This presentation focuses on the role of think tanks in the fabrication and execution of educational policies. Our interest is to contribute to a literature that discusses the rising of new “intra-national spaces of policy” and their influence in bringing changes in educational policies (Ball, 2016). For that, we will present an exploratory study about EDULOG, a self-titled think tank for education created in 2015 in Portugal that brings together actors that worked (or still do) in the government, businesses and in the academy.

Think tanks are rising up in Europe in the last decades (McGann, 2016). On the one hand, this phenomena comes together with the transformation of the State, which manifests by the emergence of “post-bureaucratic” regulatory regimes (Maroy, 2012),  emphasizing accountability, contracts, good practices, user control of schools and the shape of the “evaluative State” (Neave, 2012). On the other hand, transnational organizations, private organizations and experts that circulate worldwide are becoming key players in educational governance (Kotthoff & Klerides, 2015). As part of these changes, knowledge (its technologies for collection, circulation and comparison) is now central in the process of policy making and becoming the process of governing itself (Fenwick et al, 2014). This scenario is a fertile ground to the emergency of new spaces, within and outside each national political system, where knowledge is constructed and diffused in order to be used in policy decision-making (van Zanten, 2013). Simultaneously, this is an opportunity for new actors, namely think tanks, to have a more intense participation in policy (Lingard, 2016). Thus, the rising of think tanks is both an indicator of: a) changes in State intervention, specifically of a “shift away from government towards forms of polycentric governance” (Ball & Exley 2010, p. 151) and b) changes in the complex knowledge-policy relations, once think tanks claim to be expert-based intermediators between different social worlds.

We conceptualize think tanks as “hybrid, boundary spanning organisations that work across academic, media, political and economic fields” (Lingard, 2016, p. 15) and as “nebulous configuration[s] of new and old actors, [with] ambiguous responsibilities and blurry margins of action” (Olmedo & Santa Cruz, 2013, p. 492). Thus, theoretically we don’t look at think tanks as organizations, but as part of broader policy networks (Ball & Exley, 2010), and as important “nodes” within education policy networks (Exley, 2014) committed to develop and disseminate a certain educational knowledge. This theoretical perspective allows us to understand their particular role in re-framing “policy problems and advocate for particular policy solutions” (Savage, 2015, p. 35) and to understand the ideas and expertise employed by them (Stone & Denham, 2004).

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