Conference Agenda

This symposium will highlight the role of European policy elites (experts, consultants, advisers, etc.) by showing that they wield significant power and legitimacy in shaping educational reforms during last decades at global level, while at the same time its illustrates the social and political features of these reforming groups and networks in national spaces. By charaterising these European elite groups and networks by their positions within the State and/or International Organizations, the symposium will display the circulation of ideas and knowledge, beliefs and assumptions, between individuals and groups, but also their relations of dependence as well as their technocratic and/or ideological connivance that shape a doctrinal puzzle.

Often referred to as neo-liberalism versus welfarism, these ideas, discourses, and prescriptions are more a complex combination of personal experience, adoption of scientific and expert statements, formulation of values or principles of justice, but also political expediency in front of public opinion and interest group pressures. Far from considering educational reforms and decision-making as linear, sequential, or incremental processes, the symposium will emphasize authoritarian, sometimes nationalistic stances, but also uncertain dimension of power facing the uncertainty and complexity inherent to policy-making at global scale. It will underly the incoherence and cognitive dissonance of decision-making, the tacit and shared knowledge on which justifications are based, or the story-telling that legitimizes changes in political rhetoric

Therefore, the symposium will help to better understand ongoing and endogenous transformations of the educative State, in characterizing interactions within national, European and global elites, but also their resources and capacities for action in framing public action programmes and delivering political discourses, through games of competition and rivalry, according to specific professional, administrative, managerial cultures and ethics.

Beyond mapping national, Europaen and global links, which demonstrate also some affinities and proximities between these elites, the symposium also will intent to characterize the more or less structured, more or less formal policy networks that shape the European reformist agenda in education through recommendations and prescriptions leading to lasting and relatively irreversible changes in policy-making.

Based on the comparison between several European countries, bringing together different authors specialized in education policies, the symposium will seek to answer the following questions

- How do these elites exercise their power, their authority, by mobilising different resources and capacities to influence the decision-making process?

- How are these elites structured in networks or groups, epistemic communities or coalition of causes, in relationships that facilitate the sharing of knowledge, ideas, representations and beliefs on educational policies at national and global level?

- What is the role of cognition, values, beliefs, representations and the strategy in these alliance games and power relationships? What is the impact of public action instruments and their interpretation (laws, indicators, data, etc.)?

- How is it possible to characterize the type of proximity or affinity maintained by these elites within State, in other institutions or networks, or in International Organizations?

From a methodological perspective, policy makers will be chosen for their membership in a ministerial cabinet, as heads of a ministerial directorate or as experts/advisers for the Ministry of Education, or for their relationships with global networks and organisations, etc. Whenever possible, their socio-professional career and their various positions in education or elsewhere will be established. Analyses would developed from the study of different expert groups, national conferences, representative institutions, and parliamentary hearings in which this elite has intervened with important effects on implementing reforms.

The key insight from state-of-the-art literature on global governance in education is that it is necessary to study the interactions and overlaps between international, national, and local contexts and the entanglements of a host of actors to acquire an adequate understanding of education policy (Robertson 2018). From this starting point the paper addresses the following research question: How can we understand the role and significance of the knowledge brokers and infrastructure facilitating movement between global and national policy-making arenas? Using Denmark as an analytical case, it is the purpose of this paper to explore the complex intermeshing and interactions between and among knowledge brokers operating in the infrastructural space between the OECD and the Danish Ministry of Education in the period 2001 when a new right-wing government took office and up until today. More specifically, the paper investigates the formal and informal, institutionalized and not institutionalized connections and channels between the OECD and Denmark in the development of education politics and policy. For instance, since 2017, the OECD has increased its support for strengthening the analytical capacity of National Centres and Ministries of Education more generally, as well as that of municipalities and other education stakeholders at the national level, through its PISA Lead Analysts programme (Auld et al., 2020). A constructive angle to explore in this connection are also the shifting consortia tasked with conducting the PISA surveys which perform the boundary work that goes on between the organizations, the national political arenas, and sometimes even in the public debates and news landscape. Theoretically, the paper conceptualizes knowledge brokers as ‘key intermediaries who facilitate the exchange of knowledge between individuals or organizations (…)’ (Weber & Yanovitzky, 2021, p. 1), but also as motivated agents that are themselves changed by their brokerage activities, at the same time as they seek to change others. Such a framework improves analytical purchase on knowledge brokerage beyond the current research paradigms, revealing the purposeful mobilization by international organizations inside what can best be conceptualized as a multi-level governing complex that changes over time (Ydesen 2019). Empirically, the chapter draws on interviews with knowledge brokers operating in the OECD-Denmark space as well as archival documents harvested in the Danish National Archives and the OECD archive in Paris.

Elfert, M., & Ydesen, C. (2023). Global governance of education: The historical and contemporary entanglements of UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank. Educational Governance Research Series (Series Eds. S. Carney & L. Moos). Dordrecht: Springer. Reder, T. J., & Ydesen, C. (2022). Policy Borrowing and Evidence in Danish Education Policy Preparation: The Case of the Public School Reform of 2013. In B. Karseth, K. Sivesind, & G. Steiner-Khamsi (eds.), Evidence and Expertise in Nordic Education Policy (pp. 77–114). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91959-7_4 Weber, M. S., & Yanovitzky (2021). Knowledge brokers, networks, and the policymaking process. In M.S. Weber & I. Yanovitzky (Eds.), Networks, knowledge brokers and the public policymaking process (pp. 1-25). Palgrave. Ydesen, C. (2021) Globalization and Localization in the Shaping of the Danish Public Education System – Discursive Struggles in Four Historical Educational Reforms, In: Zhao, W. & Tröhler, D. Globalization and Localization: A Euro-Asia Dialogue on 21st-Century Competency-Based Curriculum Reforms, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 85-109, Ydesen, C., Kauko, J., & Magnúsdóttir, B. R. (2022). The OECD and the Field of Knowledge Brokers in Danish, Finnish, and Icelandic Education Policy. I B. Karseth,

This presentation examines the intervention of political-administrative elites in the conception and implementation of national education policies and programs. The study addresses the involvement of high-ranking officials from the Ministry of Education, policymakers, and experts from national higher education institutions and international organizations; and the focus is on their participation in developing and implementing a national pilot program that has served as the main instrument for a policy aimed at promoting curricular differentiation in Portuguese schools. The significance of this program, known as the "Project for Curricular Autonomy and Flexibility in Primary and Secondary Education," lies in its consistent implementation and generalization during recent years under the current government. The pilot program took place in 2017 and 2018 under the auspices of the Directorate-General for Education (DGE), the central organization responsible for implementing policies related to the pedagogical and didactic components of education, as well as providing technical support for policy formulation. Key actors involved in the program include high-ranking officials of the DGE, members of the cabinet of the Secretary of State for Education, a specialized committee (a body of national consultants from the academy with conception and monitoring roles), two national experts on curriculum studies, OECD officers, and members of the Working Group on Schools, which is part of the EU's European Education Area strategic framework. Therefore, we will present these elites at work, focusing on their interdependencies throughout the creation and implementation of the pilot program. It analyses two dimensions: the social dimension, which captures the actors' social characteristics, status and professional trajectories, their formal roles, and their political strategies, i.e., how they construct their power relations by mobilizing different resources to influence decision-making and implementation processes; and the cognitive dimension, which examines the main categories they use to make sense of the education sector and the role of knowledge and beliefs in shaping educational policies. Main methods include documental analysis and interviews with key actors. Additionally, tacit knowledge from authors generated from involvement in the project or created from experience in central management bodies will be mobilized.

Carvalho, L. M., Costa, E., & Sant’Ovaia, C. (2020). Depicting the faces of results-oriented regulatory processes in Portugal: National testing in policy texts. European Educational Research Journal, 19(2), 125-141. Carvalho, L. M., & Viseu, S. (2023). New philanthropy in education in Portugal: fabricating social inclusion as policy, knowledge and practice. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 1-13. Viseu, S., & Carvalho, L. M. (2021). Policy networks, philanthropy, and education governance in Portugal: the raise of intermediary actors. Foro de Educación, 19(1), 81-104.

Since the mid-2010s, an education policy agenda emerged in curricula across the world projecting the need to teach computer programming in schools. This chapter discusses the insertion of programming into the Swedish compulsory curriculum and argues that this change was shaped and promoted by an assemblage of external actors and their political configurations in municipal, national and international policy spaces. To frame the context of this study, an overview of the Swedish context and the emergence of the programming agenda is going to be presented. Through network ethnography analysis, actors are identified and their interpersonal links are mapped. This allows for a discussion of how the Swedish programming agenda was governed by a politico-administrative elite which features an assemblage of diverse actors. Programming was promoted by governmental and inter-governmental agencies, national and multinational corporations, as well as for-profit and non-profit organizations. These promotions occurred in schools serving their own aspirations and interests by, among other things, forming alliances, sharing their beliefs via public media and mobilizing a variety of resources. The findings demonstrate both the networks and relationships between the members of the political-administrative elite, as well as the discourses that shaped and justified the formulation of the programming agenda within the context of Sweden. These findings highlight the role of private actors in particular, and their influence in education policymaking processes, while illustrating the positions they hold within the policymaking field.

Ball, S. J. (2015). What is policy? 21 years later: reflections on the possibilities of policy research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(3), 306–313. Ball, S. J., & Junemann, C. (2012). Networks, new governance and education [Electronic resource]. Policy. Ball, S. J., & Youdell, D. (2008). Hidd Barnett, M., & Finnemore, M. (2004). Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics. Cornell University Press; JSTOR.