The paper addresses how school leadership education is localized within and between national and international policy spaces, which institutionally serve governance purposes while facilitating learning among current and future leaders. By examining globalization and policy learning as prominent features of policy discourses in two European countries, Norway and Sweden, we explore the spatial dynamics of how the development of school leadership programmes enables a borderless policy space through problem statements and strategies formed by transnational organizations like the OECD and the EU (Sivesind & Wahlström 2017). Following a discursive-institutionalist approach, we argue that the ways in which social and educational reforms become intertwined in globalizing discourses are dependent on cognitive and normative ideas in the public sphere and the interactive discursive processes and argumentation by which these ideas are produced, conveyed, and potentially led to collective action (Schmidt, 2015). By comparing two sets of country-specific policy texts about school leadership education at the national level in Norway and Sweden, the paper identifies how the countries act within a globalizing discourse while approaching their shared problems differently. Drawing on curriculum theory (Sundberg & Wahlström 2012) and discursive institutionalism (Schmidt 2015), we utilize an ideational methodology to research how school leadership education is being shaped by both national and international policies (Béland & Cox, 2011). In total, 20 policy papers have been analyzed, including OECD and EU documents, and white, green and grey papers from the two countries. Based on foreground discursive abilities, which comprise actions through the ways in which people distance themselves from everyday institutional activities and discuss and reflect upon how school leadership education is being developed and designed within the public sphere, the paper show how policy planning changes from both an ‘inside’ and an “outside” perspective. Thus, globalizing processes can be explained by foreground discursive abilities of actors involved in reform-making processes, which simultaneously provide the basis for a more local coordinative discourse characterized by the creation, elaboration, and justification of a certain policy across the nation-states programmes for educational leaders. The discursive-institutionalist approach is helpful for identifying how globalization takes place inside the national arena (Sassen 2013). Combined with a curriculum theory approach (Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017; Wahlström & Sundberg, 2017), it also becomes possible to demonstrate how policies about school leadership development connect with local practices that are partly shaped by researchers as change agents.

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