According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the role of the organization is to ‘work on establishing evidence-based international standards’ in education by providing ‘a unique forum and knowledge hub for data and analysis, exchange of experiences, best-practice sharing, and advice on public policies’ (OECD, 2022). Simultaneously, nation-states participate in the work of setting up international standards and serve as places for the negotiation of transnational policies and national adaptations, leading to an increased interdependence between transnational and national arenas (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004). The purpose of this paper is to explore the national government and the OECD as two arenas depending on each other for their exercise of power and legitimization of education reforms. The research question is “How do the government and the political parties in Sweden use the OECD to legitimize their policy, and how does the OECD use Swedish education policy to promote its policy ideals”? The study draws on discursive institutionalism for a theoretical conceptualization (Carstensen & Schmidt, 2016), which argues that ideas, discourses, and human agency are central for understanding how social institutions both can be maintained and change. Ideas are here seen as represented through discourse that is the interactive process by which ideas are processed, changed, and conveyed. The data consists of Swedish policy documents and reports from the OECD between the years from 1992 to 2021. The analytical approach to the policy texts is critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2010). Critical discourse analysis distinguishes between three steps in the analysis: the descriptive, interpretive and explanatory phases (Fairclough, 2001). The result reveals that the market-based school reform in Sweden 1991 raised many critical questions from the OECD (OECD, 1992). In particular, the OECD questioned policy instruments such as ‘school choice’ and ‘competition’ as governance methods for national school systems, which indicates that the OECD was not at the time a strong proponent of New Public Management (NPM). In the succeeding decades, the conformity between Sweden and the OECD regarding education policy has alternated over time, from occasions of close cooperation between the Swedish government and the OECD regarding evaluation of the school system (Wahlström & Nordin, 2020) to mistrust between the Swedish Parliament and the OECD concerning the application of rules in conducting the 2018 international knowledge test of PISA (NAO, 2021).

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