Based on the ‘case’ of educational reform in India this paper explores the emergence of both new trans-national spaces of policy and new intra-national spaces of policy and how they are related together, and how policies move across and between these spaces and the relationships that enable and facilitate such movement. The paper is an attempt to think outside and beyond the framework of the nation state to make sense of what is going on inside the nation state. In particular, it takes seriously the need to rethink the frame within and scale at which the new policy actors, discourses, connections, agendas, resources and solutions of governance are addressed – and the need to move beyond what Beck calls ‘methodological nationalism’. In other words, the paper argues that thinking about the spaces of policy means extending the limits of our geographical imagination. It also means attempting to grasp the joining up of these spaces in and through relationships.

In particular, it takes seriously the need to rethink the frame within and scale at which the new policy actors, discourses, conceptions, connections, agendas, resources and solutions of governance are addressed. 

From Peck and Theodore (2010) I adopt the term ‘policy mobility’ to better describe the movement of policies – not in distinct and compact forms or ‘bundles’ – but rather in a piecemeal fashion which are then (re) assembled in particular ways, in particular places and for particular purposes (McCann and Ward 2012). Nonetheless, I suggest, at least in relation to education policy, these re-assemblies may have convergent consequences in terms of modes of governance and global forms and conceptions of policy that require us to think both about the ‘global’ impacts on the ‘national’, while acknowledging, at the same time, the extent to which the national is critical in the formation of global policy agendas. However relatedly, like other geographers of policy, I want to escape from the artificiality of ‘levels’ as distinct boundaries of political activity and the global and local as a binary and instead emphasise the interdependency of actors and the movement of ideas in the framing of problems and policy directions and conceptions. 

In particular, it takes seriously the need to rethink the frame within and scale at which the new policy actors, discourses, conceptions, connections, agendas, resources and solutions of governance are addressed. In other words, thinking about the spaces of policy means extending the limits of our geographical imagination. It also means attempting to grasp the joining up and re-working of these spaces in and through relationships. I suggest, at least in relation to education policy, global policy networks may have convergent consequences in terms of modes of governance and global forms and conceptions of policy that require us to think both about the ‘global’ impacts on the ‘national’, while acknowledging, at the same time, the extent to which the national is critical in the formation of global policy agendas. 

The space of analysis is not defined by geographical entities, but by the space configured through the intersection of global and situated elements – in India global, regional, national, state and city levels of policy intersect and diverge. There is no claim of determination by a global form, rather different conditions of possibility (Ong, 2007).

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