Education and learning at all ages represent policy objects that have gained high status on the agendas of international organizations, governments and private institutions. Thus, intergovernmental organizations born either to sustain economic growth and higher living standards (i.e. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD) or European integration (i.e. European Union, EU) are equally paying a great deal of attention to the education and learning of autochthonous and immigrant adults as well as out of school youth. 

While the OECD is indisputably the ever-growing policy authority when it comes to the measurements and standardisation of adult literacy and skills (Desjardins & Ederer, 2015; Rubenson, 2015), the EU has no doubt tightened its policy coordination, inter-systemic steering and use of dedicated funding in various areas, including adult education and learning, in the wake of the global economic crisis of 2008 (Milana 2016, 2017; Rasmussen, 2014a). But how do these international prescriptions and instruments affect what occurs within national contexts in Europe?

To answer this question, in this paper we investigate how different groupings of people forming shared standpoints for collective action, and their actions, affect public policy developments in adult education and learning, especially policy elements based on international prescriptions.

We adopt a comparative perspective, studying and contrasting two fairly different national contexts: Italy and Denmark. These countries represent different historical trajectories of state formation and welfare regimes (Rubenson & Dejardins, 2009) and they are illustrative of a persistent North-South divide within Europe in terms of both rates of participation in adult education and learning opportunities, and social (in)equalities and standards of living among their populations (see also Rasmussen, 2014b).

The paper will contribute knowledge on the extent to which efforts by intergovernmental organizations, and the EU in particular, impact uniformly in national policies, and to which extent they are adapted, transformed or disrupted across borders throughout Europe.

The theoretical framework for the paper draws on sociological realism, conceptualising the different but interacting levels of the real world (Collier, 2011) and on social theory, conceptualising different logics of and frameworks for human action (Habermas, 1984-87). In our study, the real world of adult education and learning policy (i.e. the object of our investigation) comprises: 1) people getting involved in teaching and learning transactions (empirical domain); 2) people and organisations that deliberate on, and engage in, the definition, implementation, monitoring or evaluation of such transactions (actual domain); and 3) criteria, procedures, economic resources, etc. (mechanisms). But the real world contains also not concrete (or observable) entities (i.e. possibilities or absences) that have effects on real entities (i.e. individuals, collectives). It is people’s (and collectives) instrumental, strategic and communicative actions that re-elaborate past cultural and structural conditions and generate (often unintended) consequences, which produce the observable outcomes we call facts (Archer, 2011; Habermas, 1984-87).

In our study, one of the observable outcomes of invisible cultural and structural elaboration is the institutionalization of adult education and learning through policy deliberation and ‘systemic’ development of institutions. But adult education and learning policy and its institutions differ between and within socio-economic and cultural contexts, and so do the social positioning of people and organisations involved in the field. In studying this field in Italy and in Denmark we trace how these forces and actions enacts, adapt and disrupt international prescriptions on adult education and learning.

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