Investigating policy implementation has been a topic of interest for a long time and several concepts have been proposed to capture the phenomena such as policy adaptation, policy diffusion, and policy transfer (see  Kussau, 2007; Rürup & Bormann, 2013) . There is a common understanding that policy implementation intended as a reform, a) aims at influencing actions of people at different levels in the system, but b) that the policy is actively interpreted by the peoplel. Helmut Fend (2008) introduces the term “Rekontextualisierung” (re-contextualising) to highlight the central process in his model explaining the steering /regulating of a multilevel school system. The model builds on the assumption that steering /regulating a multilevel school system means changing the environment in which people in the school system act. However, to influence someone is limited, as the individual make sense of the intended change in a particular way based on one’s abilities, motivation and recognition of contexts. Therefore, according to Fend a policy implementation or reform is actively “re-contextualised” on every level of the school system. This theoretical perspective provides an analytical framework to understand intentional as well and transintentional effects of a policy implementation process.

The study that is presented focuses on an initiative called “Qualifying Mulitplicators for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the school system”. It is a state-wide initiative by one German federal state aiming to contribute to making ESD an integrated part of formal education in this state. Therefore, each regional school authority and teacher education institution was officially asked to send a representative to the training. This way the initiative targeted educators who are already involved in teacher education and professional training for the future multiplying task. In summer 2014 a number of 61 educators were qualified for the role as a multiplicator for ESD. Their task entails offering courses on ESD within teacher in-service training and initial teacher training. Further, to raise the awareness of ESD in their respected institution. The training qualifying the multiplicators lasted seven days and focused on critically interrogating the concepts of sustainable development and ESD.

The study’s research questions are: What do these ESD Multiplicators consider as their task? How do they re-contextualise their task?  

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