In the last decades, most countries in the world have faced major pressures to reform their educational systems. The emerging demand for global skills in increasingly inter-dependent economies, the challenges generated by technological innovation, and the comparisons of educational systems promoted by international large-scale assessments, stand out among other sources of pressure. In this scenario, educational reforms mainly informed by managerial policies and discourses imported from the private sector have disseminated widely across European countries due to their promise to modernize and strengthen the performance of education systems. In compulsory education, the two policy ideas of managerial nature that are at the core of this global reform movement are the devolution of responsibilities to smaller management units (i.e., the schools) and outcomes-based management through test-based accountability schemes. According to many education reform advocates, School Autonomy With Accountability (SAWA) policies seem to be territorially de-localized and context-resilient in the sense that they are expected to make education systems perform better everywhere (Sahlberg, 2011). The study of the globalization of SAWA reforms is particularly interesting from a comparative perspective because these reforms are being enacted in countries from all world regions, and with very different administrative traditions and levels of economic development. Faced with this reality, this paper aims at understanding the main reasons behind the globalization of SAWA reforms, and the different policy trajectories followed by these reforms. Specifically, the paper analyses the dynamics through which SAWA policies have been disseminated, adopted and recontextualised in multiple educational settings. Methodologically, the paper is based on a systematic literature review of 207 papers – most of them, case studies with a focus on the policy process behind the adoption and/or recontextualisation of SAWA policies. The synthesis allows for the identification of the different rationales and conditions of adoption of these policies. Analytically, this paper is informed by a cultural political economy (CPE) approach. CPE is an analytical and heuristic framework that allows us to observe how drivers of a different nature interact in the production of SAWA reforms through the mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention (Jessop, 2010). We argue that the interaction between supranational drivers (including the key role of some international organizations and international large-scale assessments) and more locally situated factors and contingencies is key to understanding SAWA reforms more comprehensively, but also to what extent these reforms develop in a polymorphic or diverging manner.

Glewwe, P. (2014). Education Policy in Developing Countries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jessop, B. (2010) Cultural political economy and critical policy studies. Critical Policy Studies, 3(3-4), 336-356. Sahlberg, P. (2011). Finnish lessons. New York: Teachers College Press.