Data chasing policy: The OECD and the construction of 'school autonomy with accountability' as a global policy model

• In Event: Highlighted Session: The ‘practice turn’ in global governance: Analysing the changing role of international organizations in education policy-making

Proposal

While the role of international organizations (IOs) in processes of policy diffusion is widely acknowledged, their role in the theorization and construction of policy models remains comparatively under-researched (Orenstein, 2008). The OECD's role in the construction of the School Autonomy with Accountability (SAWA) policy model - which this international organization started to focus on since the middle of the 2000s - is a useful case to gain further understanding of how international organizations produce and theorize policy ideas before mobilizing them. In this paper, we aim at reconstructing the process through which the OECD developed and theorized SAWA. Specifically, our paper examines the practices and forms of agency through which the OECD has developed, maintained and expanded SAWA as a global policy model.

By reconstructing this process, our research aims at contributing to an emerging line of scholarship on the role of IOs in the construction of policy models (cf. for instance Heimo & Syväterä, 2022; or Von Gliszczynski & Leisering, 2016). In line with the practice approach orienting this paper, our research builds on a critical constructivist perspective which brings to the fore the complex processes of organizational consensus-building and the tensions derived from the interplay of different forms of expertise and the power hierarchies within IO’s bureaucracies (see for instance Béland & Orenstein, 2013).

The study is primarily informed by a corpus of fifteen semi-structured interviews with current and former staff of the OECD Education and Skills Directorate, identified through a purposive sampling rationale oriented at capturing different perspectives. This was complemented with the analysis of more than 80 documents produced by the OECD and dealing directly with SAWA themes.

A first finding derived from our research concerns the dynamic character of policy models. The trajectory of SAWA within the OECD makes evident that policy models are constructs in constant evolution. Hence, the SAWA model has been repurposed - from a model at the service of New Public Management agenda towards alignment with New Public Governance objectives; and retooled - shifting from a focus on high-stakes to a softer, low-stakes model.

A second finding brought about by our study concerns the somewhat paradoxical relation between the visibility and the consolidation of policy models. The survival of a policy model appears to require a certain degree of invisibility. Although SAWA policies are no longer a particularly prominent object of research and debate within the OECD, the model has clearly become a “staple” in the policy toolkit mobilized by the OECD.

Thirdly, our research has also allowed us to identify at least two sources of tension shaping IO’s efforts at model construction, namely a) a tension between universalism and context-sensitivity - while IOs benefit greatly from the articulation of best practices of global applicability, they are also increasingly forced to adjust their advice to the reality of the countries they serve, and b) a tension between the increasing methodological and epistemological pluralism of many IOs and the internal consistency of their policy proposals.

Authors

• Antoni Verger planells, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Clara Fontdevila, University of Glasgow