Observing the “Local Globalness” of Policy Transfer in Education

Abstract

This article contributes to a growing body of research on global policy transfer and flows in education, arguing that a large number of such research has too often viewed nation-states as uniform policy containers, focusing mainly on national-level policy changes or using binary understandings of reform adaptation versus reform resistance. Consequently, it often neglected the internal complexities of nation-states, which include ambiguous modes of ongoing global-local “recontextualization,” local meanings of reforms, but also (changing) influence of national and local actors who may operate as policy “brokers.” Using data from an empirical case study on the German state Bremen, we illustrate how global-local policy dynamics played out locally in sequences of school structural reforms between 2002 and 2010. Hereby, we combine the theory of path dependency with the conceptualization of policy fields to better understand the various complexities and dynamics within a multilevel educational reform movement.