The presence and relevance of new actors operating between organized spaces of activities in the policy processes can be represented by diverse categorizations, according to traits, roles or practices: mediators, brokers, entrepreneurs, boundary persons/organizations. In general, these actors play a role in the making of more knowledge intensive policies and are involved in processes of producing, illuminating or (re)framing educational knowledge. In this paper, we use the notion of intermediary actors (Nay & Smith, 2002), i.e. those who engage in a set of cognitive and social operations for the construction and stabilization of interactions between ideas, individuals and technical devices, to describe and analyze two emergent actors in Portugal. Both actors became public in 2015 and are based on small-scale infrastructures with significant internet and media presence, supported by two different philanthropic foundations and build on expert knowledge. The first, ‘aQeduto (Aqueduct): evaluation, quality and equity in education’, was initiated by the current leadership of the National Council of Education (a consultancy body of the Ministry of Education). Its purpose is to provide ‘credible and sustained information’ and ‘explanations’ about the variation in Portuguese students’ results in the PISA tests, ‘in simple language but preserving scientific rigor’, for policymakers and lay people. This is a new phenomenon in Portugal, where the work of intentionally translating PISA results into knowledge for policymakers and lay people has been occasional and random (Carvalho, Costa & Gonçalves, 2017). The second organization, EDULOG, operates within a philanthropic foundation and is a self-titled think-tank devoted to education that aims to provide ‘objective research and information’ and encourage ‘policy makers and other actors to make better decisions’. For this, EDULOG calls for strategic research that will ‘improve the quality of education’ using relevant data and facts. Its selective advisory board includes former ministers and secretaries of education, former university rectors, deputies, CEOs and business philanthropists, thereby demonstrating its commitment to act as a bridge between researchers, policymakers and other ‘stakeholders’ (Viseu, 2017). Drawing on documental analysis and interviews with members of both organizations, our analysis focuses on how the fear of being left behind drives their activities, the rationalities that structure the production and transformation of knowledge and the features of problematization, interessement and mobilization that occur in the translation (Callon, 1998) of knowledge for policy and public audiences.

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