In the last decade Global Citizenship Education (GCED) has developed in Europe and worldwide through conceptual, political and pedagogical negotiations among policymakers, educators, and community members (Forghani-Arani et al., 2013). However, GCED remains a contested concept according to various situated theories and practices and in relation to various ideological, geographical, and cultural differences (Hartung, 2017; Jooste & Heleta, 2017) and many scholars have provided several typologies that map current and emerging definitions and expressions (Andreotti, 2014; IBE UNESCO APCEIU, 2018, p. 35-36; Marshall, 2011; Oxley & Morris, 2013; Pashby et al., 2020; Pashby, & da Costa, 2021; Shultz, 2007; Stein, 2015).  Moreover, GCED agenda setting, policy formulation, and implementation are always complex interactive and multi-layered processes, where several political actors intertwine their visions, ideologies, and agencies.

In order to address conceptual ambiguity and complex and multilevel processes of political enactment (Ball, 1990) it is crucial to identify who are the GCED key players in influencing policy and practice innovation and to map relationships that connect them as a network of GCED providers and policy actors. The presented research was seeking to map multiple ties among active promoters of GCED in the UN region of Europe and North America connecting them as a network.

GCED implemented policies, and also practices, are the result of conceptual, political, and even pedagogical negotiations. Social relations among actors shape the processes of GCED implementation, the circulation of information among key institutions, and the conceptual co-construction of GCED ideas. GCED research therefore requires the use of relational data. It is not sufficient to understand GCED policy implemented as isolated from social relations.

In particular, the inquiry was aiming to identify key institutions and individuals within the network, and/or associations between them; to understand how actors involved in the implementation of GCED in the region cooperate, how they are linked, and how the network is structured.

This presentation is based on a study which addresses an important gap in GCED research by mapping, through the lenses of Social Network Analysis (SNA), how GCED is constructed and moves across networks of actors, including governments, NGOs, researchers, and educational institutions, among others.

While in recent years some research has explored the role of both offline and digital networks (Schuster, Jörgens, & Kolleck, 2021) in shaping educational policy, GCED has not been investigated specifically. With the exception of a study combining SNA and discourse analysis (Kolleck & Yemini, 2020), SNA has never been used to investigate GCED educational policy and practice.

The research, whose preliminary results are presented here, has been funded by APCEIU and Ban Ki Moon centre and it was conducted by an international team based in Italy and Canada.

This study addresses an important gap in GCED research by exploring how this issue is constructed and moves across networks of actors, including governments, NGOs, researchers, and educational institutions, among others. SNA (Robins, 2015) appears to be one of the most appropriate methods for analyzing the structural and functional effects of those phenomena, where social relationships prevail over organizational characteristics. We took a whole network approach to social networks, which means interviewing every actor that is present in the boundary we have defined. This is the methodologically strongest approach in network theory as it allows collecting a complete picture of policy space that we aimed to analyze. It allowed us to describe the overall characteristics of the network but also the characteristics of the single actor in the network such as centrality, and relate their position on the network with the outcome of the activity of the specific actors. The final data set was composed by 45 organizations, 26 from Europe and 19 from North America, all influential institutions acting in disseminate, promote, and foster GCED in the Region and it included in the roster these types of organisations: 22 Civil society organizations 9 Education institutions 3 Governmental bodies 6 Intergovernmental organizations 5 Thematic networks. Three networks, based on relations and activities among the actors, were especially explored: mutual collaboration, technical information sharing, and meetings between organizations. The research hypothesis was that the most central and influential actors are those who have a very broad and mainstream GCED conceptualization.

We adopted a mixed methods approach that combines SNA with thematic analysis of actors' GCED conceptualizations collected in the qualitative part of the interview. The first step was the identification of the most central actors (Christopoulos & Ingold, 2015). The second step was the use of centrality indices and reputational influence to understand if the common characteristic among these actors is the discursive practice they use. Discursive practice was identified through 2 elements: 1) their priority for GCED between the following orientation: cosmopolitan GCED, market GCED, social justice GCED based on the order given to six sentences: 2) the thematic analysis of the text that defines what is the understanding and goals of GCE for every organization. Key global and local network patterns and organizations’ positions in the network were analyzed. Analysis showed that the structure of the network reflects a core-periphery model of interaction where there is high density of connection at center and lower level of connection in the periphery (Borgatti & Everett, 1999). There is no clear pattern between the dimension of the node (resources devoted to GCED) and its position in the networks. This seems to suggest that the centrality in the network is not a function of the resources devoted to GCED. To be at the center of the network organizations need to have a discursive practice that have very broad definitions. The ambivalence of policy actors is functional to for the persistence in high volatile policy environment. Moreover, when we combine the core-periphery maps with the GCED conceptualisation, we can see the importance of the organizations working outside the centre. Data shows that new ideas and experiences can be moved into the network from positions on the periphery.

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