By its very nature the European Union (EU) represents a pooling of sovereignty: European Member States delegate some of their powers to shared political institutions, granting them responsibility in decision-making processes. Over the years, however, as the EU has changed, so have the relations not only between the EU and its members, but between its member states. Education has long been largely exempt from this process – a sphere of activity reserved for member states by the subsidiarity principle. Yet at the same time the EU, like other international organizations, has been at the forefront of developing policy on education and lifelong learning. A plethora of policy documents has been produced by its institutions, supported by countless working groups on educational matters.

Against this background, educational researchers have given closer attention to the influence of EU membership has had on national educational reforms – within both longer-standing and newer member states. In so doing, several have argued that the EU has in effect created a space which allows the subsidiarity principle to be by-passed in education, generating a new scenario – often labelled ‘Europeanization’ – for educational policy making (Dale & Robertson 2009, Lawn and Grek 2012, Nóvoa & Lawn 2002, Pépin 2006). Nevertheless, with few exceptions (e.g. Lee et al. 2010), the growing number of studies that focus on EU education and lifelong learning policy tend to prioritize descriptive or empirical accounts (e.g., Holford et al. 2008, Riddell et al. 2012), or the appropriation of or resistance to EU policies within diverse national contexts (e.g., Saar et al., in press), rather than the complexity of policy-making as a co-production process. So far as adult learning is concerned, this may be due to the legacy of adult education’s theoretical ‘thinness’ as an academic discipline, compounded by the downsizing of adult education research capacity in European universities at just the time when educational and learning activities for adults are receiving greater attention in political agendas. For their part, European studies scholars have long paid attention to developments within the European Union (e.g. Moravcsik 1993), trying to capture and explain cross-country processes of integration. Drawing primarily on political science, sociology, economics, law and history, European studies has shed important light on the functioning of power relations within the EU, and between the EU and its member states (e.g., Klatt 2012). With limited exceptions (e.g., Blitz 2003) education – and still more adult education – has not received their attention.

This symposium aims to reveal the complexity involved in researching policies that affect adult education in Europe. It does so by exploring the nature of EU policy processes (paper no. 1), analyzing the different forms of common good (and sense of justice) inscribed in Lifelong Learning Policies (paper no. 2), and discussing theoretical and methodological challenges of investigating the role of supra-national institutions in the globalisation of education policy (paper no. 3).