Global education policy movement: Evolving contexts and research approaches

The literature on education policy movement—that is, the diffusion, transfer, and translation of education policy globally—has continued to expand. This expanding research on policy movement has built on established approaches while also reflecting the development of new approaches or the combination of existing ones. However, the underlying theoretical perspectives and the foundational assumptions of policy movement scholarship frequently remain implicit and insufficiently elaborated. This paper responds by characterizing four related-yet-distinct orientations to understanding and studying education policy movement: cross-scalar approaches, discourse-centered approaches, policy mobilities approaches, and decolonial approaches. The approaches discussed within and across these groups are distinguished in terms of their theoretical and methodological features. However, before presenting these approaches, the paper first situates education policy movement within the broader phenomenon of globalization. This section explains how the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of globalization affect education systems around the world and encourage or impede education policy movement. It is additionally attentive to how the features of globalization continue to evolve and, indeed, how globalization is experiencing backlash along all three dimensions (political, economic, and cultural). This discussion thus describes the “context of contexts” in which—and in reaction to which—scholarship on education policy movement itself continues to develop. The conclusions emphasize, first, that emerging approaches to education policy movement reflect eclecticism and, second, that the boundaries between different approaches to researching policy movement are now less clearly defined than before.