The two-part symposium presents conceptual, comparative as well as single-country studies that examine the neoliberal reform wave which most governments bought into over the past thirty years. In concert with Verger, Fontdevila and Parcerisa (2019), we refer to this reform package as School-Autonomy-with-Accountability (SAWA). The objective of the studies presented is to move beyond the simple documentation that neoliberalism spread worldwide and instead examine who the political coalitions were that bought into, or resisted, respectively the reform wave, what features of the reform resonated and why they held appeal, what features were repealed and how national policy actors translated key policies into the varied national contexts. These type of research questions are prototypical for research interchangeably labeled policy borrowing, policy transfer, policy mobility, or policy circulation research (Steiner-Khamsi, 2021). The panel attempts to advance both policy transfer research as well as comparative public policy studies by inserting a transnational lens into the analysis of policy processes. 

The unit of analysis of all presentations is the SAWA reform. We consider SAWA to be a coherent, pervasive, and controversial reform package that (i) claimed to ensure quality improvement, (ii) advocated for (or at least aligned with) policies to set in motion competition among schools and differentiation in the school offer, such as school-based management and school choice (iii) instated a bundle of policies that strengthened school autonomy under the condition of pervasive accountability, and (iv) advanced a set of preferred policy instruments to trigger and sustain organizational change such as continuous standardized testing and other forms of external supervision. The panelists use this quadruple differentiation of fundamental reforms—their mission, mechanisms of change, bundle of policies, and policy instruments—to reflect the vernacularization or translation of the reform package, that is, what exactly was adopted by which political actors and in which particular political context, and why some features of the reform packaged resonated more than others. 

In this panel, the presenters draw on the policy instrument approach which has triggered a lively debate within public policy studies more broadly (Lascoumes and Le Galès 2007; Béland et al. 2018; Capano and Howlett 2020) as well as more narrowly in policy studies related to the education sector (Verger et al. 2019). Several aspects of that approach are appealing for policy transfer research, notably, the insight that the choice of policy instrument is deeply political and has repercussions in who is empowered and who disempowered. Drawing on that approach, we differentiate between the reform goal, reform elements, and the instruments to achieve the goal.

Béland, D., M. Howlett, and I. Mukherjee. “Instrument Constituencies and Public Policy-making: An Introduction.” Policy and Society 37, no. 1 (2018): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2017.1375249. Capano, G., and M. Howlett. “The Knowns and Unknowns of Policy Instrument Analysis: Policy Tools and the Current Research Agenda on Policy Mixes.” SAGE Open 10, no. 1 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019900568. Lascoumes, P., and P. Le Galès. “Understanding Public Policy through Its Instruments. Special Issue.” Governance 20, no. 1 (2007): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0491.2007,00342.x. Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2021). Externalisation and structural coupling: Applications in comparative policy studies in education. European Educational Research Journal, 20(6), 806–820. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904120988394 Verger, A., C. Fontdevila, and L. Parcerisa. “Reforming Governance through Policy Instruments: How and to What Extent Standards, Tests and Accountability in Education Spread Worldwide.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 40, no. 2 (2019): 248-270. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2019.1569882.