An emerging phenomenon in Portugal since the turn of the century: the more visible and frequent presence of new actors called upon to – or who call themselves - to intervene in public policy. Actors who participate in public policy 'communicational' or 'coordinative' spaces (Schmidt, 2010). Inspired by recent literature related to this phenomenon this paper focus on the emergence, diversity of forms and manifestations of the agency of these new actors in education governance in Portugal. This research lies in the two following conceptual assumptions.

(1) The rise of these actors is part of ongoing changes in the social field of political practices, particularly changes in the modes of State intervention: the growing use of devices associated with the “new public management”; the centrality of evaluation, quality, effectiveness, performance and usefulness (Maroy, 2012; Maroy & Pons, 2019); the strengthening of new forms of participation by social actors in policies (e.g., contracts or experts). Thus, the growing importance of these new actors is conceived as a sign of the transition from "government to governance" (Ozga, 2008). In this transition, education governance is achieved through decentralized and horizontal interactions between multiple actors, located at different scales, and based on transnational or subnational, institutionalized or informal networks. These new actors are taking part in education governance, and they act as “important ‘nodes’” within these networks, “connected in dense and complex forms to each other as well as to government” (Exley, 2014, p. 4).

(2) These actors’, frequently presented in the literature under various names and/or organizational forms – “think thanks” (Lingard, 2016), “mediators” (Jobert & Muller, 1987), “brokers” (Jenkins-Smith & Sabatier, 1993), “transnational policy actors” (Lawn & Lingard, 2002), “boundary persons” (Sultana, 2011), “intermediary organizations” (Cooper & Shewchuk, 2015) or “transnational expert communities” (Kauko et al., 2018)- are conceptualize as intermediate actors (Nay & Smith, 2002; Carvalho, 2006). Intermediate actors are involved in a set of cognitive and social operations for the construction and stabilization of interactions between ideas, individuals, and technical devices. The cognitive dimension considers their self-presentation, the reasons for their intervention and how they imagine education systems and how are (or should be) governed. The social dimension regards the activities and kind of intervention, including the structuring of new policy spaces or intra-national spaces of policy (Lawn & Lingard 2002; Ball 2016).

From the outlined perspective, the paper unfolds into two analyses: (a) an essay of a 'cartography' of emerging intermediate actors, based on the spaces of collective action in use and actors to which their agency applies (e.g., general public, politicians, practitioners); and also on these actors’ autonomy in the production of expert knowledge for policies (internal staff, outsourcing or mix); (b) trends about changes in education governance in Portugal that the emergence of these actors reveals. 

This paper departs from previous empirical work on the emergence of non-state actors in education governance in Portugal (Viseu & Carvalho, 2018; Carvalho, Viseu & Gonçalves, 2018; 2019; Viseu & Carvalho, 2020), namely: EDULOG, a think tank devoted to education; a small-scale infrastructure named aQeduto; and EPIS - Entrepreneurs for Social Inclusion, a collective philanthropy association. These cases were chosen because they were fairly recently in the Portuguese education scenario; they were born out of the initiative of philanthropic foundations; they evoke a variety of actors from different social worlds (political decision-makers, researchers, business and philanthropists); and, finally, they have gained increasing visibility in the media, partly thanks to some key individual actors, including public figures, involved in their actions or social composition. These earlier works already showed the novelty these actors bring to the Portuguese scenario is based on two fundamental features. They have an explicit vocation for the production, or support to production, of specialized knowledge for education policies, and even practices. For that, the involvement of “experts” and actors from different social worlds (academia, education administration, and businesses) is important. Moreover, these actors have significant connections to the business world, namely within the philanthropic activities of Portuguese entrepreneurs. The empirical work is inspired by recent studies of education policy which use network ethnography (e.g. Hogan, 2016; Sperka, & Enright, 2017; Allen, & Bull, 2018; Avelar, & Ball, 2019). The fieldwork includes an extensive mapping of the actors and events promoted by these actors, using internet searches (website documents, flyers, Facebook publications, press clipping, call for application for research projects, conferences, seminars, etc. Interviews to key individuals (managers and “experts”) were made to fill in the missing information and add new inputs on the data collected through internet searches.

Two interpretative lines will be presented about the diversity of forms and manifestations of the agency of new actors in education governance in Portugal. The first is that these actors can be considered intermediate actors as they act based on cognitive and social intermediation. Secondly, the emergence of these actors reveals continuities and changes in education governance in Portugal: the use of a more cognitive (rather than normative) regulation, more intensive and knowledge-based, converging to a new interactive and intuitive ways of knowledge dissemination; an increasingly intertwined regulation, involving several different social worlds, promoting and establishing new policy networks and the spread of the new philanthropy reasoning within these intermediate actors.

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