries. This study examined the use of OECD-produced knowledge such as Education at a Glance and PISA in national policy documents and demonstrated how it contributed to scandalizing and problematizing the existing system and legitimizing reform needs and ideas.

Indeed, national policy experts mobilize international knowledge as policy instruments in each national policy context for various purposes and to various extents. While only about 2% of the references were international documents in the United States, 28% and 32% of the references were international in Korea and Norway, respectively. The interview participants in Korea and Norway explained that they often used international knowledge to strengthen their proposals when domestic knowledge on a particular topic was not readily available and when they sought evidence with strong legitimacy and credibility to advance their arguments. By contrast, the US interview participants rarely experienced the need to look beyond the US-based sources to investigate their policy topics because they perceived their research infrastructure and knowledge base as extensive.

In the full presentation, I will report additional findings on how policy experts utilize international knowledge differently across the countries and discuss the findings within the larger framework in comparative policy studies. In today’s policymaking, national policy actors can easily access various global ideas and practices, and making references to international knowledge has almost become part of the institutionalized process of policymaking. This study addresses the CIES 2021 theme, “Social Responsibility within Changing Contexts,” by (1) acknowledging OECD’s influence on global governance in education that is not only infrastructural but also epistemological, and (2) scrutinizing how national policy experts strategically utilize international knowledge in policymaking.

Author

• Chanwoong Baek, University of Oslo