In recent years, the role of the state in internationalisation in higher education (HE) has been the subject of increasing research (Veerasamy and Durst 2021). Yet, only about 10% of countries around the world have a formal national internationalisation strategy, mostly concentrated in affluent democracies, and of those, over 80% of them are OECD members (Crăciun 2018). Thus, national internationalisation policies have primarily emerged in developed (democratic) economies, and amongst nations within the OECD, an organisation which, in the field of education, exerts its influence on national policy debates by governing through ‘numbers’ (e.g. Education at a Glance, PISA) and projecting global policies and norms, both directly and indirectly promoting the practice of policy mimicry and isomorphism.

Comparative studies on national internationalisation policies, on the other hand, would argue (at times implicitly) that, while such policies originate as a response to demands for ‘globalisation’, countries tend to be selective in deciding which metrics, policy instruments, or specific policy rationales to employ, often on the basis of their current needs (Sanders 2019). In striving to compete, nations may embark on a process of horizon scanning, to identify ‘what works’ and best practices elsewhere, facilitating forms of policy borrowing from high performers (Forestier et al. 2016).  While scholars of isomorphism often argue that national systems are converging around a ‘single’ global model, dismissing any local or national variations as mere ‘diversity facades’ (Zapp, Marques, and Powell 2021), it should also be noted that policy borrowing is often subject to a process of translation and transformation (Cowen 2009), and that policies can be transplanted with little adaptation. Andrews, Pritchett, and Woolcock (2017), for example, argue that developing countries often adopt policies, programmes and institutional structures from developed countries, which helps improve their image and legitimacy; however, these solutions are often not fit for the local context and they are often required to borrow policies by their funders. The result is the transfer of ‘prefabricated’ solutions which ensures ‘successful failure’ as external best practices are adopted as policies, but fall short of their purposes, and do not promote innovation, experimentation or localised solutions.

This paper focuses on the role of the OECD in shaping internationalisation of HE policies in Israel and South Korea, two nations which are members of the OECD but on the ‘periphery’ in terms of those which have driven globalisation. We believe that this paper will provide a companion to the existing corpus of works on the internationalisation of HE in Europe.

We employed a multiple case study approach which allows researchers to describe, document and critically analyse phenomena in context and its impact on theory construction and evolution in a particular field (Stake 2013). Our cases were purposefully chosen because they illuminate the role of a prominent international organisation, the OECD, in national internationalisation policies. Both countries are OECD members, with important high technology sectors, involved in intractable conflict, and strong connections with diaspora. Both have been argued to have ethnonational elements to their internationalisation and are peripheral to both the core nations studied in the internationalisation literature (Bamberger, Morris, and Yemini 2019) and to the nations which created the OECD. We recognise considerable differences between the Israeli and Korean cases; notably, the timing of initiatives, scope, and extent of critique and ‘localisation’; we address these issues in the conclusion. Our data collection and analysis focused on national internationalisation policies and their related documents, commentaries and media coverage. We drew on multiple sources: policy reports, tenders, press releases and decisions from the national HE authorities and their steering/advisory committees; government budgets and decisions; national media coverage; and the academic literature. The Israeli case also drew on interviews conducted for an in-depth study of internationalisation (Bamberger 2020). We employ a critical policy perspective (Apple 2019) and used inductive qualitative analysis to understand the local contexts in which the policies were developed along with an analysis of the documents stated aims, implicit assumptions, silences, and discursive constructions; we did not analyse policy enactment.

We suggest that joining the OECD, an exclusive club of wealthy democracies, served as a source of political legitimacy and identity for both countries: for Israel, in light of its continued conflict with the Palestinians; for South Korea, in its transition from military dictatorship to democracy and its intractable conflict with an authoritarian North Korea. We argue that the OECD comparative metrics and guidelines (e.g. Education at a Glance) were crucial in generating anxieties about these countries underperformance in the global market for international students. These metrics served as benchmarks for internationalisation policies, and shaped the foci, aims and definitions of success (i.e. parity with OECD averages). The desire to ‘be part of the club’ (Li and Morris 2022) and to improve on comparative metrics, spurred cross-national policy referencing and borrowing, particularly from European and Anglo-American countries, initially with little adaptation and innovation, resulting in a form of ‘prefabricated internationalisation.’ Over time, the (im)balance between global aspiration and local realities resulted in localisation. We argue that policy isomorphism is overstated, and call for the recognition of complexity in the convergence debate.

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