International and cross-institutional forms of cooperation are widely promoted in policy discourse as key attributes of high-quality higher education. However, while these processes have been extensively studied in the higher education sector, teacher education constitutes a distinct institutional field. The teaching profession is particularly deeply embedded in national education systems, shaped by historically institutionalised forms of state regulation, professional expectations, and locally defined educational goals. Although modes of cooperation in teacher education draw on familiar higher education models, they are reworked through field-specific constraints and tensions, requiring negotiation among state, professional, and organisational actors across multiple institutional levels. In practice, this renders international and cross-institutional cooperation in teacher education more contingent and legitimacy-sensitive, and often more uneven than broader higher education debates suggest. Further complicating this picture, existing research on the internationalisation of teacher education has itself developed asymmetrically, with dominant analytical and empirical insights shaped mainly by Western contexts, leaving many other regions under-represented. Given this, there is a need for empirically grounded analyses of how such forms of cooperation are understood and enacted in teacher education across various contexts, including those that are often underrepresented.

This paper addresses this gap by examining cooperation not as a taken-for-granted policy good, but as an institutionally mediated and legitimacy-sensitive practice shaped by national context and actor positioning. It draws on an ongoing qualitative study conducted as part of a larger research project on national and international cooperation in teacher education. This study takes Lithuania and Finland as its empirical focus, exploring how key stakeholders at policy, organisational, and professional levels perceive, organise, and implement cooperation. Particular attention is given to how cooperation is framed as legitimate, translated into organisational practice, and mediated through competing institutional logics across institutional and national contexts. The analysis is informed by a neo-institutional framework centred on organisational legitimacy and institutional logics. These concepts are used to examine not only why cooperation is pursued, but also how and why it is limited, contested, or deprioritised under competing institutional rationalities in teacher education. By looking through this lens, we can better grasp the dynamics at play in these collaborative efforts.

Empirically, the study is based on semi-structured expert interviews with stakeholders involved in teacher education policy-making, coordination, and implementation in the two countries. The paper will present empirically grounded findings from the analysis of interview material, highlighting how cooperation-related expectations are translated into practice and how tensions and dilemmas emerge across policy, organisational, and professional levels. 

The qualitative design is based on semi-structured expert interviews. Participants include stakeholders involved in teacher education at policy, organisational, and professional levels, including actors responsible for decision-making, coordination, and implementation. They are selected using purposive sampling, supplemented where appropriate by snowball sampling. Data collection is conducted in Lithuania and Finland, enabling cross-national comparisons across diverse institutional and policy contexts. An interview guide is developed on the basis of the underlying neo-institutional theoretical framework, with questions informed by the concepts of organisational legitimacy and institutional logics. The guide explores stakeholders’ understandings of cooperation, motivations for engagement, legitimacy narratives, perceived benefits and challenges, and the translation of policy expectations into organisational practice. Data analysis follows a theory-informed qualitative analysis with a discursive focus. The analysis focuses on identifying dominant legitimacy narratives, competing institutional logics, and points of tension or alignment between policy expectations and organisational practices. Cross-national comparison is used to examine similarities and differences across the Lithuanian and Finnish contexts. The paper will present empirically grounded findings from interview material collected in the national cases for which data collection and analysis are complete at the time of presentation.

The paper contributes to neo-institutional analyses of teacher education by looking at national and international cooperation not just as straightforward, linear policy instruments, but as practices shaped by legitimacy pressures and competing institutional logics. It elucidates how cooperation is justified, prioritised, and organised across policy, organisational, and professional levels, and how these dynamics take shape within and across national contexts. Moreover, focusing on stakeholder interpretations and organisational practices brings into view tensions that are often overlooked, particularly when expectations around cooperation clash with historically embedded governance arrangements and professional norms in teacher education. In line with the ECER 2026 theme, the paper shows that knowledge about cooperation is not simply passed down through policy, but is negotiated, reworked, and stabilised within institutional settings.

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