The adoption of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2006 has established disability rights as a global policy issue and has led to far-reaching reform efforts, not least in the education sector. Although the Convention is implemented at national levels, a network of state and non-state actors has emerged at the global level to influence policy making processes. While UN agencies and other international organisations (IOs) act primarily as norm setters, non-governmental organisations participate in monitoring and enforcing the convention (Arduin 2019). However, research on the interplay of these actors and the networks in which they are involved is still scarce. In particular, little is known about the involvement of different actors in relation to specific disability policy issues. We address these gaps by examining issue-specific policy networks based on Twitter data to answer the following questions:

1. To what extent can issue-specific sub-networks (including education) be identified in the global disability policy network on Twitter?
2. How do the issue-specific networks differ regarding their network characteristics?
3. Which actors dominate in the different issue-specific networks?

The study of global policy networks has become an integral part in international relations and has also been extensively researched for the education sector (Ball 2012). In these global actor networks, IOs have become increasingly relevant in recent decades, not only as managers of interdependencies and mediators of interstate cooperation, but also – at least in part – as agents of political change in their own right (Bauer, Knill, and Eckhard 2017). At the same time, various non-state actors directly participate in the management of global education issues (Junemann, Ball, and Santori 2016). In order to better understand the structure of a global education policy network, we apply concepts of social network theory (SNT) (Wassermann and Faust 2009). SNT concentrates on the interactions between structure and agency in a social system and conceives of actors as embedded in social structures. Hence, it places the structures and properties of an actors’ environment at the centre of empirical analysis (Borgatti and Lopez-Kidwell 2011). Gaining a better understanding of the general structure of a network and the role of specific actors within can help to make assumptions about how actors might be able to shape the dissemination of information (or any other resource) in the network.

Previous studies have examined the global disability policy network as a whole (e.g. Schuster and Kolleck 2021). In our contribution, we argue that the network needs to be conceptualised as a complex set of actors with a narrow thematic perspective on the one hand and actors with a broad agenda on the other. To give an example, while some actors have a particular focus on education within the global disability policy field, others can be expected to play a central role in several issue-specific networks. By integrating a network theoretical perspective into the study of global disability policy, we aim to contribute to the understanding of the role of different actors in education policy and the way they influence policy making processes at the global level.

The study of global policy networks poses particular challenges to researchers because of the large number of different actors involved. Online data, such as Twitter, seem to provide a valuable source for studying communication networks on the global scale (Schuster, Jörgens, and Kolleck 2019). Twitter is a social media platform that has become a widespread communication tool for political purposes (Dubois and Gaffney 2014; Goritz et al. 2020). On Twitter, relations to other users can be established by directly addressing another user in a message (i.e., a mention), replying to another user’s message (i.e., a reply), or sharing messages from other users (i.e., a retweet). In this way, communication networks are emerging around specific topics. The Twitter data analysed for this study were gathered in the context of the Conferences of States Parties to the CRPD between 2013 and 2017. In order to distinguish different issue-specific networks, we further filtered the overall data set for messages related to four main topics in global disability policy: education, children and youths, women and girls, and technology. We applied techniques of social network analysis (SNA) to map the relations between different actors and to identify key actors in the issue-specific networks (Borgatti, Everett, and Johnson 2013). SNA focuses on the relationships between actors as well as the structural properties of networks of relationships. Specific techniques of SNA can also succeed in measuring latent forms of influence (Jörgens, Kolleck, and Saerbeck 2016; Kolleck 2016). In order to assess influence and visualize the network, we implement measures such as density, network centralisation, degree centrality and eigenvector centrality. Examining both the entire CRPD Twitter network and issue-specific networks enables us to observe the debates on specific issues within the entire network and compare the involvement of different actors across issues.

Our results indicate that subgroups of actors can be identified that exchange information on a specific topic. In particular, information on the use of new technologies in the context of the CRPD appears to be shared only by certain members of the network, suggesting that this topic is mainly discussed by a limited number of actors with a rather narrow agenda. In contrast, aspects related to women's and girls' rights in particular appear to be discussed throughout the CRPD network. A comparison of the network measures of the topic-specific networks shows that the technology-related network is particularly dense. The women's rights-related network has a high degree of centralization, while the education-related network is less centralized. These results suggest that women’s rights-related communication tends to be focused on a few central actors, while the education-related network includes a large number of actors with low hierarchies. In terms of the central actors within the issue-specific networks, the results of our analyses suggest that each network is dominated by different actors. In the cases of technology and women’s rights, the most central actors are the respective UN bodies. For the closely related issues of children’s rights and education in the context of the CRPD, the international NGO Lumos takes the most central role, followed by UNICEF. Other IOs central in issue-specific networks include WHO and ITU in the case of technology, the EU in the cases of women’s and children’s rights, and the World Bank for education. In addition to the IOs, several NGOs hold central positions in all networks. Furthermore, the central positions of the multinational technology companies Microsoft and Dell in the technology-specific network are particularly interesting. Overall, our findings indicate that the global disability policy network is constituted of issue-specific sub-networks and a diverse set of various actors shaping them.

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