This paper is located within educational policy studies. Within that framework, it is predicated on a need to re-theorise policy and policy processes in recognition of the effects of what has been called a move from government to governance associated with globalization and privatization (Roseneau, 1992; Rhodes, 1997). What this means is that agents and agencies, as well as discourses beyond the nation are now involved in policy production and framing policy content, and that this scale of policy agents is influential in national educational policy development. This is what has been called the rescaling of statehood (Brenner, 2004), which has implications for understanding national policy developments in education and their relationship to global processes. At the most macro level, this is the move from Westphalian politics, which recognised the sovereignty and authority of the nation state in politics and policy making, to a post-Westphalian reality (Krasner, 2001), which sees new postnational politics and policy processes operating across nations. We argue that both realities now work simultaneously. Additionally, as a function or expression of these developments, the private sector is now imbricated in these processes as well, including the media and large multinational corporations (Ball, 2007). The policy generating community in education,as with other policy domains, has thus been extended in scalar terms and in terms of private/public engagements. This changed reality is picked up on in the descriptor, ‘new forms of educational governance’, which demands that we rethink the classic definition of policy as the ‘authoritative allocation of values’ (Easton, 1953), recognizing that the new scalar politics has added a postnational or global element to all three aspects of this definition, authority, processes of allocation, and values. Within this context, this paper develops two interconnected arguments, which are focused on theorising and mapping the contours of the emergent global education policy field, which has implications for education policy studies. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu (1993)and a range of literature on the rescaling of statehood and politics, firstly it theorises an emergent global education policy field. This argument suggests that in order to develop and extend theories of global fields some theorization needs to be focussed on how a change of scale affects field theory. Then secondly, again utilising Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, pp.104-107), it seeks to map the contours of this global field.

This paper is principally theoretical, and draws on the language and theory of Bourdieu to map the contours of a global policy field considering three levels of analysis derived from the methodology inherent in Bourdieu’s theoretical and empirical oeuvre. These three levels include: i.) the relationship of the global education policy field to the global field of power; ii.) relations between agents/agencies within this global field; and iii.) the habitus of agents within these agencies and links to the field and practice. The paper also gives some consideration to the relationships between this global field and national fields of education policy, suggesting in the process, that Bourdieu’s (2003) concept of ‘national capital’ is useful in understanding the nature of these relationships. While the paper is theoretical rather than empirical in orientation, some use will be made of empirical examples to illustrate the global education polciy field and its contours.

The major outcomes of this paper are a theoretical outline of the scales and effects of a global educational policy field which may be used as the basis for either further theorising in educational policy studies or as the basis for further empirical studies of the effects of policy fields beyond the nation-state.