Transferring education from one country to another is not a new phenomenon, nor is the association of business and education. What is significant about recent education transfers, though, is the shift in education towards a managerial regime (Ozga, 2009). The neoliberal shift of education governance carries out the notion of human capital and return on investment in a context immersed in an increased global education competition whereby education is considered a valuable asset, and therefore, an export product. In such context, possessing a great volume of this asset and having an internationally recognized education system, such as Finland after its ‘PISA miracle’, turn countries into big players globally.

Education, both as social phenomenon and institution, reflects the changing economic, social and political demands (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). Education trade emerges and changes accordingly. Education export, which is defined as an industry (Marginson 2011; Chowdhury 2012), has been firstly associated to the internationalization of higher education institutions (HEIs) through the attraction of foreign students to domestic HEIs and the establishment of education programs and degrees in international HEIs (Bennell & Pearce 2003; McBurnie and Ziguras 2009; Healey & Michael 2015). It developed worldwide, from passive indirect export to a maturity stage (Chadee & Naidoo 2009), requiring more multidimensional and blurred-boundaries typologies for characterizing its processes (Healey 2015).

Anglo-Saxon countries pioneered and dominated global education export, challenged by the emergence of new players, such as Singapore, India, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and China (Chadee & Naidoo 2009; Healey 2015). Finland has become a reference society (Takayama et al. 2013; Parcerisa & Verger 2019) and gained attention among countries primarily located in the Southern parts of the globe. These countries have been projecting their own education systems based on the Finnish education (Waldow & Steiner-Khamsi, 2019), eventually importing the Finnish education, which has been delivered in service and product packages. Despite been identified as one of the key export programs in Finland with growing turnover targets for the next years, Finnish education export is under-examined in academic literature.

Our research maps Finnish education export in relation to the practices of key players in transnational education. Our attention is directed to the construction of education export as  discursive practices (Bacchi & Bonham 2014; Brunila & Ryynänen 2016). By mapping relations, connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces and strategies we ask how Finnish education export is legitimized. We aim to challenge the taken-for-granted nature of Finnish education export and open up areas for the critical analysis of the implicit power within the political and institutional discursive practices.

We analyze data from political documents about Finnish education export from the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Finnish National Agency for Education, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Our analysis examines how Finnish education export is constructed in its scope and complexity as discursive practices, which collective and individual agents are involved, and which contradictions it entails. Data was processed through a systematic qualitative analysis inspired in a Foucauldian approach.

Our preliminary findings show that Finnish education export has started in a ‘direct and strategic export growth’ stage much later (only in 2007) than other countries and diverges from other countries’ transnational education practices due to its socio-historical context. The discourses of education export in Finland rely on both material and symbolic practices of branding Finnish education as a unique ‘good’ in association to the country’s leading positions in educational indicators (e.g., PISA), innovation, human capital and global competitiveness. Stakeholders work in different networks and ecosystems, which support and strengthen the processes of education export in Finland, but the lack of regulation contributes to fostering a sense of lack of possibilities as well as competition in the sector. The ‘naturalized’ market-oriented nature of Finnish education export contrasts with the Finnish primarily public education system.

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