Policy transfer as the growth of dynamics and challenges: The case of school textbooks in Greece

Abstract

The Greek school textbook is at the core of this article and is treated as a matter of policy. In 2003, the Greek Government decided to include the publishing of school textbooks in the current Community support framework and as a result school textbook publishing goes beyond Greek priorities and gains European interest, which means that the whole process, being mainly supported by Community funding, has to respect certain of its rules and procedures. Our aim here is to show how European policies were transferred to the Greek context and how they inter-reacted with the corresponding Greek rules and procedures. The theoretical framework is based on Dolowich and Marsh’s (2008) proposal concerning the transformation of the concept of policy transfer into an analytical schema in the study of the policy transfer process. The methodology includes the content analysis of 29 school textbooks and comparison of the old ones with the new, and 32 interviews with actors involved in writing and publishing them.