The key insight from state-of-the-art literature on global governance in education is that it is necessary to study the interactions and overlaps between international, national, and local contexts and the entanglements of a host of actors to acquire an adequate understanding of education policy (Robertson 2018). From this starting point the paper addresses the following research question: How can we understand the role and significance of the knowledge brokers and infrastructure facilitating movement between global and national policy-making arenas? Using Denmark as an analytical case, it is the purpose of this paper to explore the complex intermeshing and interactions between and among knowledge brokers operating in the infrastructural space between the OECD and the Danish Ministry of Education in the period 2001 when a new right-wing government took office and up until today. More specifically, the paper investigates the formal and informal, institutionalized and not institutionalized connections and channels between the OECD and Denmark in the development of education politics and policy. For instance, since 2017, the OECD has increased its support for strengthening the analytical capacity of National Centres and Ministries of Education more generally, as well as that of municipalities and other education stakeholders at the national level, through its PISA Lead Analysts programme (Auld et al., 2020). A constructive angle to explore in this connection are also the shifting consortia tasked with conducting the PISA surveys which perform the boundary work that goes on between the organizations, the national political arenas, and sometimes even in the public debates and news landscape. Theoretically, the paper conceptualizes knowledge brokers as ‘key intermediaries who facilitate the exchange of knowledge between individuals or organizations (…)’ (Weber & Yanovitzky, 2021, p. 1), but also as motivated agents that are themselves changed by their brokerage activities, at the same time as they seek to change others. Such a framework improves analytical purchase on knowledge brokerage beyond the current research paradigms, revealing the purposeful mobilization by international organizations inside what can best be conceptualized as a multi-level governing complex that changes over time (Ydesen 2019). Empirically, the chapter draws on interviews with knowledge brokers operating in the OECD-Denmark space as well as archival documents harvested in the Danish National Archives and the OECD archive in Paris.

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