A recent but largely under-researched area of the extensive marketization and privatization of Swedish education during the last decades concerns the international expansion that large Swedish free school companies are currently embarking on. At present, such Swedish education delivery companies are operating primary and secondary schools and/or providing early childhood education services globally, from Norway, Germany and the Netherlands to India and Saudi Arabia (Rönnberg et al., 2021). In this paper, the gaze moves from these companies to the wider national policy context of which they are a part. Swedish compulsory and preschool education export as commercial trade is focused, and the paper aims to provide a first and initial exploratory analysis of the institutional frameworks, policies and interests involved in Swedish education export. There is an expanding national Swedish education industry and examples of Swedish companies exporting education services etc., but as of yet the Swedish policy set ups and/or institutional architectures to promote education export has not been the focus of research. This is in sharp contrast to the situation in neighboring Finland, where education export has a prominent position in both policy/politics and research (c.f. Juusola & Nokkala, 2021; Seppänen et al, 2021; Schatz et al., 2017).

Education export is defined as involving the international trade of education and related goods and services, including education goods such as teaching materials, EdTech, and so on, different forms of education consultancy, coaching and services, as well as to deliver education abroad (c.f. Schatz, 2016). Previous important work on the Global Education Industry (Verger et al., 2016; Parreira do Amaral et al., 2019; Ball, 2012) has highlighted the global character of education as both a commodity and site for sales and products. Still, nation states and their legal and national frameworks work to enable or constrain private actor involvement in the global education industry in different ways and this is related to previous policies and national reform trajectories (Alexiadou & Rönnberg, 2019). In this paper, this overall framing is supplemented with analytical tools from the agenda setting literature, more specifically Kingdon’s (1995) multiple streams framework (MSF), highlighting the role of policy, problems and politics in agenda setting, as well as the actors operating in these streams. In brief, these independent streams must come together during a ‘window of opportunity’ to enable policy change, aided by the work of ‘policy entrepreneur/s’ (c.f. Beland, Howlett & Mukerjee, 2018; Cairney & Jones, 2016; Béland & Howlett, 2016; Zachariadis, 2007).

Empirically, the paper is based on data from interviews with 13 central actors in Swedish business and public administration, covering both Ministry and Agency staff as well as business associations and actors from edu-business and export. The informants were primarily identified via snowball sampling and included central officials/actors from for instance unions, a private public partnership (PPP) on export, as well as Governmental Ministries and Agencies, such as the Ministry of Education and the Swedish Institute. In addition, CEOs and/or consultancy-based interest advocacy from the business side were also interviewed, who had experience of trying to export their education services abroad. In addition to these interviews, the paper also analyses five reports published from 2008 to 2017 from different organised interests in the area of education export promotion. The first analytical step included an initial mapping of the institutional frameworks and the actors, departing from both the information in the reports described above and accompanying legislative/policy documents covering export and trade more generally. The reports and interview transcripts were then analysed and coded thematically (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) on institutional support structures, policy activities and/or the lack of activities and motives/justifications for this etc. After this, the data was coded in analytically derived themes from the three streams in the MSF, i.e. problems, politics and policy, and a fourth theme on the presence or absence of policy entrepreneurs in this particular field of policy advocacy.

Organised interests from the business side have been trying to place education export on the national policy agenda in the 2010s. The business interest advocacy association Almega has recurrently argued for the potential of exported education services, and highlighted that the Swedish policy design with tax funded but privately owned welfare service delivery companies has rendered useful competition at home to ensure a good international position. There are also other organisations, for instance promoting preschool export, that have been actively trying to put the issue on the political agenda. The findings first and foremost highlight the relative absence of an explicit Swedish education export policy. Compared to for instance the pronounced and state-led Finnish national education export strategy, Swedish edu-export is noticeably less organized and state-promoted. Even if there have been some attempts to put this issue on the Swedish political agenda, a coherent and institutionally supported framework for education export is still lacking. The paper discusses how this can be understood, using Kingdon’s three streams and the accompanying notions of ‘policy entrepreneurs’ and ‘policy window’ to frame the discussion. The interviews offer several accounts going back to the general national political debate climate and the attitude to welfare businesses. As a preschool delivery company representative said: ”they dare not touch this politically”. Taken together, the analysis point to a lack of political opportunity structures, as well as problem/s to attach education export as a solution to. Furthermore, there seem to be a lack of boundary-spanning policy entrepreneurs that work to connect policy, business and administrative structures in order to open a policy window for Swedish state-promoted education export.

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