The features of a ‘Nordic’ or ‘Scandinavian’ model in welfare and education has attracted both scholarly attention and caused debate. Certain features have been attributed to the organisation of Nordic welfare states such as the ambition to align economic efficiency with equality, a large public sector with tax financed welfare and universal distribution of benefits (Kuisima, 2017, as well as the relatively strong role played by local government (West Pedersen & Kuhnle, 2017). In more recent times, instrumental goals and output-oriented management have been promoted and implemented in various ways (Telhaug, Mediås & Aasen, 2005) – a development very much in line with global neo-liberal education policies (Lundahl, 2016). One area where such translation and adoption has taken place concerns the design and institutional set-up of different forms of accountabilities in education. In this presentation, we analyse and compare recent changes in school accountability in the three Scandinavian countries Sweden, Norway and Denmark. In particular, we focus on the role and functions of standardized performance tests, one of the main instruments in the accountability toolbox, and how these developed and have been enacted over the last two decades. The empirical data consists of policy documents and research literature on accountability and national testing in the respective countries and include government bills, legislation, agency reports, as well as previous studies. The sources have been analysed using the notion of ‘policy instrument’ and the sociology of public policy instrumentation as an overall lens (Lascoumes & Le Gales, 2007; Simons & Voß, 2018). In this way, national testing is situated in relation to its wider constituency and policy context, and thereby we also follow Ozga’s (2019) overall argument to take the political dimension of policy seriously. The findings illustrate and exemplify how national testing is linked to translations and enactments including re-centralization processes in decentralized school systems under the auspices of a universal welfare state model. We demonstrate how global policy is translated and adapted to serve different purposes and functions in the respective national contexts and how national testing regimes come to develop ‘a life of their own’ (Simons & Voß, 2018, p. 31). The presentation illustrates the importance of national trajectories and translations of global ideas and we argue that the notion of ‘instrument constituencies’ may be analytically useful in understanding the complexities and transformation of accountability and governing practices.

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