Globalisation has increased interest in educational policy transfer in the academic and policy debate. This includes vocational education and training (VET), whose role has been emphasised by policy makers all over the world after the global financial crisis of 2007/8. VET, so it seems, can be an efficient tool to combat unemployment and increase economic productivity.

Based on this assumption, the last decade has seen an exponential rise of transfer activities and accompanying research of the model of dual VET from the German-speaking to other countries. While success of transfer endeavours has been mixed, research tends to focus on issues of implementation rather than underlying social relations and actors’ interests in both sending and receiving countries.

In this paper, we will discuss the transfer process of dual VET to Serbia, where in 2017 a law introduced dual VET as a separate track in the traditional school-based VET system. This had been preceded by reform discussions, encouraged and supported by the EU and German speaking donor countries, of what was perceived as an outdated, theory-biased and not market-responsive VET system. The dual VET reform has been meant to decrease youth unemployment and skilled emigration. Yet, more visibly than in other countries, the introduction of dual VET in Serbia was met with resistance by academia, civil society and trade unions largely based on concerns that it could increase social and educational inequities. While the implementation process, started in 2019, is still young and valid monitoring data on the intended impact of dual VET is unavailable, the transfer process in itself offers promising terrain for an analysis focused on underlying social relations rather than on success or failure at the level of implementation.

Our research question is therefore what role political interests of the involved internal and external actors have played in and how (diverging) conceptions of education have framed societal debates on the transfer process.

In this paper, we will first challenge the predominantly pragmatic research approach to dual system transfer by unpacking the notion of context. Beyond an examination of actors’ roles, interests and their (conflictive) relations, this includes discourses, conceptions and imaginaries of education. Second, we will relate this to the discussion on the purpose of education. Indeed, the opposition to dual VET in Serbia, beyond immediate concerns over wage dumping and curricular narrowing, transmits conflicting imaginaries of education. While the presumed success story of dual VET is framed by economistic conceptions defining human capital formation as education’s main purpose, humanistic objectives, such as social equity, continue to underpin collective imaginaries of education in Serbia, basically as a heritage from socialist Yugoslavia.

Our conceptual framework refers to two interrelated strands of academic debate in comparative education. First, we will draw on policy transfer literature, in particular on the analytical approach that examines motivations of transfer and its impact on existing policies and power constellations (e.g. Steiner-Khamsi, 2014). Rappleye’s (2012) ‘political production model’ of educational policy transfer will serve as analytical guidelines. This model postulates that political objectives tend to determine transfer decisions to a greater extent than the technical suitability of particular education policies from other countries. Second, Rappleye’s model will be complemented by Crossley’s and Watson’s (2003) notion of context, which points to the significance of culture, including discourses as well as understandings and imaginaries of education that predominate in a given context.

Our objective is to contribute to an analytical rather than normative academic debate aimed at understanding social relations, actors’ roles and educational imaginaries that might underpin collective efforts to support or oppose the reforms in question.

This paper draws on two bodies of research by the authors: research on the Serbian dual VET reform (Langthaler, forthcoming; Langthaler & Top, 2023) and research on the reforms of the education system in Serbia and the social factors that accompanied and influenced them (Ivić & Pešikan, 2012; Pešikan & Ivić, 2021). It is based on the one hand on a literature review including academic publications from educational, political and economic disciplines, as well as grey literature and policy papers from Serbian, EU and bilateral (mainly German-speaking) donor sources. On the other hand, the analysis draws on a body of 16 semi-structured expert interviews (as defined in Bogner et al., 2009), conducted between August and November 2021. Interviewees include Serbian academics, Serbian and non-Serbian representatives from institutions involved in the transfer and implementation process (including statal and para-statal bodies, research organisations, trade unions), as well as experts from European, bi- and multilateral donor agencies. Interviews were assessed using content analysis (Mayring, 2010). The main categories for the assessment of the literature and the interviews were: a) Perceived challenges and achievements of dual VET in Serbia; b) Motivations and objectives of involved actors to introduce dual education in Serbia; c) Motivations and criticism/concerns of those actors who opposed the introduction of dual education in Serbia; d) Extent of involvement and role of different societal actors, in particular “social partners”, in the process of designing and implementing the reform.

Our findings suggest that the dual VET transfer process to Serbia has followed political rationales rather than imperatives to improve Serbian VET. As for the donor countries, there are economic and political interests as major investors in Serbia. For the Serbian government, blaming an outdated VET system is an easy explanation for complex socio-economic problems such as youth unemployment and high poverty rates. As it is an easy solution to draw on a successful foreign example, regardless of its actual suitability to the Serbian context. This context is substantially different to that in German-speaking countries: Social relations are not corporatist, but strictly neo-liberal; social dialogue is absent; the economy is unstable and based on low level skills, and a substantial part of stakeholders hold collective visions of education that oppose the economistic framing of dual VET. At the conceptual level, our analysis shows that besides political interest by the respective actors, collective imaginaries of education and VET play an important role in educational transfer processes. They substantially frame societal debates about the transfer and particularly underpin endeavours to oppose and resist the transfer processes and the educational reforms in question. In the case of Serbia, humanistic and human rights imaginaries of education and VET, inherited from socialist Yugoslavia and deeply rooted among academia, teaching staff and civil society, collide with economistic conceptions that view the primary purpose of education in workforce supply.

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