The focus of this symposium is educational governance at the local school district level seen in a cross-cultural perspective, which is based on national survey studies of local school boards in the Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

The overarching research question that has guided our studies is: How are trans-national influences and national policies transformed into local policy cultures when they meet the school boards? In all the Nordic countries, the municipalities are equivalent with the school district level. But the point is that school districts play a similar role as the interface between state policies and the schools.

We briefly introduce our perspectives on the trans-national influences, as they can be seen in the case of the OECD. This serves as a basis for discussing the need for looking into local conditions for educational governance that meet the trans-national influences. We argue that policy borrowing should be based on robust and thorough knowledge of the context of the policy provider and also of the policy borrower.